Postcard from the ledge

It’s a mess out there. – Me.

Maybe that’s a good thing. – Me.

Introduction

It’s been a while. There has been much for me to do in too little time. 

Today is Sunday. I’m alone in the house, and my project work is done, for now. Though insanely busy these last three months or so, I’ve been deep in thought whenever space and quiet allowed, and while in that quiet noticing further elements of the body of my thought disintegrating with the disintegration of the Western world.

This is a lengthy postcard from that windy ledge.

A breakdown of categories

Charles Eisenstein’s career is aimed at inviting as many of us as possible to notice and then advance “the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible”. It is a romantic line, and a romantic vector, one that attracts me deeply. Lately though … less and less. I spy many ‘problems’ beneath its pretty surface.

The first has been visible to me for a while: “more beautiful” on whose definition? Beauty lies infamously in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps this is not a problem, perhaps this is in fact part of the solution, a strength. Diversity is the spice of life, right? But don’t we have that already, anyway, and in abundance? Yes, there is homogeneity and groupthink aplenty, but not to the point of an outright grey-washing of everything Out There. The tensions, the disagreements, the endless cultural fault lines speak of a very spicy, very interesting period of history. Multiple ideas of what we find beautiful are in ‘competition’ right now. Some favour safety, others risk. Some favour escape from limitation into who knows what digital utopia, others yearn for a return to tradition and immutable categories. I am drawn to love as it relates to wisdom and health while others enjoy the creature comforts modernity provides. Some are engineers, some accountants, some are corporate career folk, others mavericks. On and on the diversity goes. There is enough diversity in evidence to occupy whole oceans. To argue otherwise is to wilfully overlook the obvious.

And yes, of course there are terrible, terrible problems, and, yes, it’s very hard to deny that humanity stands trembling and afraid before a mighty historical crossroads – or mighty historical spaghetti junction – but this is not an unprecedented state of affairs.

These simple observations eat at me. They always have. I am by nature a doubter who doubts the very ideas I doubt into temporary existence. There are certain certainties in me – there is nothing but God, for example – but how to honour them, which constellation of ‘solutions’ is practical and fitting to the times … these are different challenges entirely to identifying Good Principles. And while there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, nothing is more impotent than one whose time lies far in the future.

Categories are indeed in breakdown, and yet our past is riddled with such turbulence. This is nothing new. Well, not 100% new; history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes, as the saying goes. There are, despite such emollient platitudes, very reasonable grounds for concern This Time, such as the complex supply chains and just-in-time delivery processes that, in the event of a broad collapse, would present unprecedented societal challenges. But perhaps this very risk keeps things tied securely together? Perhaps this existentially important complexity – deadly over-complication? – is our best insurance against collapse?

Furthermore, civilisational collapse is a misunderstood creature. Imagination has space to blossom in the dearth of information civilisational breakdown leaves in its wake. Apparently, “collapse” is now seen as too dramatic a word. Affairs simply transition to less documented times in which new ways of doing things have a greater chance of winning out than during more stable periods.

Or perhaps this time will indeed be different, who can say.

Catastrophists enjoy imagined (or real) approaching doom. Which mostly never comes. We have all watched countless dread predictions come and go unfulfilled. Who remembers the buzz around Y2K? Not only does catastrophism sell books and papers and movies, we humans are often darkly fascinated by catastrophe and can magic ourselves into a bewitching array of collective hysteria, when mood and moment permit.

Categories are breaking down once again, but nobody knows where this particular iteration will take us, nor how turbulent it will be, nor how much of humanity is bound up in it, nor how deeply. Some folks love to pontificate – I’m one of them –, but an embarrassingly high percentage of our output is just excited chatter on the wind.

To pontificate, or not to pontificate

The answer is yes. Yes, I shall pontificate. It is my wont.

To recap the core thesis as it once tottered about in my mind:

Money is a cultural technology required by the dissolution of trust that is but one consequence of civilisation-scale ‘communities’. When communities are sufficiently small, when specialisation has not taken hold, when social affairs are intimate and all-including, money (as unit of account and store/measure of value) is not needed. 

But things change. Societal evolution of a civilisational stripe includes the establishment of technologies such as private property and a state of some kind to protect it. This in turn produces class hierarchies, the consequent need for statecraft, and the need for money to glue it all together. As such, money effects trust among a community of strangers where far earlier there were no day-to-day strangers to speak of.

But things change. It just so happens money requires scarcity. This is a technological artefact of money in my view, not an immutable consequence of so-called ‘infinite’ wants dismally abutting finite resources to produce tedious supply-demand-price intersections so beloved of economists.

Things change. Scarcity appears to become ‘solvable’, slowly loses its dark charisma. Meanwhile, consumerism’s charms age and wither. And yet money remains the glue that holds all things together. What to do?

Things change. Digital technologies make (potentially all) information available to everyone at all times. This punches the dark arts of statecraft right in the solar plexus. When your chances of success at a Very Difficult Job Indeed require almost watertight and perpetual control of The Narrative, and that now at virtually global scale, the internet is a beast you must tame, pronto. But how? Censorship is what nazis do, and nobody likes those guys.

Things change. People dumb down because dumbness breeds further dumbness as society iterates forwards generationally. Wisdom cannot be handed over neatly to our progeny. To make matters worse, the danger and adventure humans need to grow in wisdom recedes inexorably as the hunger for ‘safety’ and Predictable Outcomes radiates ever outwards like a slow storm. The human crop harvested to produce the ‘leaders’ needed to usher in the glittering dystopian technotopia that will solve all ills via Change You Can Believe In is not remotely of sufficient quality. The human crop is now almost wholly infected by the narcissism that has been running rampant for decades. Those unaffected are unwanted, and anyway want nothing less than leading us dumbed-down oiks to some New Jerusalem.

What to do?

Communities R Us?

What is community? I don’t know, but what it once was and what it might be in future are likely two very different things. 

We need each other differently now. In days of yore, we needed each other existentially. Today, it’s as if we need each other as consumer items. Is this a bad thing? I’ve argued repeatedly that it is, that “meaning” is what humans need, not shallow, throw-away pleasures. 

Humans need humans, this is certain, but how? Meaningfully, and in unchanging ways? To raise barns for each other? To harvest each other’s crops? Stitch each other’s wounds? Rear each other’s young?

Or play online computer games together and have endless fun, with robot slaves cleaning up after us?

In a rain forest, the animals and vegetation take care of each other’s waste. One entity’s waste is another entity’s food. There is in fact no waste. By stark contrast, the domestic world brings with it, unintended, the need to clean up after ourselves. This is kind of against the grain, biologically speaking. No other animal does this. So why should we want to? Self-discipline? Maybe, but forever? Foreverever?? Aren’t we always striving to head back to our ‘perfect’ (idealised) jungle-forest home where our mess was cleaned up after us by other beings, whom we often thanked by gratefully eating them? Only this time around, we aim to recreate that ‘paradise’ with robot slaves, and gaze out across forests of mechanised vertical farms from our climate-controlled, sky-high apartments…

So what is the true character of the community humans must have? Play, or self-discipline? Both?

