A tale of two values
Sometimes we just don’t want to hear nothing lasts forever. And yet it’s true (mostly*).
Broadly speaking, Everything – God, All That Is – consists of patternings whose common quality is perpetual change (evolution). Yes, its inmost heart can helpfully be envisaged as the immutable fact and pure experience of existence, but that heart is embedded within the context of perpetual change. By way of a more accessible example, although spring returns every year, each iteration is unique. And ice ages alter spring’s behaviours far more profoundly than the variations human lifespans are currently exposed to. Change, in other words, is (just about) the only constant.
As of this writing, active within All That Is is a concept humanity has dubbed Capitalism. Also active are Socialism, Communism, Imperialism, Fascism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Post-Humanism and any number of other isms, none of which will last forever. To the extent any of them are guises or outgrowths of Capitalism, the timing of their dissolution will be closely governed by their progenitor’s.
Sometimes we don’t want to face these plain truths. This is because decisions are cumulative investments in the future. Without exception, decisions initiate vectors that then, outside our full control and awareness, intertwine into ever evolving weaves – patternings – that reveal themselves in time as Chinese finger traps binding us in some manner to their inescapable dissolution.
Too often, the modern mind finds this sort of misty-woo rhetoric infuriating. Be that as it may, things nonetheless bubble up, seemingly from nowhere, co-evolve, then dissolve into the nowhere whence they came. How turbulent dissolution turns out to be for us depends on how deeply invested we become – a process beyond our full control – in the myriad evolution-to-dissolution vectors that constitute a particular cycle, be it buying a new pair of socks to throwing them away, or birthing a new civilisation to living through its dissolution.
Unlike a pair of patterned socks, Capitalism happens to be a vast, planet- and culture-spanning patterning in which billions of souls are deeply invested. The notion that it might dissolve at all, that it is not in fact the most faithful socioeconomic expression of unchanging human nature, is thus itchy intellectualising to most. In response to such resistance, I designed this article’s headline image to illustrate, as simply as I was able, how inevitable and historically imminent Capitalism’s dissolution might be. Its particular lensed window onto my view of things pits one aspect of value against another and tracks both logically forward to the very lip of Capitalism’s end.
Exchange value (price) is Capitalism’s bedrock, but look where it leads.
Ineffable value (quality) is anathema to Capitalism; see where it leads.
The former is inextricably related to the latter.
It doesn’t seem to matter which tale we track, Capitalism appears to have an inbuilt shelf life.
Taking the Devil from the detail
Where frightened minds reflexively seek the comfort of certainty, 10-point plans, hot tips for quick wealth, sound predictions for the coming year, etc., I offer what must seem like irrelevant vagaries. My own certainty is that the best way through our current historical turbulence – which is as violent as it is bureaucratically monotonic - is the trinity of wisdom, health and love. I suspect such advice is currently so thoroughly out of vogue because the only way to honour and nurture this vital, fundamental trinity to a living vibrancy is to Know For Yourself. This is no quick fix promised by a charismatic authority figure; it takes patience and perseverance, seems of uncertain outcome, and requires us to take full responsibility for our lives.
Nothing reports back to us more honestly on the quality of what we have become than our lives. It can take real courage to request an unvarnished report on our progress so far. Embracing wisdom, love and health as a way of being begins with this.
Know for yourself: Evolve in wisdom through mindfulness and patience. Observe attentively as wisdom slowly evolves to house the truth – the True – ever more cosily, exactly as you mature in your ability to humbly, openly allow others their knowings, their pace, their perspectives. This manner of being is the one true and lasting antidote to the divide-and-conquer tactics, to narcissism and its siblings, that infantilise us, censor us, depress us.
Without wisdom, love and health as our loadstone, when irksome details must be faced, the devil surges up to scatter our potential and hope to the winds.
As old as humanity, this advice is out of fashion for now. But as things continue to unravel, as the choking, noxious dishonour exuded by those in power and promulgated via the useful idiocy of establishment experts infects all pores, personal and societal, so the truth of what I merely repeat here is growing in resonance and appeal. This is what I anticipate and, to some extent, see.
Let’s consider the flowchart up top.
