Alchemical economics

Dr Manhattan’s crystal lunar city, from The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon

From the exchange, the poison will out. In the absence of exchange – the absence of relationship – nothing can happen; neither poison nor joy can come.

Imagine a wholly impervious being. It has not one need. It cannot be harmed, or indeed changed, in any way. It experiences no boredom, no curiosity, no appetite, no desire. What sort of being would it be? One incapable of exchange, one that could have no conception of risk. It could have no conception of anything. Perception changes the perceiver because perception entails exchange: the transmission of information from ‘object’ to ‘subject’, from perceived to perceiver. Is anything more fundamental?

Humans, and indeed all other things, are vulnerable. Our deeply experienced vulnerability is our womb of fear. Is the ‘solution’ absolute imperviousness? Is the desire for great wealth a misguided ambition that reduces down to a need to be safe from all harm? Is the desire for nirvana, for total peace, for freedom from all desire, a similarly misguided ambition?

Because we are not impervious, we can engage in exchange. From exchange the poison will out. 

What, then, is poison? Perhaps it is the exposure to that which is ‘weak’ in us, which means untested, which means immature. Perhaps exposure to these untested facets of our being is painful because our relationship with our vulnerability is shadowy, unexamined, buried. Perhaps pain is the consequence of the tightness and tension that grow from this unexamined relationship. Perhaps the poisons exposed by exchange are nothing more than the contents of our Maturation Todo List.

To avoid maturation is to seek the void of total imperviousness. There are many ways of being addicted to seeking the void, from materialistic to spiritual to emotional, and on. None of them are in themselves healthy, but the sickness they produce teaches us what health (wisdom, love) is. Sickness is kindling for soul growth.

Economics calls itself “the dismal science”. It studies exchange, which entails risk, which begets cost. Economics studies where the rubber meets the road. Life must be vulnerable to permit change. Without change there is nothingness, which is impossible. Economics embraces this ‘dismal’ truth. But it is only ‘dismal’ if the void of imperviousness is viable, or could have any value at all.

I have spent the last 15 years trying to understand a foundational assumption of economics – scarcity – as it pertains to the ‘problem’ of technological unemployment. The latter is, in my eyes, the progressive erosion of the economic value of human labour. What I am beginning to intuit is that economics has not dared deeply enough, that where it has dared to go it has travelled too cleanly, overly needy of the neatness it perceives in academic rigour. Has it wanted too much to stay true to certain unchanging fundamentals, not to be infected by nor to cross-infect with other aspects of exchange? I suspect so. Exchange, the process by which relationship happens, is a foundational feature of reality. Perhaps economics should concern itself more fluidly with this truth.

Does scarcity govern exchange? I argue for curiosity-driven expansion. I suspect technological unemployment is unearthing this poison, this ‘flaw’, this untested thing within economics, within modern thought.

We have a poor relationship with fear because it hurts; it costs us too much to tackle it. We have more profitable values to accumulate: measurable values that secure our position in a cruel and capricious world. This is our ‘dismal’ reality. 

We now confront the wasteland this perspective yields. The only way through is to reassess our understanding of exchange itself, which requires a reassessment of value – and thus cost – which will then lead to a reevaluation of everything else; what we value determines what we choose.

The prospect of this radical transformation terrifies us. But the alternative – an impervious void – is becoming more terrifying still.