Divided and conquered

 

In 1958, Mao Zedong ordered that sparrows be exterminated throughout China.

For three days, the Chinese went hunting for sparrows. It was the beginning of an ecological and humanitarian disaster leading to millions of dead.

In a state-sponsored announcement and as one of his first initiatives, Mao declared war on the “four pests”: mosquitoes, flies, sparrows and rats. The impact on China’s ecological balance was catastrophic. The sparrow – which Mao identified as a pest – only rarely eats farmed grain from the field. The main components of its diet are in fact insects such as locusts, which can reproduce undisturbed in the absence of their main predator.
From Dr Wolfgang Wodarg’s Telegram feed [my translation] 

Systems prepare for their overthrow with a preliminary period of petrification.
R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

This post extends “Why I ‘support’ Trump over Biden” and analyses different aspects of the material in Part I of “Only the intensity has changed. Nothing will ever be the same again.” In the former, I briefly touched on the deep divisions that bedevil the American people, and by extension the world’s peoples. In the latter, I examined at some depth a few logical derivations we might tease out from the dogged phenomenon of inter-group antipathy at a broader scale than narrowly focussing on it as productive ground for sustaining an ancient strategy we know as “divide and conquer”.

Within that narrower remit, we here consider why societies and groups can be divided and set against each other, why so often we fail to see it happening, and what we might do about this understandable dynamic going forward. The article is structured as expositions of two civilisational building blocks – specialisation and hierarchy – that, taken together in the remainder of the article, serve to illustrate why divide and conquer is such an effective strategy for controlling very large numbers of people. We close by peering into the nature of reality, for it is among these deepest of fundaments that robust ideas supportive of a possible Better Way are to be found (I assert). 

This article is familiar ground but it is, I feel, absolutely pivotal to our historical moment. My hope is that examining this territory from multiple angles will make the analysis more accessible to more people.

Specialisation

Civilisation without specialisation is almost unimaginable (see Idiocracy). One of the fundamental properties distinguishing civilisation from non-civilisation is the incredible societal complexity it can sustain over large tracts of time. Specialisation cumulatively permits this growing complexity – or more accurately is an expression thereof – and is an accomplishment with roots in numerous civilisational accomplishments such as grain stores, geometry and metallurgy. These and countless other technologies free up time some use to become experts in something very narrow, like viral infection vectors or endocrine disruption. Over time, areas of expertise cumulatively and mutually advance each other, spawn yet others and generally interact in countless ways to, put crudely, produce wealth – lots of wealth. (We’ll talk about wealth later.) 

But this simplistic, progressivist rhetoric does not account for the problem highly focussed specialists can have when communicating with other highly focussed specialists, especially when their respective areas of expertise are remote from one another, yet both are suddenly relevant to some urgent social issue. Add ideological conflict to the mix, and specialists so thrown together can have a very hard time reaching agreement. More mundanely, we might also reflect on how hard it would be for primary-school teachers from north London to truly appreciate the worldviews and interests of Tibetan monks or Cebu’s street children.

And our account should also include vested interests that agglomerate around particularly valuable specialisations while thwarting or suppressing the findings of others that might harm those interests. After all, scientific research has to be funded by something, and not everything that can or should be investigated will yield financial profit – much may even harm it. In a world ruled by money, even science itself, not to mention politics and law, is for sale to a large degree. This problem is compounded by the challenge of staying humble while possessing the extraordinary ambition and skill needed to become a world-leading expert or figure of power. And then really identifying with that lofty status. As Max Planck put it, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

But the domain of specialisation most important to our discussion here is politics (within which I include the mythical, semi-mythical or wholly real yet invariably disturbing ‘Deep State’). Politics – beyond parliaments to all institutional power structures – could be characterised as a societal process evolved to protect wealth (aka power) and determine its distribution through society. A second relevant quality politics possesses is its structural function as intermediary between Business and The People. The tensions characterising this triad’s interdependencies also characterise human history. How transparently and honestly can politics perform this role? How wisely responsive to cumulative change can it be? Does ‘runaway specialisation’ in fact fatally impair politics’ ability to be a transparent mediator? How does our cultural sense of wealth / wealth generation govern which group has more power over political processes, regardless of any moral or ethical considerations? And are this triad’s just-asserted constituent groups in fact the result of an ideological perspective, a mirage-like emergence of our acquired cultural reflexes around wealth?

Hold those thoughts.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is a social structure that tends to emerge from advanced specialisation. Decentralised, more anarchic/democratic structures can emerge from specialisation but are far less likely, as history attests. Currently and for a while yet, hierarchical social forms have their hands on history’s steering wheel. 

What does this mean, fundamentally speaking? It means politics’ function as protector and distributor of wealth operates within a hierarchical dynamic that must, by virtue of this dynamic’s structuring pattern that is ever operant, ‘autonomically’ favour the pyramid’s upper over its lower layers over time. I would argue this is the case in state communism and socialism, in ‘free-market’ capitalism, indeed in any institutionalised hierarchy. In other words, the wealth-power any hierarchy generates flows cumulatively to the top. The degree to which a rising pyramid lifts all boats depends on circumstances, which include but are by no means limited to the relative balances of power available to each level. One contemporary example would be trade-union relative to corporate/business power.

