The need for money is psychological barrier humanity has constructed to artificially separate itself from the earthly abundance that already exists. Everything we need to thrive – food, land, shelter, water, education, energy, clothing, home furnishings, travel, health care – exist in quantity on the other side of the money barrier. All we need do to access those items is to work continually for money, which we then give away in exchange for the things we need to survive.
The money game was already in full swing when all of us were born. We didn’t invent it, and we’ve not stopped playing it long enough to really study its flaws and limitations. We’re so focused on personally surviving in the game that we haven’t had time to consider the value of deconstructing this barrier to our collective abundance. We’ve instead turned our attention to finding new and clever ways to siphon more and more money away from each other, in the hope that we can individually accumulate enough cash to at last punch through the barrier and gain permanent access to the wild abundance that exists on the other side.
Every so often, a few people manage to accumulate so much money that other people’s profit-making schemes are no longer capable of siphoning away very much of their cash, and for those people the barrier falls for good. They find themselves in material heaven, with access to endless delights measured by all the best goods and services the money game has to offer. The Bill Gateses, the Sergei Brins and everyone who has ever won first prize in a lottery have all experienced the falling away of this psychological barrier to abundance, the same way the people of East Germany experienced the collapse of the Berlin Wall and at last felt physical freedom.
The rich, in turn, may retain enough compassion for their friends and neighbors still trapped behind the barrier to try and help them punch through it as well, but no wealthy person can give away enough money to make a significant difference in the quality of life for most of the rest of us.
If all the wealthy gave away most of their savings to large numbers of people who were still stuck behind the barrier, all they’d manage to do is to assist those people in permeating the barrier for a moment or two, before the barrier moved away from the crowd again. For example, if Bill Gates gave away forty billion dollars and created four thousand new millionaires, those millionaires would soon be competing with each other to purchase new houses, fancy cars and expensive services. Once the people who create those products and services noticed the increased competition, they’d raise prices to draw more cash away from those newly created millionaires and enhance their own efforts to punch through the money barrier and gain access to all the things the millionaires have.
It seems then, that the more money we invent, lend, grow and trade among ourselves behind the barrier, the more each of us will personally need to accumulate if we hope to punch through the barrier. That’s because the value of money is relative, not fixed. Whether or not we punch through to abundance then, isn’t a function of whether we’ve been able to accumulate a hundred thousand, five hundred thousand or a million dollars for ourselves. It’s dependent upon each one of us accumulating vastly more than most everyone else accumulates – no matter what that number of future dollars might turn out be. Yesterday’s millionaires don’t have nearly the clout they once did, since prices continue to rise and siphon off more and more of our cash as we play the game. Additionally, more people are entering the game every day through population gains and the ongoing exportation of capitalism, so more and more money needs to flow to entice those newcomers firmly into the game.
Since it’s impossible for every one of us to accumulate relatively more money than everybody else, the money game sets up a reality where – in order for there to be any winners – there must always be a far greater number of losers who remain stuck behind the barrier and continue to work very hard to play the game. They may be willing or unwilling participants, but they must not be allowed to quit the game or the winning players will have no one with whom to continue to play.
Modern creations like interest, mortgages, insurance policies, taxes, utility fees, etc. ensure that money will continue to be siphoned away from most of the players before they manage to accumulate too much. These “fee traps” help ensure that the majority can’t quit playing the game without surrendering the necessities of life. People who try to go around the barrier by taking what they need or by refusing to pay trap fees are labeled “criminals” and are punished for their refusal to play the game.
The wealthy can afford to invest some of their money into finding creative new ways to avoid having their hoards of cash siphoned off by the workers who remain stuck behind the barrier. They invent tax shelters, move their production facilities to countries where labor costs are cheaper, install automated assembly lines that eliminate human jobs, and make workers compete with each other for increasingly scarce positions, which gives them the power to pay out lower wages. They also reduce paid benefits, eliminate retirement plans and force workers to cover more and more of their daily costs of living. Through taxation, governments try to provide a safety net for those who can’t manage to meet their daily needs, but because government is controlled by the wealthy it creates that safety net by taxing worker wages instead of hoarded wealth, which siphons even more money away from the workers who remain stuck behind the barrier.
The danger for us in continuing to endlessly play this game can be seen by noticing what is at stake – for us as individuals, and for life itself. Unlike a board game, this game allows people to die if they can’t pay for what they need to survive. People therefore become enslaved to the game through the ongoing (and very real) fear of death. Meanwhile, those who appear to be winning must continually hoard more money to retain their access to abundance and privilege. They wantonly use up scarce resources and damage the entire planetary ecosystem in a relentless quest to manufacture more and more “necessary” goods and services they can then impose on the workers who live behind the barrier. Clever advertising seduces workers into believing they need more things, and social laws (auto registration, property taxes, water bills, etc.) force them into spending their hard-earned money on life's necessities. Long term, this game cannot continue without destroying the entire field of abundance that sustains us. There can BE no absolute winners in the money game; only a few who may beat the system in the short run but who help bring down our entire civilization in the end.
The point of the money game – which places huge emphasis on material consumption and the ‘need’ for us to work to pay for life’s necessities – is to continue to siphon money away from the masses of working people so they can’t ever punch through the barrier themselves. That means they must remain slaves to the game for their entire productive lifetimes, after which they become society’s discards and are considered financial “drains” on public assets.