Much of civilisational effort is the manufacture of solutions to this irksome issue of waste and work, from animal and human slaves to mechanical and robot slaves. What’s wrong with that vector? I see a certain beauty in the minimalism of a disciplined life of low waste and simple living, but I’m not ethically against robot slaves. I’m not against ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of ‘waste’. I’m not against technology, at all. I’m not against ‘sloth’ either, except in the context of a civilisational phase that requires its opposite as a matter of survival. After all, the animal sloths that live well enough are not immoral creatures. They’re just doing their thing. And there is a place for their thing.

Another ‘problem’ of civilisation that dovetails with the above is one-size-fits-all ‘solutions’. Because communities that take care of each other disappear as states grow in skill and size, intimate knowledge of each and every citizen disappears, and each citizen grows increasingly dependent on the state. At some point, case-by-case remedies for each and every unique injury are utterly unaffordable. Thousands, millions, pay a bitter price for this harsh reality, which is also the soil of much corruption and nihilism. Bureaucratic, form-based, statistics-based ‘solutions’ predominate. We become Kafka cogs in a dystopian machine, anonymous, meaningless, quietly desperate. As this progresses, so we dumb down, increasingly dependent on remote ‘experts’ who know the best ‘solutions’ to our (infantile) ‘problems’. And it’s horrible. But also not really. We seep into our situation like spilled coffee into an old sofa, to get stuck there forever, too timid to dare anything different. For the most part.

This is the price we pay for the richly complex journey civilisation is. Except “we” is a very wide scattering of outcomes that is far from ‘fair’ to most. But who really knows what “fair” means? And those who claim they do, can they deliver their ‘fairness’ without accidentally spawning yet another dystopia, as the dream-crushing momenta of civilisation’s autonomic behaviours reassert themselves?

And can we really insist on a deliberate return to a context in which we need each other existentially, just so as to recreate the communities that are our healthiest social context? If indeed they are our healthiest social context.

Or can we become mature enough to produce graceful responses to these dull and terrible horrors, this overly mechanical time that is the post-modern era? Is this, my romantic prayer, simply too much to ask?

The more things change, the more they stay the same

And yet and yet and yet…

I am a man who for ultimately unknowable reasons chose a ‘spiritual’ set of ambitions over those on offer from the world of corporate careerism. At least, that’s how it seems to me at the moment; I’m increasingly unsure the dichotomy just implied really exists anywhere but in my labyrinthine reasoning. I am also a man with a family, four cats, and a dog. This rare combination of factors is not without its considerable stresses. So much so, I find myself wondering too much what’s what, repeatedly reassessing everything as the world around me decays. The answers I produce may be logically and rhetorically sound, but they are also wildly at odds with Life Out There. This practical dissonance appears to strip them of (functional) validity. Who’s right here? Yours Truly The Weirdo, or, in the ‘opposite’ corner, The Great They?

Like everyone else, I do not know how to measure success. In the absence of clear feedback, I plod on, do what I can, and struggle manfully to learn from my repeat-pattern ‘mistakes’. All to grow in grace and wisdom. On the whole, I’d give myself maybe a 4 out of 10 so far.

In my eyes, there can be nothing more ugly, more terrible, than the Russia-Ukraine war, nothing more darkly moribund than the WEF’s plans, the WHO’s pandemic treaty, the “safetyism” and compulsive virtue signalling that characterise the burgeoning totalitarianism that is corporatism’s Frankenstein monster. For the love of God I cannot make my peace with any of it! Why not? Have I correctly reasoned and intuited myself to the wiser, healthier take on all this, or am I but a stubborn old goat?

I have a memory that I now believe was one of my first dreams. I used to think it really happened, but my mother never mentioned the event while alive, so I think it must have been a dream. That I had it is incredible, considering who I am and these times the adult me is living through.

I am a toddler at a party, in a room playing with other toddlers. We ‘telepathically’ agree to go downstairs to visit our parents. We toddle and crawl to the stairs in our seeming multitude, but can’t descend them with skill. A small waterfall of screaming toddlers tumbles down the stairs and piles up at the bottom. I am the only one who manages to hold on to a bannister spindle. I hold on for dear life as if clinging to the edge of a cliff. From this vantage point, I see the shadowy shapes of our parents hurrying to the smoked-glass door of the room they are in, and let go. As I start to fall, the memory/dream ends.

Obviously, the tumbling toddlers represent those who just go along with societal moral decay, incapable of mounting any resistance. I am a lone but pointless exception holding on grimly against the flow of events. When I see authority figures about to remedy the situation, I yield and go with the flow, though I think I wanted to hold on until rescued, as if that would have been a noble accomplishment worthy of their praise. 

Am I about to yield ‘in real life’? The pressure of the flow of events is mighty. Resisting it, when you are essentially a lone wolf, as I am, is quite thankless, and draining. For me, there is no community out there that holds any lasting attraction. I have looked around, volunteer all my spare hours to those who want my technical help (IT skills), but am not attracted to fully join up. And it seems to me that no one is. We all like our customised creature comforts too much. We don’t need each other all that much. A little, perhaps, but not much. Aren’t we faking it?

More and more, this does not bother me. But one outcome of this cool observation that people, generally, are happy enough in their own four walls, is a growing conviction that my spiritual endeavours are misplaced, or misapplied, that I have misunderstood their character. Does this mean that I have likewise misunderstood the character of this historical moment? I suspect so.

I suspect that events are going to morph in unexpected ways that are both wildly anticlimactic and yet powerfully subversive, with a mix of contradictory ‘returns’ to several traditions, though as altered by evolved perceptions thereof. At the same time, these changes will produce, almost stealthily, new technologies and solutions that will bring about deep change. Much of what is ‘needed’ to effect all this is likely already embedded, but the wisdom of those ushering all this in is gravely limited, so limited in fact that their expectations will be dashed. Here I’m thinking of AI and its many Kafkaesque applications. 

I am one of those whose wisdom is simply not up to the task of seeing how things are about to play out. There may well be much turbulence across all societies on earth, but also perhaps not. There will be, I suspect, a re-separation of cultures, but one that mysteriously fosters renewed and deeper communications. Our lost youth will want to learn, and be able to do so, the new skills and social-governance methodologies required by changing circumstances. There will be incredible technological breakthroughs that seem par for the course: revolutionary, but oddly seamless. 

Some mix of these and other such things. Our many cultural soils are growing fertile just beneath our perception, their features and cracks opening to new germination and seeding that will prove Just So for how they have evolved, for the wounds that have enriched them.

“Have I not guided you to where you need to be?”

God said that. To me, when I was at my most desperately angry, when I raised my fist against Him like a spear. By “you”, I think He meant us all. And I could feel His deeply disarming smile course through me like a river.

(Note he said “need”, not “want”!)

Tell me why, I don't like Mondays

The Song of the Shirt
Thomas Hood, 1843

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread –
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the ‘Song of the Shirt’.

“Work! work! work!

While the cock is crowing aloof!

And work – work – work,

Till the stars shine through the roof!

It’s Oh! to be a slave

Along with the barbarous Turk,

Where woman has never a soul to save,

If this is Christian work!