To continue with trade unions by way of further explication, they tend to be structured hierarchically. This is hardly surprising; in societies that have been hierarchical for centuries, we would expect almost every member therein to be reflexively hierarchical, to reflexively expect leaders and followers and to not know how to organise differently. To be effective, trade unions must have power and wealth. Hunger for power is probably the best predictor for which personalities within a union’s membership will make it to leadership positions and be effective in those roles. As such, they are likely to have more psychological affinity – even if hidden from conscious view – with the leadership of corporations and politics than with the members they represent. This makes them easy to corrupt and separate from their members. I don’t mean this disparagingly, I’m simply teasing out logical derivations from the components under discussion.

To recap, organisations, groups, unions, political parties, etc. have particular defining dynamics. If these happen to be inflexibly or ideologically hierarchical, the decisions, solutions and discoveries they will tend to favour will conform to or serve the dynamic outlined above; favouring upper over lower levels of the hierarchy over time. And yet despite this systemic tendency, the vector history takes cannot be controlled completely; unintended consequences will slip out from under all attempts to control history and have their unpredictable way with it.

In the case of politics generally, this tendency will underpin, in both the most hidden and obvious of ways, how politics continues to conceptualise its role – romantically and pragmatically – and will also reinforce its perception and understanding of the wealth it is solemnly sworn to protect. Systems structure perception. And all of this somewhat in the manner of a positive feedback loop that one day must crash against the mounting cliffs of perpetual change.

Groupings: antipathy, mistrust, conspiracy

Combined, the two civilisational building blocks presented above generate seemingly endless groupings: sub-groups within groups, fringe groups, dominant groups, tiny groups and huge meta-groups, and we may not be particularly conscious of the many groups to which we belong; sociology does a dizzying job of discovering new groups, and most laypeople have probably never heard of them. The more we look, the more we reveal. Who can say what part fantasy and what part reality play in this process. 

Not all groups have antithetical interrelations but any two can be coaxed into that relationship. Propaganda, public-relations and behavioural-programming powers are by now highly advanced skills. Should it serve the interests of those with the means to wield these skills – those at the very tip of the hierarchical pyramid whose duty is to sustain that pyramid by any means possible –, they can create new groups as if out of nothing, and set them against each other. Of course, to be effective, such efforts must be sufficiently psychologically grounded, e.g. those who fear viruses and those who fear authoritarian power, or those wanting the freedom to question claims made about vaccines and those believing such criticism leads to widespread disease and death. It seems fault lines develop along axes of fear. Fear goes viral in ignorance, and ignorance is a hard thing to defeat in highly specialised societies, especially when education is designed to dumb down the vast majority of us.

But this tempting civilisational tool is something of a double-edged sword. Societal continuity over time is an existential matter. Our ideas around what reality is about – pursuit of happiness, property accumulation, success and accomplishment, humble service to God, humanism, science, etc. – are cohering forces that power us through time, structure us, guide us, unite us. Were an entire civilisation to lose faith in their deepest convictions and beliefs over night, the resultant chaos would be terrible, regardless of how noble or cynical the establishment of those cohering beliefs had been. Hence, the continuity that is the core remit of the political layer in guarding and distributing generated wealth – one critical part of which is sustaining consensus about what wealth is – is fiercely protected. No individual or group is as valuable as that continuity; every group and individual would be plunged into the abyss were that continuity to suddenly snap. Of course, this does logically make the group guarding continuity the most important group, and there’s the hierarchical rub. 

These hard facts mean states and other powerful interests will play groups against one another if such is perceived to be helpful in protecting societal continuity. This sort of realpolitik could be termed conspiring. As Stalin put it, you have to break eggs to make omelettes. I’d add that one tends not to reveal which eggs are going to be sacrificed, to extend the metaphor to its logical limit. Such decisions are thus made in secrecy (for the good of the realm!).

The problem is the temptation to abuse this great power that politics must wisely manage – forever. This challenge is made steadily more difficult as the pyramid’s tip loses touch with its lower levels, as it loses connection with ‘reality on the ground’, as it struggles to properly understand specialist advisors, as it fails to resist the persuasive charms of lobbyists etc. It takes a rare set of individuals indeed to handle these sorts of pressures: making life-and-death decisions at mass scale while staying wise and compassionate.

Recalling the communication issues that bedevil specialisation and how this relates to the above paragraphs, we might recast this phenomenon as one of several co-factors eroding community cohesion over time. For example, a 50-strong hunter-gatherer band is going to be a far more cohesive community than, say, the population of Great Britain. The social complexity of the latter far exceeds that of the former. This complexity can be viewed as a rich attack surface offering an endless number of fault lines that might be exploited for divide-and-conquer purposes. In other words, because we don’t know each other very well, we can easily be induced to become suspicious of each other. Some have called this the atomisation of society. An episode from the first season of “Black Mirror” (“Fifteen Million Merits”) depicts one dystopian version of extreme atomisation. And it is dystopian, not utopian, precisely because humans are social animals. Distrust is poison to us, depresses us, corrodes our emotional, psychological and physical health.