It begins with value. It all begins with value and how a culture handles value.
If we take value in the capitalistic sense of price – in the sense that value can be measured objectively –, the flowchart presents its twin vectors as a particular logical sequence. Because price <=> money <=> market discovery <=> supply and demand <=> endemic scarcity** are necessarily interdependent, they arise/exist as one, from price, as a living ideational dynamic. And from this living dynamic, other things must also be, or come to be. Consumerism is one, so is perpetual economic growth as systemic requirement, advertising is another, wages for labour yet another. All these things belong together necessarily; each element is a necessary descriptor of a larger whole we might call Capitalism.
By contrast, technological advance is, more deeply, a product of human invention and curiosity. Whether it thrives more under this or that ism is a subjective matter not relevant to my efforts here, though it might work its unpredictable magic more rapidly in Capitalism than in other isms, I don’t know. What is clear is that technological unemployment, once again becoming loudly important as AI flexes its rapidly burgeoning muscles, is a problem for wages for labour (I do not mean it is a problem for work itself). Wages are a foundational requirement for Capitalism; they distribute purchasing power, without which markets cannot function; no buyers = no market.
For the sake of argument, if we only ‘need’ – can we satisfactorily define need? – to employ 20% of humanity to furnish everyone on earth with the essentials plus much else by way of luxury, what hope for a system that requires wages to distribute the purchasing power markets need by way of effective demand for what manufacturers supply? How disruptive to this system would 60% unemployment be? Or 40%?
To ponder this imponderable more coolly, shouldn’t we consider what humans actually ‘need’ to be ‘happy’ – better: healthy? Shouldn’t we consider, humbly and openly, what we require to create life meanings for ourselves that we know are real and authentic?
If we don’t ‘need’ consumerism and advertising for such things, if most human labour isn’t really ‘needed’ any more … or more persuasively: If human labour is now, or will soon be, too costly to sustain (disruptive, societally harmful) within any system that uses price / market discovery as its guiding light, what would an economy look like that has no consumerism and no advertising? How much less labour might such an economy need than Western economies? What if, furthermore, there were no incentives whatsoever to use builtin and perceived obsolescence in manufacturing? What if no one anywhere was influenced in their desires by the dark arts of advertising? What would such a system look like?
I doubt the result could meaningfully be called Capitalism.
Because we could not reasonably call our imaginary new system Capitalism, would it therefore be worse, or terrible, or wrong, or unnatural, or unfree? If the delights of consumerism are our only real freedom, how free are we?
What do you think value is? What do you want and why do you want it? Is it money, status, power? Are these things not inextricably intertwined with Capitalism and price? There’s theory positing many complicated arguments that deal with government and corporate interference. Then there’s the reality: Money is power is money, and those who feel they must rule society know this full well.
To me, it looks like these idols, for so long now our guiding lights, reveal themselves ever more plainly as unfit for rulership, unfit for the deep formation of societal goals, as wholly incompatible with wisdom, love and health. Those that fixedly worship and advance money, status and power seem wholly given over to their sclerotic venality, dangerously misguided by their narcissistic incompetence, too deranged to see their professional unravelling. As globalist ‘elites’ dare everything to keep control of what’s wrongfully in their possession, as they pore through all data they are willing to accept to predict and manipulate the future they demand, so they ensure their demise. The harder they try, the more certain their fall. They are the rotten vanguard of a rotten system rooted in money, status and power, which are egotistical/Satanic perversions of value, honour and authority.
The value definitions we have culturally accepted uncritically for too long are tearing us apart.
Surely this train of thought is only upsetting while we can’t imagine anything else. Upsetting to we who adhere to the West’s value system, that is. Surely such adherence is so pervasive because the ‘ruling elite’ of any system is far more invested in that system than anyone else. Any system’s ‘elite’ has at its fingertips, necessarily, the levers and dials that ‘control’ the system that sustains that ‘elite’ in its status and power. Any threat to that system is thus a threat to that which its ‘elite’ values most: the tenets of its system. Ergo, it will pronounce most loudly that There Is No Alternative, and use all manner of statecraft, public relations, NLP and dirty tricks to propagate and nurture this belief in the minds of the hoi polloi, until the system seems as inevitable und irreplaceable as gravity.