“Work – work – work

Till the brain begins to swim:

Work – work – work

Till the eyes are heavy and dim!

Seam, and gusset, and seam,

Till over the buttons I fall asleep,

And sew them on in a dream!”

These are only the first three of the twelve stanzas that comprise the poem, but it’s clear what is being expressed. We of the civilised world know it well, and hear its echoes in Bob Black’s diatribe against work, which begins: “Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.” Whence this cultural antipathy to something as universal and necessary as work? Is the infamous capitalism to blame?

In The Empathic Civilization (2009: 290ff), Jeremy Rifkin spends some time tracing the demise of guilds and the emergence of a labour class. “In the sixteenth century in England, an independent merchant class was beginning to challenge the guilds’ control”. Generally, great changes were afoot, in particular the enclosures, which loosed peasants from the land, creating an exploitable labour force. Advances in transportation using rivers and canals sped trade up. These factors enabled merchants to bring cheaper goods to market, which made them enemies of the guilds. Eventually, 

the old social economy, based on controlling production, fixing prices, and excluding competition from the outside, was too provincial to accommodate the range of new technologies that were making possible greater exchange of goods and services between more people over longer distances. The new technologies gave birth to a capitalist class hell-bent on exploiting their full potential. They found their commercial mode in self-regulating free markets. 

Work became a commodity, along with almost everything else.

That human work became an exchangeable commodity subject to the forces of the ‘free market’, is, I feel, perhaps the prime reason work is as hated as it is today. This governing of work by the price system, in conjunction with mechanisation and the industrial revolution, led inexorably to the state of affairs we have today, and have had for many decades. Work-for-wage at any job at all is a matter of survival. How can we have pride in our work if it is most often for another person’s profit, if we are mere cogs in the machinery of a profit-seeking monolith that cares only about its own (endless) growth?

Charlie Chaplin ‘slaved’ over his films. He wrote them, directed them, acted in them, wrote the music for some of them, edited them, but would not have called that (at times highly repetitive) work “evil”, nor the long hours. I work hard on my blog posts. People everywhere work hard on their own labours of love. But even the ironing, the vacuum cleaning, washing the dishes, changing nappies, none of these things are hateful when we recognise them as necessary elements of a healthy and pleasant life. Then we can say “whistle while you work”, and mean it warmly. Perhaps the distinction is that these forms of work are self-directed and more or less freely chosen.

If capitalism is about capital – as it must be –, and if work is one form of capital that can be exploited in pursuit of profit, and if profit is almost exclusively monetary in nature, then work must be stripped of its potential nobility and grace by capitalism over time. This is, I assert, exactly what we have witnessed. As readers of this blog know, I don’t believe this model is sustainable, for reasons of technological unemployment, planetary carrying capacity, and good old fashioned change. Jeremy Rifkin is similarly critical of this dynamic, as are many other thinkers,  but anticipates an evolution towards what he calls “distributed capitalism”. By this he appears to mean a transition from rigid hierarchy towards flatter, more anarchic arrangements (I don’t recall him using the word “anarchic” though!). In very broad brush strokes, his prediction crudely mirrors some of the aspects of how I envision a resource-based economy gathering steam. Regardless, from where we are now, culturally relearning the grace and nobility of work via transition presents us with a number of challenges.

1. We are still children of the industrial revolution, and this is nowhere more evident than in state education. Grades, large class sizes controlled by a single authority figure tasked with pumping into those malleable minds as much of the state-sanctioned curriculum as possible to sort ‘the wheat from the chaff’, clearly demarcated subjects, lessons begun and ended with the ringing of bells, are all design consequences derived from industry needs. Factory workers are not permitted to be imaginative, critical thinkers. They must be unquestioning drones who are also easy-to-addict consumers. Money, industrialism’s god, requires a constant supply of such humans to grow and grow. Money-as-wealth, money-as-profit, can only see humans as capital to be exploited in its own interest, for its own eternal glory. This is a centuries-old socio-cultural dynamic, so we will not escape it quickly. In other words, we are industrialised, mind and body, yet tasked with changing the system which shaped us, and thus changing ourselves. We are blind, immature and unprepared, yet we must act. The transition can only be bumpy.

2. Can it be capitalism if there is no exploitation (pursuit of profit at the expense of others)? This is a definitional issue, but an important one. Dan Pink is a behavioural economist whose main area of focus is motivation. He cites experiments that have been repeated across the world showing how menial tasks are indeed well motivated by money, whereas cooperative, creative projects are negatively affected by the promise of financial reward. As automation increasingly takes the menial and the repetitive out of human hands, what is left of economic (or public) work for humans will be cooperative and creative. If in this area monetary reward produces worse results than other forms of motivation (i.e., ‘success is its own reward’, the joy of meaningful accomplishment), no explicit profit as measured by money can be the goal of such endeavours. What does this mean in terms of capitalism? Is “distributed capitalism” a contradiction in terms? If capitalism is fundamentally about the pursuit of profit, or the accumulation of capital in ever-growing amounts as leverage for still further growth, doesn’t the distribution of the fruits of socio-economic endeavour along less profit-oriented lines imply socialism? Again, this is a definitional problem, or perhaps one of vision, but one worthy of our attention I feel. To what ‘ends’ and in whose name will we want to work, if not money?

3. Because of 1. and 2. above, state-based socialism may seem attractive in some areas of the world, perhaps all, though the US is packaging its own brand as Freedom! I feel this would be a dead-end. Replacing the Money God with the State God – a mere slight-of-hand trick –, the beneficent father looking after his weakly and incapable children, would be but a continuation of the patriarchal/industrial mindset, as it was in Russia after 1917.  To not exploit each other, but also not to place our entrepreneurial and inventive potential, our individuality, our creativity in the hands of some all-powerful governing institution, is what our maturation from socio-cultural childhood is about. The immaturity I touched on in 1. above is pervasive; we are all infected with it to some extent. The desperate narcissism of the Internet is clear evidence of this. To evolve towards more distributed social structures requires a mature citizenry. We must grow ourselves up, mature, cut ourselves from new cloth. This is hard work. We hate hard work.

And there’s the Catch 22. Part of what is demanded of us to evolve is a re-embracing of that which we have come to despise.  To love work, to appreciate that success is its own reward, to taste the joys of meaningful accomplishment, requires hard work. But, “hard work” as our own hard work, taken on in a spirit of community and cooperation towards meaningful goals and guided by a vision in which money-based profit is distant anathema. We could well rename this “hard work” hard leisure. But, until we begin in earnest to build this as yet unknowable New, promises of the Twenty Hour Week, the Life of Leisure, will remain promises. Our view of them now is similar to the way we anticipate holidays on the beach. They are well-wrapped sweets to be plucked from an evergreen Christmas Tree, only capable of satisfying us for as long as it takes them to dissolve to nothing in our mouths. For work to be good again, for leisure to be more than an empty distraction, we have to put in the hours.

So roll up your sleeves and get down to it. Do good work!