So what are we to do if we want our civilisational cake and eat it too? My answer is that we have to revisit what we mean by wealth, by hierarchy and anarchy, value and other foundational concepts. The concluding section will now turn to these matters.

Closing observations towards a Better Way

Underneath both building blocks discussed above, and I believe also under any others we might advance, lies value. All decision making is guided by our value systems, whether ‘civilised’ or ‘primitive’, ‘humanist’ or ‘animal’. Value is thus somewhat synonymous with wealth; wealth is what we value. But neither is a distinct object impervious to change. Over the last two or three centuries, both terms have become profoundly influenced by materialism. Materialism requires the measurement of all things so as to mechanically describe and thus control them. Measurement is of course nothing new, but materialism’s dominance has reached unprecedented levels in this time period, though is now past its zenith, in my view. 

Value, it is claimed, is measured by money. One effect of this peculiar claim is that we have come to see value as almost entirely contained in and created by money, and is thus expressible in numbers. 

Money, being little more than numbers attached to some currency symbol and imbued with purchasing power, simplifies and thus cheapens how we conceptualise and structure the economic domain. Economics should concern itself primarily with wise husbandry of the environment by protecting biodiversity. Instead it casts itself as an impartial science of market mechanisms, which are asserted as laws of nature steered by price discovery via supply and demand in the market place of life. If market forces are left to their own devices, the rest of reality will take care of itself, including the environment, which is conceived as an endless pool of idle resources. This intellectual framework actually places money at the heart of society, but this reality is artfully concealed by the orthodoxy that money is a “veil”, or almost meaningless consequence of buying and selling, a necessary but neutral tool invented to make trading more efficient. 

Money is so much more than this disingenuous description.

Money, being made of numbers, can grow forever, especially when it is created as interest-bearing debt. Try as humanity might, its attempts to anchor money-as-numbers to something real, like gold, always fail. Money’s core logic – more is better than less –, combined with human invention and ambition, tends to grow the economic domain beyond what is sustainable. Only the big and powerful survive (until they collapse). Numbers can grow forever. Human imagination can grow forever. The constant battle for scarce resources adds fuel to this growth conflagration, whispering into our collective ears to escape constraints, to completely ‘tame’ the ‘wild’, to get everything under control. But resources are only scarce because human imagination is inexorably steered towards greed by the poor definition of value under discussion: tautology as positive feedback loop.

Health, on the other hand, isn’t like money. Health is an expression of biological systems that cannot grow forever. Perpetual growth of health makes no sense, not even as an idle notion. Health is something we must always tend, much as we might tend a garden, not that it expands, but that it stays functional, perhaps beautiful. Health and beauty can be thought of as synonyms. 

Something about perpetual economic growth appeals to our civilisational instincts to escape the limits of reality (see transhumanism). What we value governs what we choose, how we steer our lives. If money is value, then money and its ‘infinite’ potential governs our lives. Were we instead to perceive health as value, how different would civilisation be? What effect would such a simple but profound change have on specialisation and hierarchical systems?

Aside from measurement, number and the illusion of control emerging from mastery thereof, another consequence of materialism is a pervasive victim-centred passivity that leads to depression, apathy, cynicism, nihilism, etc. ‘What’s the point? I’m just material stuff knocked this way and that by forces beyond my control.’ ‘There’s no such thing as free will; I’m a biological robot.’ 

This psychological stance sees health in a mechanical light, a perspective that makes health seem less attractive, dull somehow. The greeds and appetites that are the products of this stance desire primarily what cannot nourish: pornography rather than love; romance instead of relationship; quick and easy junk, not inconvenient home-cooked, food etc. Such desires, expressed as economic demand, end up rewarding those powers that need our needs to forever remain in that narcissistic frame, in that painful emptiness. How is this a recipe for health, for meaningful success?

Hence too-big-to-fail banks, hence Big Pharma, hence Big Ag, hence dumbed-down populations who prefer not to think for themselves, who don’t have the time to do so anyway, who just want a ‘quiet life’ in the face of all the existential angst around money, career and meaning. It’s a vicious circle and there can seem no way out.

All this adds up to one sad truth: humanity is suffering an unprecedented crisis of trust. There’s too much divide and conquer, too much hierarchical control, too much nefarious meddling and nudging … all to keep the system going as it fights to survive rapidly accelerating technological change. And though this basic pattern – dawn to decadence – is as old as history, there is far more at stake now than there has ever been. Whether our response to the crisis takes us in a healthier or a yet more dysfunctional direction depends on whether we can learn to wisely manage the structural tensions and challenges detailed above. The healthier way is the harder; the slippery slope into totalitarianism the easier, the more passive.

The causes of this crisis are of course more complex than I have captured here, but concealed beneath them all is, as argued, the low quality of our cultural reflexes around value and wealth. As the saying goes, we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The wholly out-of-date constitutions and instincts of our governing bodies confront a situation they can only respond to with ever more control. These instincts – civilisation’s DNA as it were – are, naturally enough, honed to self-protection, but this time the ‘elite’s’ egotistical inflexibility may prove catastrophic.