Perhaps this explains why we can’t imagine anything else.
But nothing lasts forever. The clash between sclerotic defensiveness and unstoppable change yields historical turbulence, which is precisely what we see now, right across the planet. Many will argue this turbulence is explained by the dangerous transition from uni- to multipolarity. This is certainly a very large part of it, but deeper than this important geopolitical reality other forces are at work. At least, that’s how it looks to me. My prediction – for what it’s worth – is that the isms governing the likes of Russia and China, as well as other nations now scrabbling to board the BRICS++ bandwagon, will soon experience similar strains to those besetting the West, strains whose causal roots lie in the complex soils of technological advance as it collides with the price-based systems whose time is running out.
The other facet of value explored in the flowchart above is the ineffable, immeasurable, lived experience we all have of how our preference-based relationship with the world around us, and within us, morphs subtly and organically from moment to moment. Deep down, we know we can’t measure value, just as we cannot measure wisdom, love and health. There is something about the ineffable that won’t quite lie down and die, try as we might to reduce everything to number. As important as finely accurate measurement surely is, it is nothing but empty numbers when we strenuously ignore the ineffable. That wisdom is what is coming through now as things break apart, as science, governance, medicine, media, and justice systems are corrupted by money and ideology.
Wisdom, love and health are as threatening to Capitalism as is price.
Conclusion
My argument boils down to this: Societal systems developed on assumptions of insoluble scarcity, which undergirds price, which requires market-based mechanisms for ‘fairly’ distributing the wealth generated in such systems, cannot accommodate change that breaks any one of their foundational elements. This could not be more obvious. The sort of historical turbulence that follows epochal evolutionary leaps – which are far from unprecedented – is best navigated by humbly embracing wisdom, health and love.
None of this is to advocate abandoning or condemning measurement, nor in fact anything else, as a target of one’s derision or judgement. Rather, it is to advise letting go, indiscriminately, of attachment to all isms so as to allow what is truly viable to rise to the surface clearly, unhindered by vested interests, be they political, financial or ideological.
And I do not argue that money must be abolished, nor that it will, 100%-no-doubt, gently be rendered redundant by historical processes. What I have been engaged in here at Econosophy for well over a decade now is exploring the ramifications of technological advance. This endeavour has exposed me to pathways of thought and intellectual adventure I had not anticipated. I have also undergone a profound ‘spiritual’ transformation that has greatly altered the tenor and emphases of my approach and outlook. Money, I now believe, is as rooted in ‘spirituality’ – how I hate that word – as prayer. We are consciousness. We therefore live in ideas, are filtered by ideas, see reality itself through ideas as a constellation of ideas. And everything is experience. Physicality is an experience. Modernity misunderstands this, proceeds from the assumption of a mechanical universe. This assumption is rapidly losing coherence and support.
Money is immune to none of this. It is not an immutable, objective force of nature beyond our influence; it is simply a creation of our devising. It can therefore be changed should wiser heads than mine deem it necessary. We have what it takes to navigate our current cultural impasse into whatever brighter future awaits a wise handling of the coming few years.
* Well, almost nothing. In my view, the fact of existence will last forever; existence’s nominal ‘opposite’ or ‘death’ – absolute nothingness – is itself a flat impossibility, so can never occur. Ergo, existence per se cannot die, is eternal. Not only can nothing come from (strict) nothingness, (strict) nothingness – in contradistinction to the concept of nothingness – is in fact a wholly impossible non-thing that can by definition have no properties whatsoever … including the property of existence. Ergo, nothingness cannot ever be, not even for a nano-moment. Existence and nothingness are mutually exclusive. “Nothing lasts forever”, strictly speaking, is thus a very revealing truism, capable of inspiring all manner of paradoxical semantic casuistry. For example: Nothing is a ‘something’ that lasts forever in the very fact of its impossibility as immutable and eternal Truth; that is, in nothingness’ guise as anti-existence.
** It should be pointed out that whatever scarcity remains to be justly distributed can be managed without price discovery.