Money Talks, Bullshit Walks (or, Scarcity: a New Look at an Old Devil)

In Aztec, the notion of deference is regarded as crucial. Consequently, according to Nida, ‘it is impossible to say anything to anyone without indicating the relative degree of respect to which the hearer and speaker are entitled in the community’ (1964:95).
Mona Baker, In Other Words (2011:95)

A friend of mine used the expression that is this post’s title a little while ago, and it struck me as a true statement. As someone concerned with the resource-based economy direction (demoting money and promoting wealth), I recognise that this simple truism deserves my attention, which it has had these last few months. In what follows, I’m going to try and associate the validity of this truism with both capitalism (which is in a state of advanced breakdown in my opinion), and the change of direction humanity is stumblingly bringing about.

When we commit to something, we invest in it. If that investment is to mean something, both to ourselves and those around us, losing what we’ve invested must be painful. Because of money’s importance, when we risk our money investing in something, people recognise that we believe in that something (unless we are compulsive gamblers or otherwise of unsound mind). Thus the risk of losing something valuable causes us to carefully appraise what of our scarce resources we invest in which projects and endeavours. For believers in a resource-based economy, this begs the question: does abundance mean we won’t take anything seriously? Put another way, must things be scarce to be valued?

The most obvious example to help us look at this is air. It is abundantly available and has a price of zero. Accordingly, we might argue, we have treated it rather cavalierly. Only as we have started to notice that its delicate ability to sustain life on earth is threatened by our reckless treatment of it have we begun to try and figure out how to look after it. In other words, as the abundance we earlier perceived doesn’t seem to be the whole truth about air, as scarcity enters the picture, so we treat the item with increasing respect and wisdom. The same, it could be argued, goes for planet earth.

The economy

There is a curious paradox here. Economics presents nature as a subset of the economy (concealed in "other inputs"), as an inexhaustible supply of idle resources to be converted, via labour and machines, into goods and services, then sold as scarce commodities via supply and demand (price discovery) processes. (If this assumption were dropped, perpetual economic growth could not be held to be both desirable and possible.) We might express this as follows: abundance + labour & capital = scarcity. For this to hold, labour and machines must be limiting in some way, a sort of conduit through which idle resources must pass to become goods and services. We might look at this conduit as partly consisting of time; even if we could work 24/7, we have to go to market and have time to consume what we buy there. That is, we can’t only earn and produce, we have to spend and consume too. Society needs time to demand/consume what it supplies/produces, as it were.

Demand is an area of economics which is also abundant, or insatiable. Indeed, economics is the study of how best to distribute scarce goods and services to an infinitely greedy humanity, goods and services which are scarce precisely because humans are insatiably greedy. To expand on the earlier equation then: abundance + labour & capital = scarcity (because of demand abundance). Scarcity is thus inescapable, if we accept this sort of thinking. Scarcity appears to emerge within the pincers of posited abundance. In other words, scarcity and abundance happily coexist in economic theory. They are not mutually exclusive.

Of course, the other reason for scarcity in the price system is that if supply exceeds demand (which might be a definition of economic abundance), price falls to zero (‘I couldn’t give it away!’). Suppliers must limit the amount of stuff they bring to market to keep price/profit as high as possible. In other words, for there to be prices above zero, demand must exceed supply, generally speaking. (Let’s not forget the advertising industry that manufactures artificial demand.) In short, the picture is somewhat clouded, although the simple mechanics sketched above make the necessity of scarcity to the market system very clear.

I have come to think of abundance and scarcity as matters of perception and organisation (again, we mustn’t forget advertising). For example, the question, ‘How much is enough?’ cannot reasonably be answered. There is no specific enough. Against what yardstick of what phenomenon? Happiness (immeasurable)? Health (immeasurable)? Security (immeasurable)? So when dealing with the problems of scarcity and abundance, we are not dealing with absolutes. To draw on the preceding paragraph, abundance need not be about infinite amounts, only amounts that consistently exceed demand. I don’t think economics has quite mastered scarcity and abundance, and by logical extension, value. There is much for us to learn and discover here.

And yet the truth of “money talks, bullshit walks” remains. Should we seek to initiate a resource-based economy at all? How would humans value things if there were more than enough of everything? Look how we’re treating the earth. The Perpetual Growth paradigm says nature can keep on providing idle resources to be turned into ever expanding amounts of goods and services forever, that planet earth can take everything we throw at it (or throw away on it). I’m with those who believe infinite growth (of the economic realm) in a finite system is impossible. Unless we treat the ecosystems which engender and support us with intelligence, wisdom and respect, we have it in our power to destroy ourselves. A better model for envisioning economic activity might look something like this:

  Source: Positive Money/David A Jones

Let’s recap the conundrum. On the one hand, we have the current economic paradigm which sees abundance on the input side and scarcity on the output side. On the other, we have a possible future system which sees scarcity on the input side and abundance on the output side. If the reason we are trashing earth’s ecosystems is because of the flawed assumption of input abundance, does it not follow that we will trash ‘goods and services’ if they are abundant? Not necessarily. It all depends on how we raise our kids, how we educate ourselves, and what we see as the function of ‘goods and services’ in a resource-based economy.

In a RBE, there are no goods and services. There is no market. Things like housing, clothing, computing, communication, energy, travel and education would be available with no price tag and are therefore not goods and services. There can be no consumerism, no ‘I want the latest iGadget’, no keeping up with the Joneses (as we experience them today; there will always be the pursuit of novelty and excitement). A full-on, global RBE is only possible if people really understand the benefit of treating, with wisdom and respect, the systems that make their prosperity possible. That’s the idea, at least. In the way we learned to perceive air as a scarce resource, that treating the air with respect is good for humanity generally, so too can people learn to treat housing, transportation, gadgets etc. with respect, even if there is no private property. As in the current paradigm, there would be no binary choice between absolute scarcity or abundance; humanity would deal with scarcity and abundance from a different mindset.

So what happens to money? I think something like it will still be around, albeit in a vastly different form and with a vastly different role, perhaps unrecognisable to our eyes, perhaps something equivalent to kudos or deference (as in the quote that opens this post). “Money (or some related equivalent) talks, bullshit walks” will still apply. There will be respect, accomplishment, social standing (though not as class-based as today’s), expertise, reputation, and other ‘rewards’ for social contribution. Only, the ‘price’ for losing one or all of them won’t be starvation on the streets.

We might argue that these immeasurable social phenomena will be the new money, the only remaining social currency. They are of course with us today, so are nothing new. They will be scarce and require hard work to build up and earn. People in an RBE will not lightly risk this new money, just as we don’t lightly risk contemporary money. Because we are social animals with strong preferences and dislikes as well as very varied ambitions, this aspect of value and scarcity will never leave us. But the abundance the RBE idea references is a more sensible abundance than that assumed of nature today, and is certainly not some absolute, infinite abundance.

As I have repeatedly stated, an RBE is a direction, not a destination. This article is thus somewhat out of keeping with recent posts. I wanted to return to RBE proper, as it were, because I still believe the direction, which is essentially the prioritizing of human concern and environment in the context of reasonable sustainability, is the only game in town that makes lasting sense. It deserves more attention from more people than it is getting, not because it is a finished idea we can implement tomorrow, but because it is an open idea that is both wise and intelligent, if still in its infancy.