At root, cultural and societal reflexes become unfit for purpose for the simple reason that change is the only constant. The way things were is not the way things are. “Systems prepare for their overthrow with a preliminary period of petrification.” And we cannot stop change unless we transform reality into absolute nothingness. Can we be more flexible and wise in how we handle inevitable change? I strongly believe so. The trick lies in redefining, or newly appreciating, value.

I should point out here that I do not advocate throwing all babies out with all bath waters, nor do I advocate a return to any prior ‘normal’, an ugly concept at the best of times. Besides, despite repeating patterns, return itself is an impossibility. As Heraclitus put it, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

In pursuit of the healthier path and as far as we are able, we should try to rid ourselves of all ideologies; they censor perception. Traditionalism (conservation of the good) partners radicalism (perpetual change) via trial-and-error, seesawing exchanges. Patterns repeat eternally while the contexts within which they iterate, great and small, are always changing. Spring comes every year, but every spring occurs within a unique context and is composed of only unique events. Further, spring itself can be seen as a symbol for life cycles that characterise conscious processes of growth and decay that both precede and will last beyond this planet’s existence, a claim that takes us neatly to the nature of reality.

As chance would have it, I recently came across an article entitled “Scientists Reveal a Multidimensional Universe Inside the Human Brain”. Though still rooted in materialism, I believe it is indicative of a turn in science that will inexorably lead to a cultural acceptance that consciousness is reality’s true foundation. Donald Hoffman’s investigations into consciousness are another indication of this turn. 

For a large number of reasons that I won’t set out here, I am confident almost to the point of certainty that what we call matter and energy, or rather what we experience as matter and energy, occur entirely within consciousness, not the other way around. In much the same way – metaphorically at least –, pixels on a computer screen behave like ‘real’ trees and rocks to the pixel-based avatars we conscious humans operate when playing, say, League of Legends. From the point of view of a character within the game, the rules (code) defining the matter-like behaviours of trees, rocks, light, gravity, etc., are invisible, or behind the scenes. Similarly, the set of continuous experiences we call physical reality is governed by rules – we could think of them as the Laws of Physics – that structure our universe. A switch from matter to consciousness as foundational would not mean all scientific discoveries would have to be discarded, just that they are couched in an error of perception that puts the cart before the horse. In Hoffman’s terms, physical reality is a constructed user-friendly “interface” that enables us to do what consciousness generally feels it needs to get done … for some as yet unknowable reason. Our lives on earth serve some conscious purpose we cannot as yet discern.

In my view, the crisis of trust that is the bitter fruit of decadence includes the erosion of materialism this time around. One of materialism’s tenets is a universe of lifeless objects. As touched on above, this foundational perception (weltanschauung is perhaps a better word) fosters the objectification, and by inexorable extension the commodification of nature/reality. Materialism undergirds the hubristic notions that nature (Other, NotMe) is a subset of the economy (experienced as ‘my material needs and desires’), and that perpetual economic growth is possible and good, and so has ultimately given rise to soulless, narcissistic consumerism. 

As humanity increasingly dislikes what it sees in the mirror, as modern humans search in vain for a soul, as economic growth refuses to reignite, as advanced robotics and the historically rapid approach of AI turn most of humanity into little more than vessels of demand through which to pour a very conditional universal basic income, so the structures that got us here desperately need a redesign. To co-create something healthier and wiser than previous versions, for our co-creation to be lovingly open rather than psychotically totalitarian (i.e. The Great Reset), a profound evolution of consciousness is needed. Though profound, however, this required evolution is in fact quite simple conceptually – once the unnecessarily complicated and superfluous detail of modernity is pierced. As Charles Eisenstein has it, though the sky seems impossibly far away, it starts at the ground and rises from there.

Systems structure perception. We are each constrained by a matrix of beliefs that filters what we perceive. Fear of identity collapse, of betraying the group, of losing face, of being wrong, of dying, of being a powerless incompetent fool … all of it is currently rooted in a now instinctive belief (oddly we rarely believe it when pressed) that value = money = price = property accumulation. The antidote to fear is always courage. Courage is – among other things – a readiness to be wrong and the strength to persevere in developing understanding and wisdom regardless of setbacks along the way, and not permitting ourselves to be held back by beliefs. In short, being scientific in the noblest sense of that word. This is our healthiest path as conscious beings. 

There are many ways to pierce the convoluted matrix of modernity but each would be assisted greatly by the realisation that there is nothing but God, that there is only God. Or, that there is only consciousness. I believe this realisation is dawning. It’s not the only way to break the spell, but it might be the most effective and lasting because it describes reality more accurately; consciousness cannot arise from matter but the experience of ‘matter’ can occur within consciousness. 

Whatever path we take, rerooting our cultural sense of value in health and love will produce wealth-generation systems that enhance beauty, fecundity, freedom and truthful living everywhere. Were we to earnestly take on this task, I suspect social-organisation systems – politics – would become a fluid mix of anarchic and hierarchical. Natural authority is a beautiful thing, authority by brute force is not. Anarchy – leaderless decision making – is at its healthiest when our systems of education promote independence of thought and a willingness to be wrong, to learn by doing, to know in youthful excitement that learning never ends. As such, anarchy and hierarchy are not opposites at all; they are compatible decision-making modalities that can be used like any tools: as needed. The desire to treat Other with respect, to want its health to flourish and prosper, is simply a healthier way to be. It is love’s way. Love exposes how deceptive the selfishness-selfless dichotomy is; as I do unto Other, so I do unto Self. And all this would sustain civilisational complexity while presenting a minimal attack surface to divide-and-conquer tactics. 