The Venus Project decouples from Zeitgeist

That's right folks, you heard it here last! Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows have, somewhat hamfistedly, severed their affiliation with The Zeitgeist Movement.

My interest in both groups is qualified for many reasons, but perhaps the first of them is that in defining a system humanity has never tried, conviction is the last thing I can have. The term "resource-based economics" may have originated with Jacque Fresco, but that means very little, especially when the man's message is deeply rooted in systems theory, which tells us we are not creators or potent actors initiating The New with the power of our being, we react and respond, are shaped and influenced as we shape and influence in response. Resource-based economics is nothing more than the prioritizing of resources over money, an idea which has many ramifications and implications, but, being untried, needs to be openly discussed and tested in whatever are the most effective ways. I do not believe that process can be tightly controlled, especially not by a 95 year old man. Insistence on such control weakens you.

But there we are, it has happened. We are all only human and should not expect perfection from one another, nor be too surprised when we screw up or when plans don't work out as hoped. Shit happens. Interestingly enough though, in his latest radio address, Peter Joseph mentions working with ideas such as time banks and other monies that are necessary to move beyond the current impasse. It is refreshing to hear that. That was a point that always frustrated me. The Venus Project insists on a moneyless solution, talks often of transition, but does not define the money-design that stands a chance of placing humanity on a path that can prioritize resources over money. That was always a glaring failing. Without that defined all you have is an idea of a possible future and nothing more, no matter how many times transition is mentioned. Peter also mentions working with the Buckminster Fuller Institute and other bodies, and this can only be good. To unite as many people as possible behind an idea as contrary to the status quo as resource-based economics, you simply must work with others, which means mess and compromise. That The Venus Project are still alone cannot be a good sign.

I sincerely hope Peter and others in the movement look at MMT, at demurrage, guaranteed income, and anything else that might serve as stepping stones toward steady state growth, human and environmental concern, and away from our religious reliance on Hand, The Invisible. Diversity is the spice of life. Insistence on purity, whatever the hell purity really is, always ends badly. In the end it's not money itself that matters, it is our systemic relationship with money and money's association with wealth that does. It seems likely to me that a system which needs no money is possible, but not inevitable. There are too many variables. The means are the ends, the journey is the destination. If we, globally, as a species, can have some variant of agreement to demote money and promote wealth, over time and going forward, see the vital importance of staying supple so that we can adjust wisely to the changes that come at us unendingly, that would already be the seed of resource-based economics. And that task is mighty enough.

Sustainability or Growth4Ever? The Choice is Ours

Not only subjective poverty is never overcome by growth, but absolute poverty is increased by it. Growth requires technical progress and technical progress alters the composition of the labor force, making more places for educated workers and fewer for uneducated, but opportunities to acquire qualifications are kept (with a few exceptions for exceptional talents) for those families who have them already [Robinson, 1972, p. 7].

The number of very poor countries has doubled in the last 30 to 40 years, while the number of people living in extreme poverty has also grown two-fold, a UN think-tank warned Thursday. Source.

The debt-money system forces growth upon us by virtue of its ponzi-dynamic of requiring ever more debt to prevent collapse (see “The Ecology of Money”, “The Grip of Death”, “The Ascent of Humanity” and the work of Silvio Gesell, and many others). Growth is forced upon us by the debt-money system, but perhaps more deeply still by interest itself. When we study the consequences of growth – everything has consequences – we must look at the planet as a system. To study only this country or that, or even human population, without considering their effect on planetary carrying capacity, is to fail before you've begun. As for growth creating jobs, ILO figures suggest otherwise.

If you were convinced growth were always and only good, you might be thinking at this point, “So what? At least us lazy douche bags are pushed forward by a bitchin' system which kicked communism's derrière!!” But, as the quotes above demonstrate, not only is economic growth a failure on its own terms, more importantly we live on a finite planet and are experiencing the decline of all living systems, the very systems which make human life possible in the first place. As with everything else, growth is only good when it can clearly and unequivocally be shown to be so. Therefore, being addicted to it on purpose is more than unwise, it is suicidal. (And besides that simple logic, the glitter of modern technology and burgeoning human population could never have happened without oil and a revolution in sanitation. Debt-money can only take a slither of the credit, if you'll pardon the pun.)

I've been looking more deeply this week into the work of German professor of economics, Bernd Senf, in particular, “The Fog Around Money”. As far as I know his work is not available in English, so those who can't read German will have to trust me when I say his style, as well as his approach to the subject matter, is clear, concise, and engaging. What follows is a brief introduction to his analysis. We start with some simple observations.

The money people can save – because they earn more than they 'need' – must earn them money if saving is to happen in banks and not under mattresses. Where is this extra money to come from? Lending. To earn savers money, savings are lent to people who 'need' to borrow – nobody borrows if they don't have to. Not only that, fractional reserve banks could not exist as profit-making businesses without interest-earning deposits as leverage – reserves – for earning profits (although apparently they can lend money to themselves out of thin air to initiate their life as a bank).

So, with interest involved at all stages of money creation, society is forced to encourage people to borrow, at interest, those monies savers don't really 'need' right now. The 'rich' earn yet more money from their, by definition, excess richness from those who have too little. Because of this general dynamic, combined with other factors such as cost-cutting and technological developments, we see, over many decades, growing credit card debt, mortgage debt, overdrafts, national debt, etc. It is the richer sucking money from the poorer, a process which accelerates its own operating because it exacerbates the conditions which power it – the richer the rich become the more money they have to lend, the poorer the poor become the more they have to borrow. Need-differentials (to coin a new expression on the fly) inescapably increase ever more rapidly. This acceleration requires exponential growth; Growth4Ever.

While it cannot be denied that savings bring 'idle' money via bank and other lending processes to those who 'want' to borrow, what is most certainly open to inquiry is the cumulative effect of this over time and across the planet. Also, I do not seek to claim here that only the 'poor' borrow, and know that credit worthiness is part of borrowing (in the early decades of the process anyway!) – ideally lenders need to know they are likely to make a profit – but borrowers are, systemically speaking, poor relative to their lending counterparts. And yes, the thrifty can forgo the delights of consumerism and save money for a rainy day – I myself am like that – while some higher-earners live a too expensive Life of Riley and get swamped in debt. But these are sub-dynamics of a broader, global dynamic which is the needy paying the affluent more and more over time – think third world debt. The main point is that the system is perfectly happy with gluttons, indeed it creates them with the best advertising money can buy, encourages people, every step of the way, to want, to desire, to 'need' more and more shiny stuff. Bernd Senf:

Even the middle and upper income brackets belong therefore to those suffering under the weight of the interest system. Only roughly the highest 10 percent with the highest income, profit from the system. And the final 1% or even 0.1% profit from interest to a barely imaginable degree – at the cost of the vast majority of the population. Unearned income in a society which prides itself on being a "meritocracy"!

Interest acts, then, like a pump: it pumps, day in and day out, enormous quantities of money in opaque and mostly unknown ways from the great majority to a small minority. Who "pumps" this money to themselves, and from whom? Not the borrower from the lender, as the language suggests, rather – seen in the main – the few rich from the great majority of the population -- and this without work or contribution, but simply because they possess so much money.