What’s not to like!

W = R&D

A short post for you after the recent long post. I work as a translator now, so am reading material I ordinarily would not read. Everything is food for thought, and one set of documents for chemical giant BASF’s R&D labs got me thinking about research and development as a metaphor for social welfare (W).

To stay viable over the long term, a corporation or other large enterprise must reinvest some portion of its profits (surplus) into R&D. If it does not, it risks being left behind by either other large companies who do have sufficient capacities for R&D, or innovative start-ups eating up their market share.

But R&D is risky. You simply cannot know in advance which money-pit is going to produce the next new wonder product the whole world can’t do without. So it takes courage and faith to invest in this area. Nowadays, the big boys often save on R&D and just buy out successful start-ups, ‘out-sourcing’ R&D costs to pioneers and society generally. But for a socioeconomic system to have sufficient surplus to fund sufficient numbers of pioneers for keeping society ‘modern’ and ‘competitive’, there must be high and well-paid employment, sufficient free time, a good welfare safety-net, and good education. So, we can see that surplus, or excess, or fat, is essential for development of the new.

This is true across nature generally. The number of seeds an apple tree produces every year would be far in excess of requirements if every single seed took root and grew into a mature and productive apple tree. The number of sperm a fertile man can produce far exceeds the number of children he can help to raise, ditto the number of eggs a woman can produce. The examples are endless. Excess is ‘natural’. And you cannot know in advance which seed, which new idea, which egg is going to produce the wonder X the world didn’t know it was waiting for, nor can you know what the ‘negative’ consequences brought into being by product/offspring X are going to be. Uncertainty is inescapable (and beautiful). Not being able to predict and control all outcomes is what makes life worth living.

What is clear, is that evolution/change/innovation/development requires excess, or surplus, or fat. Efficiency is a useful skill or modality, and successful living systems are most often efficient users of energy, for example. But if razor-sharp efficiency is all you have, if you are an efficiency one-trick pony, you spend your entire life merely surviving, until some New Kid On The Block knocks you over with its new tricks.

In this light, social welfare can be thought of as cultural R&D. We cannot know which of the millions of artists, inventors, musicians, writers, poets, philosophers, piss artists, ‘good-for-nothings’, lost souls, etc., are going to be ‘useful’ to society, today or tomorrow, nor what ‘usefulness’ really is, especially over the long term, but we can know, or assert, that a vibrant culture – one not geared to 100% efficiency and capable only of taking care of immediate, day-to-day needs – must take a risk and invest constantly in that which may never produce anything ‘useful’. Cultural vibrancy is the overarching ‘meta-useful’ product of welfare.

And the metaphor I’ve just presented does not consider the perhaps more important factor of morality; what does it mean to judge, either by majority or dictator or monarch, what is valuable to society, and what is not? There can be no list, no top ten or hundred Valuable Things a society should nurture and protect, where everything lower down on the list can just be wiped out.

Then there is the matter of Dignity of Interbeing, which means we should be very careful about consigning anything to the trash heap just because we can detect no immediate use for it. We are not so all-knowing that we can be sure we know what we’re doing. Humility is vital to long term survival and health.

So, things like a guaranteed income, the slowing down of the rat race – which Just Knows that more More MORE! is what life is all about –, the steady demotion of money and the careful promotion of real wealth, are in fact sensible, pragmatic proposals, wise R&D investments back into culture we will bitterly regret not risking, should we fail to do so. And while we suffer the nightmare of Money=Wealth, and insist on using this terrible equation as sole determinant of all society should value, we continue to impoverish ourselves in pursuit of a ballooning vapour-wealth which is destined to vanish anyway.

Giving Wealth a Chance

“In a monetary system there is an inherent reason for
corruption and that is to gain a competitive advantage over someone else.” Jacque Fresco

One of money’s great shortcomings is its tendency to accumulate to itself. The rich become richer, the poor poorer. Countering this, capitalism’s most beguiling selling point is the arbitrary way money-flow, as affected by buying and selling, acts as an impartial force for democracy and social good (The Invisible Hand). Vote with your wallet, communicate your desires with your spending power, and keep government out of it. We all know the argument.

But the poor cannot simply 'vote' how they want – many can barely afford food – while the rich get far too much of a say, and do their level best to keep it that way.

In the US, the idea of redistributing income is seen as socialist, and therefore evil. However, capitalism is by definition a distributor and redistributor of wealth via the price mechanism, using so-called rational or enlightened self interest to drive this forward. But, instead of the theoretically predicted 'creative destruction,' humanity has repeatedly endured too much hoarding and accumulation under capitalism's aegis. Today we have Too Big To Fail, but the pattern is the same across the centuries; stubborn social divisions leading to decadence and corruption. This is generally predicted by the quote opening this piece.

Monetary wealth is capitalism’s implicit goal, its sign of success, the carrot to poverty's stick. Poverty is the horror to be avoided at all costs. Inescapably this dynamic will tend to entrenched social divisions, and we have indeed seen this throughout history. Humans, being highly intelligent and social, have 'escaped' the law of the jungle by establishing dynasties and institutions for protection of 'our own' (be that race or class or creed) down through the generations. Now we have immortal legal persons known as Corporations, cheating death, and hoarding power and wealth like there were no tomorrow. Soon there won't be.

Lopsided and therefore unhealthy distributions of money are like stagnation in an ecosystem, when dynamism is suffocated and rot (decadence) sets in. Wide and deep money-flow simply cannot persist over time at sufficient speed and depth unless the system is designed from the ground up to affect this. A guaranteed income, aligned with demurrage (negative interest) and the other suggestions I list below, would not ‘redistribute income’ in the sense of 'theft,' but ensure healthy money-flow, keep democracy working, prevent stagnation and persistently deep income inequality, and promote growth only where it is healthy to do so. This post is a rough and discussion-oriented attempt to list goals and priorities as I see them, and part of an ongoing attempt to redefine wealth.

Core socioeconomic elements:
1. Guaranteed income from birth to death
2. Negative interest of 4% on all money
3. One tax – sales tax, simple, no avoidance possible
4. All money spent into existence by state
5. 100% reserve banking (if banking is at all necessary (see below))
6. (?) One currency worldwide (???)

Priorities/goals:
Full employment, with work to be redefined at the cultural level
Open, optional education geared to maturity and creative problem solving, not rote
Constant or increasing amounts of fertile topsoil (other cultures have managed this)
Clean air
Constant or rising water tables of clean water
Ever falling crime rates
Full automation of grunt labour where this is good for society and the environment
As close to 100% recycling as possible (adherence to cradle-to-cradle design principles)
Goods built to last for as long as possible
Building of ‘intelligent’ eco-cities and new transportation network (ET3)
Speedy transition to renewable energies
Health system focused on prevention, not cure
Decreasing emphasis on ownership, increasing focus on access
Where feasible, goods and services to be given away for free

All of the above under the following directive: demote money, promote wealth.

(Some thoughts on my thoughts: Persistent and deep money flow throughout all parts of economy including return to govt. ‘coffers’ (trash) guaranteed by points 1,2 and 3 – hoarding would be virtually unheard of. Investment in new production could be funded by the 'community' on Internet sites designed to raise interest in new ideas (this would be very democratic and give the term 'purchasing power' real meaning). Otherwise government could enable new production, in which case either ‘normal’ money would be spent into existence, or ‘fixed-life, single-purpose’ money that ‘expires’ after having fulfilled its function. We need only a healthy aversion to risk, not horror of it. (Could banking be entirely automated? It need simply be storing money and tracking its movement, money being mere numbers.) Assumed/expected at the outset is less (I really mean “less”) economic activity. I seek the death of the pursuit of ever increasing monetary profits and Perpetual Growth, and the demise of the very notion of 'money is wealth.' I am not against growth (whatever that is), I am against forced growth.)

Implemented in full, the above suggestions would change economic activity and society beyond all recognition. We have lived for centuries in a culture whose central premise – at least the elite's propaganda tells us this – has been the ‘naturalness’ of the struggle for existence, where ‘civilized’ reward is accumulation of material goods and a subsequent demonstration of one’s societal value via conspicuous consumption (certainly over the last century). Changing course towards a resource-based economy is by necessity a radical departure from the Money-Wealth paradigm, which is, to my mind, far past its sell-by date (it had its uses) and the hidden heart of the battle ground.

Thus I am uninterested in the thinking of those who, either explicitly or implicitly, remain trapped in the dying story. Judged through the grey-tinted spectacles of the current system, the above suggestions can only seem unworkable. And it’s true, they are unworkable ... in the current paradigm. They are valid, however, as parts of the process of hewing a new path forward into the uncertain future. What the above cannot engender, systemically, are the familiar ‘successes’ of the current mode; ostentation, non-stop economic ‘growth,’ differential advantage, and so on. Unlikely therefore are: huge houses; ownership of multiple, expensive cars; exploitation; poverty; crime; cronyism; moral hazard; political corruption; concentrations of wealth and power, and so on. As such, to the untrained eye, all this seems no doubt to be the ravings of a dangerously socialist mind.

And no, such negative socioeconomic phenomena, currently so pervasive and endemic, are not the organic and inevitable consequences of human nature. Homo sapiens sapiens were strictly egalitarian for the vast majority of their existence on earth. It is the current system which goes ‘against the grain,’ to the extent there is a grain. Witness the suicide and depression, the perversity of paedophilia and the sex industry generally, the inhumanity of exploitation, the very existence of the word ‘decadence.’ Watch children’s insatiable curiosity purposefully extinguished by a schooling system designed to dumb us down for the industrial age, for uneasy subservience, for insatiable consumption. Feel your own yearning for honesty and integrity, recognise your despondency and cynicism when you fear they may never come.

Nevertheless, ideals and rhetoric have never been enough on their own. Practical considerations are always paramount. Is the direction I promote workable?