Professor Senf mentions the marriage of a poor boy to a rich girl. The figures are startling: Poor Boy earned 4,600 DM monthly, before tax, Rich Girl earned from interest over 650,000 DM daily (quoted from Bild, 27/7/1990). These are the types of figures we all need to know about. The very wealthy are so wealthy it is impossible for them to spend even their interest. Their interest-earnings come from borrowers, from the poor. I wonder if Ms Quandt and Mr Klatten are still married, and if happily so.

On a side note, the idea that hard work should be rewarded is wrong, not in the complexity of potential interpretations of that received wisdom, but in the mythical association with external reward in the form of money. Such stems from a paternalistic, hierarchical mindset placing some tiers of society in a fixed posture of judgment over the labour of others. The story of Hard Work Leading to Riches, which are then 'your property' because it was 'your hard work,' that therefore any attempts, via taxation, to 'redistribute' that wealth in the interests of anything that is not you, is also wrong. Success is reward, as is hard work, as is accomplishment. No hard work, no life is even possible without networks of interdependent systems enabling it. Who on their own can create air from a vacuum? Weave gravity from the cloth of space-time? Who can with hard work fashion soil in which to plant the seeds they also somehow created, then cause those seeds to grow with the water and sunlight they likewise summoned from the void? Who can live all alone and develop language, story, art, culture, civilization? When we remember how dependent we are on nature's bounty, on history, on society, we see that hard work is made possible by Universe, not by those of its subsystems we wrongly think of as 'individuals.' 'I' cannot have agency and sovereignty, only we can. I think, therefore we are.

There need not be money as reward for reward to exist. Reward is inevitable simply because of our biology and its embeddedness in the environment; endorphins for example. Reward thus takes many forms. In a system in which money is reward, because of the inescapable and healthy diversity of nature, the different abilities and interests of people, and because of the logic of money, the rich will become richer and the poor poorer, increasingly, unless wisely checked. Societal division is a cost which everyone must then share via decadence and breakdown, though the cost falls predominantly on the poor, as Professor Senf clearly demonstrates in his work. Interest exacerbates this dynamic, accelerating it over time.

To live decently in a modern monetary system, having money is essential. Having less money must be, by design, a hindrance, otherwise money loses its potency; poverty as stick to rich's carrot. Interest, as said, exacerbates, intensifies, conflagrates money's crude reward mechanism by pumping money acceleratingly from the poor to the rich, which leads to obscenely wide and entrenched social divisions, which are the cause of most of what ails us today. Hundreds of millions starve while others earn so much they simply cannot spend it all. Instead they use their excess to make the situation yet worse. 'Hard work' can never and will never justify this inhumanity, even ignoring the fact that most super-rich do not work hard for their 'wealth.'

Usury and money are twinned whips enslaving humanity to the wheels of forced growth in the service of the few. They are the engine driving the increasing absurdity of the rat race, the daily grind, the decadence, corruption, and war. Across the world we see suffering of unimaginable depths just to fuel a system which is destroying us all. While we allow it we are implicitly choosing extinction. No sane person wants this. Surely sustainability is the way forward now. I write in support of a resource-based economy, which is the only system I know of prioritizing sustainability above all else, then proceeding from there. It needs our joint and unprejudiced efforts to become the best it can be.

Money Cannot Afford

There is a monetary budget and a resources budget. The latter is the more important, though the reverse of this truth is what we hear again and again, primarily because it is firmly believed money is an accurate representation of the value of resources, as well as being the best possible arbiter of how they should be distributed and deployed. In a very real sense, money is seen as wealth.

Suppose we trash the planet in pursuit of monetary wealth, and billions of us die. There are, say, 10,000 survivors huddled together in the barren rot and decay, yet they have in their immediate possession all the planet's untarnished gold and wads of dollar bills. Obviously that monetary ‘wealth’ will be of no use to them whatsoever. Seen in this simplistic way it is blindingly clear that resources represent the more important budgetary constraint. Money cannot afford, resources can.

So today, when we hear, “We can't afford it!” what is actually being said? My answer: The mechanisms or groups controlling money have determined that there is not enough money to accomplish a given objective. That there might be enough resources is not considered. Money, by virtue of its historically proven ‘excellence,’ rules.

However, I believe passionately that we are obliged to question this implied assertion, especially when we repeatedly witness across history poverty and starvation amidst abundance. So, when it is claimed there is not enough money, why isn’t there? Furthermore, under what conditions should a shortage of money be considered a problem? Simple enough questions, but answering them takes us deep into the famous rabbit hole…

The vast majority of money is today created as a debt which vanishes when repaid, though lenders keep the interest charged for further use. In theory lenders continually spend and lend their profits back into the economy, so there should never be a shortage. But as we know, theory is one thing, reality quite another. Not only is money always scarce because more is owed than exists, there are in fact times when very few new loans are being made, but banks are calling in existing debts. This imbalance leads to either a recession or depression, depending on its severity and governmental response. The amount of money being circulated then diminishes, either because there really is less in existence, or because economic uncertainty coupled with systemic addiction to growth exacerbates hoarding behaviours (see below), as people and firms struggle to weather the storm. Then we hear over and over, “We can't afford it!”

Hoarding is best thought of as a leak in the economy through which money escapes. It is not saving as conceived by the theory briefly outlined above, where savings are available to the broader economy, allowing banks to fund entrepreneurs. Hoarding takes money out of the real economy of things – usually because growth has slowed sufficiently to make normal saving unattractive – and funnels it to more exotic money-making schemes such as derivatives, commodities, currency exchanges, etc., aka The Casino. To my mind there is an inevitability to the growth of this type of ‘investment’ while society lauds financial wealth above all other types. The ‘smart’ money goes where it grows fastest, and risk is always ‘taken care of’ by some brilliant scheme or other. Hoarding of this type is therefore in the system’s make up, a system which assumes the existence of a god-like hand cleaning up our messes, as we mortals, automaton-like, maximize profit. This philosophy births vampire squids.

Silvio Gesell’s proposed ‘demurrage money’ – money with negative interest or a storage fee – is the only monetary solution I know of which systemically disincentivizes hoarding. The chances of this being implemented any time soon are vanishingly low at best, despite some quite big gun support. Hoarding therefore remains, for the foreseeable future, an inevitable consequence of money and one of the main challenges to maintaining a healthy amount of money in circulation (if such is at all possible – more later).

“We can't afford it!” means, then, there’s not enough money in the system, and so far, this ‘not enough’ is a result of hoarding, and/or the mathematics of debt-money, a money which is only available in adequate amounts during booms. (The scarcity built in to debt-money is the root of Growth as Necessity, Growth as Good.) This ‘not enough’ has not been, in living memory, a result of too few resources, though ecological disasters do happen, and wars can devastate cities, farms, etc. In the case of war, which of course has occurred in living memory, the wider planet has had enough to help struggling survivors, only the distribution mechanisms, including the money-price system, have not delivered. The nation state too – a fiction created by humans for various reasons – is a part of this problem.