A joyous spending into existence of the negative-interest money a society needs to tick economically is but Stage 1, the key turning in the ignition. The social engine must keep turning over in some kind of dynamic balance, after it has been sparked to life. While money is needed for enabling economic activity, money must continually move from place to place, from person to person – as far as possible without exception – or gangrene will set in, in the form of gross imbalances. Perhaps it is helpful to think of money as society’s blood, which has to reach the very tips of the remotest limbs to keep society healthy. (Cutting off ‘unneeded’ fingers and toes, or Culling the Poor, is not a long term solution; the current paradigm necessitates rich-poor divides by design. It is elitist and must, in the view of the elite, remain so, come what may.)

It is for this reason alone that the unemployed are an economic ‘problem,’ with familiar societal and psychological problems all arising from this economic ‘uselessness.’ With a guaranteed income they would at least have sufficient spending power not to become ‘gangrenous,’ but would monthly need more money from the government, earning none from a paying job. By definition, the unemployed perform no economic activity which keeps non-taxed, existing money circulating, except spending. It would be absurd for a government constantly to spend more and more money into existence, just to pour it directly into the pockets of the unemployed. Some proportion of the money flowing through the economy must be taxed back to the government to prevent inflation, to keep money circulating rather than expanding. The amount of money in circulation should be increased only because of, or to enable, increased production, not otherwise (where the purpose of production is not the pursuit of monetary profit, but to improve society, be it for pleasure, leisure, transport, whatever).

The question is this: Does guaranteed income plus high unemployment plus a large state sector necessarily result in a too powerful and therefore corrupt state? Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Or, more fundamentally: By systemically preventing concentrations of monetary power, do we ensure concentrations of state power?

No. The Market can now be reintroduced as an efficient distributor of goods and services after money's importance has been systemically demoted. We could privatize education totally, health too, and much else besides, as long as wealth is culturally decoupled from money, and deep and persistent money-flow is systemically assured. The 'think global, act local' maxim can find its full voice too.

Guaranteed income flows to adults and children. School is optional so children and parents could choose; there would be healthy competition here. Health would be all about prevention, not cure. Transportation systems would be designed to render accidents impossible. Stress can be removed from the work place as egalitarianism flourishes, carcinogens and other toxins removed from food and other production processes. Cities would be designed for minimal energy use, maximum community, maximum safety and health. Crime would fall dramatically, police and army would become increasingly unnecessary.

In short, concentration of power can be avoided and market principles re-embraced without fear of wealth concentrations, the state's role can be minimized, the private sector expanded, by designing a money system to prevent wealth gaps from arising, and opening society up to true democratic processes.

The underlying premise here is that (non-sociopathic) humans need to feel needed. As a social animal, that urge is perhaps the main element of human nature, to the extent there is such a thing. Perfection is of course impossible, but a healthier blend of competition and cooperation, of 'collective' and 'individual' is surely possible.

The intense competition for unnecessarily scarce money has reached a sickening pitch of avarice that will surely end in blood globally, for, as much as national governments might like to believe otherwise, we live in an interconnected community of business and money, such that we can now safely say, “Nowhere is safe.” The arrival of the Internet has added a social layer to that interconnectivity which is working to undermine the status quo's grip on the hearts and minds of the so-called masses. The jockeying and jostling to stay in power is now totally transparent and will likely soon become war, war which cannot take us anywhere better long term, unless, by chance, a radically new consensus arises from its horrors. As I have echoed elsewhere, the entire ‘Self Against Other’ story is closing (to paraphrase Charles Eisenstein). A new paradigm is being written, but a third global war could well mean its stillbirth, hence the pressing need to do what we can now to prevent that possibility.

The above represents the direction towards post-scarcity economics as I imagine it. The journey is the destination. The means are the ends.

All We Are Saying, Is Give Wealth a Chance

Foreclosuregate is one of those potential political and socioeconomic watersheds that make a guy like me hope, again, that deep change might well and truly be 'just around the corner.' But, before I stride forward and cry, "The Revolution is Come!" I ought first to confess that my intuition has been oft deceived by my fervent hopes. The mighty sheeple are about to stir from their propaganda-induced slumber! This time it's different! And yet, thus far, no matter what the indicators, no matter how flagrant the decadence and criminality, the expected fireworks have not been seen. Perhaps I'm expecting the wrong type of fireworks.

Observation 1; the revolution will not be televised. A strong argument can be made that Revolution is Now, though deliberately and skillfully ignored by the MSM. The status quo must, for its own protection, direct our gaze elsewhere, by presenting any information that might suggest 'the wheels are coming off' as normal business, humdrum hiccups and bumps along The One True Way. The MSM is The View of the World the status quo needs us to use, it is the window we are led to when we want to know what's going on 'out there.'

Some months ago, Yves Smith posted an article about the failure of the left to make hay while the sun shines, or rather, as capitalism's sun sets. It prompted some good debate, but my favourite comment came from an activist who lambasted the article and commenters for failing to 'get out there and act.' The commenter claimed to be part of a thriving community of people stepping out from the system and building a new one, of course unreported in the media. (I can't find the article, because I can't remember the title.) I wrote a blog on the opting out option, which I believe is an essential precursor of revolution, particularly today. Opting out is fairly bloodless in its initial stages, but should it generate momentum enough to upset the status quo's apple cart, attempts will be made to stamp it out. All systems want to live on and on, no status quo can be an exception to this, yet everything dies.