Hoarding is the more complex of the mechanisms discussed (is implicit anyway in the first), though it can seem otherwise when we consider the complexities of finance behind debt-based money. Hoarding implies ownership, including ownership of resources such as land. Hoarding is a natural consequence of a property-based system, which assigns ownership via the laws of exchange and defines success as Owning More Than The Next Guy. It is a system which we think as natural as the air we breathe, a manifestation of Darwin’s survival of the fittest, and certainly one more modern than the sharing, hunter-gatherer lifestyle we left to our distant past, a lifestyle which, sadly, cannot produce ‘high culture’ and many other things we have grown addicted to.

If you have ownership, you have some kind of money. If you have some kind of money, you have ownership. The two are inseparable, and both arise out of scarcity. If we presume scarcity, we encourage, generally, the urge to secure for ourselves as much as we can, to the detriment of our competitors. If success in the sense described above – Owning More Than The Next Guy – strongly motivates us, we will fight to amass vastly more of the planet's resources than the average person has. In short, the competition set up by the presumption of scarcity (whether that presumption is accurate or not) leads inexorably to gross imbalances of distribution of the output of human ingenuity. Hence, with scarcity presumed, we systemically encourage our ‘alphas’ to work to the detriment of their less ambitious, or able, brothers and sisters.

If we presume scarcity and want civilization, we need a way of distributing scarce goods and services without resorting to violence and lawlessness too often. This is money’s principle job. If we presume scarcity, we say, in effect, “We can’t afford enough for everyone, and besides, there’s no such thing as ‘enough,’ since humans are insatiable.” Suffering is therefore built deep into the presumption. So, for as long as we believe that scarcity remains the true state of nature, that greed is one of our deepest drives, money will remain the most civilized way of sharing the spoils of human inventiveness. Without money, it seems, we would have chaos.

But we have a problem – we’ve become too ‘successful’ as a species. Our money system demands perpetual growth on a finite planet. We humans are now close to 7,000,000,000 and rising. Many billions are poor, but want to be rich. Billions are rich and will fight to stay that way. In the meantime we are by some measures consuming resources at a rate equal to 1.5 earths and show very few signs of caring enough about this problem to change direction. The haves and have-nots are on a collision course as we consume our way to resource-destitution. Soon resources will not be able to afford, indeed they cannot now afford the system they suffer under. It seems apocalyptic.

Over 99% of all species that ever lived are now extinct. Apocalypse is therefore a regular occurrence for life on earth, doom the likely outcome for every plant and critter. Is what is currently threatening homo sapiens sapiens an inescapable outcome of our genetic constitution and other natural factors we cannot influence, or is it cultural? My answer is culture (and even genetic behaviour is subject to belief).

Two questions arise from our predicament.

1. Is there actually enough to go around as people like Richard Buckminster Fuller and Jacque Fresco claim?
2. Are humans insatiable?

My answer to 1 is, it depends on how you design your distribution system and your cultural attitude to abundance, and to 2, it depends on how you define insatiable.

Now it may well be that money needs scarcity like water needs oxygen and hydrogen, I'm not sure, and I’m not even sure how we might find out. What I do feel certain of is that debt-driven consumerism is the wrong model generally, and currently about as helpful as a blind-drunk bull in a china shop scented with Eau d’Ovulating Cow (do cows ovulate?). To want to stop the debt train we have to believe it is headed for a cliff, but see too another train nearby, waiting to head off in another direction, a direction that makes enough sense to risk change. Sadly we’ve been made stupid enough, via education, advertising and other propaganda, to ride this debt-train to our doom, rather than try something tamer and safer, and potentially far more beneficial. Better the devil you know, eh?

Forced growth has to stop, that’s for certain. Hence debt-based money creation has to go; deep monetary reform is a necessity. This would mean no private enterprise could be in the money-creation business; it wouldn’t be a business. That on its own is a Very Big Deal, so big it might lock us into this train and power us over the edge. Those psychopathic enough to actually enjoy having enormous wealth and power (The Masters of the Universe) simply cannot care about human society. They'll drive the debt train to our collective doom, just for kicks, and enjoy every second.

Some monetary reformers, e.g. Michael Rowbotham, do not seek to prevent banks from creating money as debt (see “The Grip of Death”, chapter 17). However, we’re suffering Rowbotham’s proposed set up already, and have been for decades. Governments are entitled to create their own money, debt free, and indeed do; roughly 3% of the money in existence was printed debt free. However, painful experience shows that banks have both the desire and ability to swamp government, control the debate via control of the media, and create the vast majority of money in pursuit of profit; corporations are legally bound to grow constantly in an economy which is forced to grow systemically. (A question to those who think money should still be earned from money: why should we maintain that system at all?)

But, how will it be decided how much money is best if the market is not involved? That’s not an easy question to answer. I have big sympathy for the argument levelled by those opposed to monetary reform, that only market-like processes can figure out, in an ongoing way, how much money the economy ‘needs.’ The proposal to create a fourth state pillar ‘separate’ from government, assigned with the task of managing money supply, places too much power into a single institution. A sweet theory perhaps, but we ought to be suspicious; power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Although there can be no such thing as perfect competition, an organic system of bottom up control is far preferable to a hierarchy of top down control. Bottom up control is the essence of democracy.

That said, I am not against all forms of centralization per se. Standardized measures are important, as are rules of grammar, and much else besides. Some centralized or centralizing process is necessary to establish ground rules, without which people cannot work together, without which we would be ‘isolated’ beasts like wolverines, and none of the problems I’m discussing here would exist. Society must have some centralized aspects. The question is which, and how?

My heart desires something like an open source society guided by ground rules which enable creative collaboration across the planet, but disable concentrations of power and wealth. I fantasize that an open source money system might be possible, a globally deployable software for creating money dynamically at the moment it is needed, but which also monitors inflationary pressures, applies demurrage, and ‘runs’ the whole money-shebang transparently and dispassionately. No one would get paid to operate it. It would be a commons in the way all open source software is. And it would mean no more banks. Banking itself would be automated. Part of such a system would be a guaranteed income, since we ought to see money as our share of humanity’s ingenuity, not as reward for ‘horrible’ work. Money as ‘human ingenuity shared’ frees us to pursue our passions and contribute to society in the best way we can.

Or, something along the lines proposed by The Venus Project, where money is slowly rendered redundant by gentle pursuance of abundance as guided by planetary carrying capacity, removing ownership and exchange from the economy, and allowing open access to all goods and services the economy and environment can provide. The likelihood of this becoming the solution of choice globally is about as low as you can get, but the proposals The Venus Project has put forward are no less worthy of unprejudiced analysis for it.

In either of the two mentioned alternatives to debt-money, human ‘greed’ or ‘insatiability’ would redirect its energy towards accomplishment, excellence, mutual aid, the spreading of joy, and the never ending attempts to make things just that little bit better. Nothing wrong with that, but neither can it be perfect, nor should we even want perfection. And if my suggestions seem Utopian, that merely demonstrates how shamefully adjusted to decadence we have become, and how unwilling we are to imagine something different, which is, after all, exactly what is required.

Why Can't We Awaken?

Some excerpts from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's article of earlier this week:

The actual number of jobs contracted by 260,000 to 153,690,000. The “labour participation rate” for working-age men over 20 dropped to 73.6pc, the lowest the [sic] since the data series began in 1948. My guess is that this figure exceeds the average for the Great Depression (minus the cruellest year of 1932).

The long-term unemployed (more than six months) have reached 42pc of the total, twice the peak of the early 1990s. Nothing like this has been seen since the World War Two.

Raghuram Rajan, the IMF’s former chief economist, argues that the subprime debt build-up was an attempt – “whether carefully planned or the path of least resistance” – to disguise stagnating incomes and to buy off the poor.

Asia’s mercantilist powers have flooded the world with excess capacity.

There is no easy solution to creeping depression in America and swathes of the Old World. A Keynesian `New Deal’ of borrowing on the bond markets to build roads, bridges, solar farms, or nuclear power stations to soak up the army of unemployed is not a credible option in our new age of sovereign debt jitters. The fiscal card is played out.

So we limp on, with very large numbers of people in the West trapped on the wrong side of globalization, and nobody doing much about it. Would Franklin Roosevelt have tolerated such a lamentable state of affairs, or would he have ripped up and reshaped the global system until it answered the needs of his citizens?

I am 'happy' to see bald facts presented in this way in the mainstream, though I doubt very much this makes headlines across the world. (I'd be happy to be corrected on this though, because I no longer read newspapers nor watch television, so miss plenty.)

What saddens me is that a list of statistics which together very clearly highlight a deeply broken system yields neither mention of alternatives nor criticism of the roots of the failed system. The alternative to borrowing money is … a rhetorical flourish referencing a solution Evans-Pritchard has already discounted. Alternatives are not to be mentioned by name (does Evans-Pritchard know of them?), are barely even to be hinted at, no matter how broken the system is, no matter how dried out and useless. Roosevelt changed nothing of the fundamentals of money creation, he merely initiated bold borrowing, a bout of the very Keynesian economics dismissed in the preceding paragraph. And why should any national leader 'rip up and reshape the global system' to the exclusive advantages of his or her citizens? Haven't we exhausted all benefits that attitude can possibly deliver?

This wilful blind spot is the cultural problem Götz Werner speaks of (though not deeply enough). We have conflated money with wealth, work with suffering, can only see money as reward and motivator, a brutish but clever manipulator of 'human nature.' How mighty a kick up the backside do we need to even consider listening, with an open mind, to any ideas that suggest we could organize society around different priorities, such as health, trust, and sustainability?

This is the bizarre netherworld we are wandering through. The only signs we see scream “CHANGE DIRECTION!”, but the ringing in our ears and the white noise of the media hold us so transfixed we fail to respond cohesively to the approaching cliff. We can't redirect our thoughts as we so desperately need to. How bad do things have to get before we open to the new?

Post-scarcity economics, resource-based economics, monetary reform, guaranteed income, revolution in education, cold fusion, geothermal power, wind power, eco-cities, permaculture, aquaculture, and much else besides, under the auspices of sensible priorities as mentioned above, are the alternatives we need to explore globally, acting locally while staying globally interconnected and aware. The know-how and resources are there. Only we stand in our way.

Capitalism is Dead! Long Live ???

"Were this system improvable, such would already have happened within the last 80 years. Instead we see an insoluble problem in the absurd Capital Market Theory.

Allegedly, all participants in a free market possess the exact same information and future expectations. Were such at all possible in the real world, all participants would value all goods in this market in the same way, that is, assign the same price. But that would mean no transactions whatsoever would take place since no profits would be possible. With identical information and future expectations price and value are judged identically by all market participants. In those conditions no one can make a profit, either through buying or selling. Instead there are only losses due to transaction costs." Franz Hoermann

Unless, perhaps, price/value includes ‘profit.’ But, how could price actually do so in a perfect market? Knowingly paying others profit would be a form of cooperation, antithetical to perfect competition. And even if we did endow homo economicus with sufficient generosity to say, “Sure, I’ll pay X% above your costs,” that X% would be so low as to prohibit accumulation of capital, and hence prevent capitalism from functioning. Hence, capitalism cannot be ‘pure’ in the sense of a perfect market or perfect competition and still be capitalism. It is systemically geared to increase concentrations of capital, otherwise the very leverage required to expand society’s productive and consumptive capacities would be impossible. Capitalism is Wealth-and-Power-Concentration by definition. It is top-down elitism as socioeconomic system. It can therefore be neither free nor democratic in the sense its champions would have us believe. The only freedom capitalism ensures is that afforded by one’s purchasing power. Yes, one can ‘work hard’ and perhaps earn more, but people’s chances of accessing such freedom diminish as power and wealth concentrate and hunker down. Then corruption becomes the norm and decadence sets in.

The question society must ask itself is this: “When the costs of capitalism outweigh its benefits, how do we go about changing course?” After all, one property all systems share is mortality.

The argument that capitalism is Nature mapped to the economic sphere, and therefore not a system as such, and therefore immortal, is mere propaganda. Nature’s composition – as seen by those who assert capitalism’s robust naturalness – looks like this: competition in the true Hobbesian manner of each against all; selfish genes determining behaviour; creative destruction ensuring renewal and change; pitiless, merciless, randomly mutating evolution ensuring survival only of the fittest. But this perception of Nature is an ego-based projection arising from incomplete information garnered over the centuries. The view afforded by the latest science is very different.

Nature is in fact cooperative first, competitive second. Genes are not controllers of behaviour, they react to the environment; environment has primacy, not some unaware double-helix firing off instructions, via proteins, from an imagined control center. Creative destruction is not everywhere evident; there are exceptions, wisdom being one of the most important, institutions the most pernicious. And Lamarckism is making a slow comeback; random mutation as lone engine of evolutionary change is an incomplete idea; there is also intent.

Capitalism does not mirror Nature. Even if it did, it would only do so for a while; Nature is Change, is in fact Everything, and humanity is seamlessly, irrevocably, beautifully embedded in it, changing it as it changes us. Capitalism is indeed a system born of an ideology serving an elite, and can only be so. It has been a lever to linear growth of a certain type, and has successfully harnessed humanity's inventive genius in pursuit of that growth. To paraphrase Eisenstein, it has monetized (made scarce) everything it could, but can take us no further. To the extent it lived, it is now dead. Certainly it was never what it's defenders said it was, and that growing realization is a kind of death.

The alternative is some form of loose egalitarianism motivated by environmental concern, a model based on abundance and cooperation rather than scarcity and competition. (And by the way, neither socialism nor communism are it, for they too are elitist.)

If humanity wants to transition to such a system, in my view it must be one which can benefit sustainably from the fruits of centralization while avoiding its dangers and incorporating decentralization too. This is, in my view, only possible via a radical reorientation of our goals and desires. By demoting money’s socioeconomic role while promoting true wealth as arising from community- and ecosystem-health, open access to a relevant and optional education, etc., the necessary ideas and solutions should arise. What we call this system only history can reveal. Right now, to me, the best name seems to be “Resource-Based Economics.”