Observation 2; Foreclosuergate is massive and full of juicy stories of suffering and woe, so has to be in the mainstream to some extent. It furthermore follows an unbroken and ongoing succession of other scandals and robberies (bailouts and bonuses) I'm sure the majority do not want.

Is the great propaganda machine losing its grip? Not on everyone certainly, and where it is slipping, in different ways among different groups. The right is as dissatisfied as the left, each reacts differently, much as I hate to feed into what I see as cosmetic divisions fostered by the very propaganda I try to ignore. There is agitation and deep frustration, a yearning hunger for something else, but no real consensus. 'Divide and conquer' has worked well, though its harvest will be bitter indeed.

And yet, as Charles Eisenstein puts it, a millennia-old story is coming to a close. The heart of that story is 'self against other,' with its younger offspring, 'survival of the fittest,' 'nice guys finish last,' 'the invisible hand,' and Efficient Markets Hypothesis being but the latest iterations of it. The Guardians of this story occupy society's fulcrum as The Finance Industry, and have been in control of cultural definitions of money and wealth for a very long time. Since they possess the keys to the Money Making Machine, they get to shroud it in mystery while telling us, on a need to know basis, what success and wealth are. In short, they get us to want what they have to give; money. Therefore, money must be wealth, and monetary wealth must be success. Money must be the arbiter of all that gets done. 'Let Money; Price; and Hand, The Invisible take care of business, and everything will be just fine. Trust us. We know what we're doing.'

Faith in this tale is wearing thin, and the moles keeping on digging up the garden.

Recently, some US politicians have been getting a clue, and subjecting the Guardians' underlings to some half-way decent questioning. Yves Smith's article quotes a Congressional Oversight Panel paper:

While these documentation irregularities may sound minor, they have the potential to throw the foreclosure system – and possibly the mortgage loan system and housing market itself – into turmoil.

The guts of the Money Making Machine are at risk of prolapse, which means the status quo itself is at death's grim edge staring into the abyss. While they won't debate issues such as money and wealth, they will, and do, squeal about system collapse and the end of civilization, again (echoes of 2007-2008).

Chase Manhattan has been accused of perjury. The Republic of Ireland is facing its High Noon, an epic struggle that goes to the very core of Money Power, and the carrot society uses to propel itself 'forwards.' Regular Naked Capitalism commenter DownSouth posted the following:

Are the wheels starting to come off the corporate states? These are the anti-democratic governments that are underpinned by the ideology of state capitalism that emerged during the 19th century and became dominant in the West during the 20th century. Corporate states now rule over almost all Western peoples, as well as much of the rest of the world.

And let there be no mistake. American banking oligarchs are aware of the stakes, as became evident at Tuesday’s Senate’s Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing “Mortgage Services and Foreclosure Practices.” Senator John “Jack” F. Reed made this explicit in his comments starting at minute 2:15:35:

There’s a real question, I think: Do we have that time? And not just in terms of the individual homeowners but the economy. And if the economy gets worse for reasons not directly related to this—-sovereign debt crises overseas, etc—-then the foreclosure problem we face today, you know the bottom keeps slipping down, down, down, down, down, then this problem becomes really tremendous.

What is at stake here? The financier's will scream 'Life Itself!' or at least, 'The Good Life,' but I think it's our cultural definitions of wealth and money. The more often this putrid game repeats, the more often we borrow money to lend to those up to their eyeballs in debt to 'rescue the system,' the more ridiculous money seems to be. This soiling of money's 'good name' is behind recent attempts to bring gold back to the forefront as a 'store of value.' Solidity is sought as the ground beneath our feet crumbles away. People want something 'real' to hold on to. I don't believe gold can do it. Nothing can which is 'wealth as money or single commodity.' The rot is just too deep, the old story too old.

A new story is being written, people are opting out, the rich are eating themselves, and though mostly at the fringes and desperately ignored and finessed, this squeaks through into the mainstream, from time to time, as Catastrophe. For the mainstream it is a death knell, though allegedly 'fixable' with standard medicine. The old way is indeed dying. The Revolution is indeed Now, but is disjointed, straggly, leaderless and groping. As it grows down and out into society there will be increasing chaos, horror, collapse, and then something unknowable.

As I have come to see it and consequently promote it, real wealth arises spontaneously from healthy networks. A human being is a society of individual cells cooperating as one organism whose health depends on access to the right environmental conditions. Society is likewise a collection of individual cells (and clusters of cells) whose health depends on access to an appropriate environment. Wealth is a complex of relationships, not an 'out there,' detached object we can hold to ourselves like gold or money or property or land. The new emergent story is principally about this; systems interdependently embedded within other systems in a state of perpetual change. This is the counterargument capitalism and liberalism do not want to engage.

Transitioning from that old to this new will be, I believe, an unprecedentedly broad and deep planetary process, and the outcome is uncertain. But make no mistake, it is underway and cannot be stopped. The best we can do is give our energies to those processes we believe will promote societal and environmental health, hoping for a good outcome.