Children too, are not revered as gifts for whose nurturing and care our society is responsible in this game. They're treated as future business commodities – potential workers who will step into the money game at maturity and support its continuation. We educate them only so far as their knowledge can be “standardized” in a way that will enable them to plug seamlessly into the system when they reach working age.
The money game offers no vision for the future. It holds no promise for humanity as a species, for our planet as a sustainable and abundant source of life, or for the higher evolution of human consciousness. All it promises to do is to bleed the life energy out of most of us in exchange for our short-term survival. The questions we must ask ourselves then, are these: Do we want to continue to play this game? If not, how do we stop? How can we tear down the psychological barrier to our own success that we’ve erected inside our own minds?
I suspect the answer is for enough of us to love life - in all its many forms - fiercely enough to come together and "just say no" to the game.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010
The Limitations of Money as Energy
The funny thing about things not happening overnight is they don't - only suddenly they appear to! The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the end of World War II, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the fall of the Soviet Union - all were experiences that took years in the making, but were observed by most as "overnight sensations."
The disappearance of money as our energy of exchange may happen the same way. We've been wrestling with money's inequities and limitations for thousands of years, struggling through recessions and booms and deflation and inflation, imperialism and human exploitation, land wars and power/resource grabs - all in service to the need to control the continued flow of money and profitability.
What hasn't changed is that money, by design, is a win/lose game at its core. It's worth is relative, not fixed. That means we CAN'T all ever have as much of it as we need, or it loses its value and power. Prices would just go up to absorb the extra money in the economy and siphon it off to the wealthy few at the top, so we'll continually need more of it than we have, no matter how much of it we put into circulation.
Right now the US owes 12 trillion dollars to the rest of the world. One trillion dollars laid end to end would stretch from Earth to the sun. Do you get that picture? :)
Unfortunately, what I'm saying is that we've agreed to exchange an energy source that must be deliberately kept scarce (money) for our work product (our labor and creativity) to build our modern society. Is it any wonder then, that we'll never have enough? The problems we're now experiencing with money are a reflection of the same struggle we're having with fossil fuels. We have too high a need for continued energy output, but not enough fuel to keep the system going. (I suspect our thinking will eventually shift and we'll solve both those challenges around the same time.)
With seven billion of us here on Earth we have an unimaginable amount of physical labor at our disposal, along with an infinite amount of talent, passion, ingenuity and creativity. Still we fret that we can't provide enough for all of us, and wonder aloud if we need to depopulate in order to survive. Why? Could it be we're choking off our own capacities at every turn by limiting education and personal progress to those who can afford to pay for it, so that someone else can profit off their acquisition of knowledge and self-empowerment?
We hinder our own ability to thrive at every turn by assigning no value to a person's work unless it's in service to a profit-making machine in the form of a job, despite how very much real work remains to be done to promote humanity's cause. We impoverish ourselves too, by funneling the primary fuel that runs our economy (money) into the hands of a very few. We then allow them to hoard it and spend it mainly on themselves, so they can live far better and more comfortably than most of the rest of us. We nod our heads when they promise to allow it to "trickle down" to us, and wait for the soothing rain that never comes.
We are self-destructing piecemeal by allowing our REAL energy - our own labor and creativity - to be used to subvert our genuine needs and values in exchange for the fake energy that is money. We can't eat money, wear it, live in it, drink it or mate with it. We can only pawn it off on someone else in exchange for what we actually need to survive - so long as the other person still clings to the delusion that money is real and possesses tangible value.
Meanwhile, we've been unwittingly destroying our surroundings, killing our fellow species and reducing our own ability to survive over the long-term to support the short-term profit making engines of business enterprise. None of which is pointed in any clear direction that serves as a vision for human destiny or promotes our evolution as a species. The direction of our economy today mainly points toward continuing to preserve and protect the continuation of business itself, while entertaining us (or stressing us into Prozac) in the short run so we don't notice what's happening around around us. We've also been encouraged to divide into groups and fight over concepts and beliefs, which distracts us into missing the reality of our planet's deterioration. We're now slashing our spending on all the stuff that has the potential to ensure a brighter future for us all - things like schools, scientific research, health care, parks, infrastructure and social services - because we fear we "can't afford" to do the things we need to thrive as a species.
These days I observe all the chaos, wars, banking collapses, moral failures, job losses, global contractions and business distress with bemusement, tinged with sadness. I trust that one day we'll wake up and a majority of us will have completely lost all faith in money as a form of energy exchange - seemingly overnight!
What happens after that will depend on what we're doing now to raise our own awareness of our interdependence on each other and on the magic, mystery and wonder that is life itself.
The disappearance of money as our energy of exchange may happen the same way. We've been wrestling with money's inequities and limitations for thousands of years, struggling through recessions and booms and deflation and inflation, imperialism and human exploitation, land wars and power/resource grabs - all in service to the need to control the continued flow of money and profitability.
What hasn't changed is that money, by design, is a win/lose game at its core. It's worth is relative, not fixed. That means we CAN'T all ever have as much of it as we need, or it loses its value and power. Prices would just go up to absorb the extra money in the economy and siphon it off to the wealthy few at the top, so we'll continually need more of it than we have, no matter how much of it we put into circulation.
Right now the US owes 12 trillion dollars to the rest of the world. One trillion dollars laid end to end would stretch from Earth to the sun. Do you get that picture? :)
Unfortunately, what I'm saying is that we've agreed to exchange an energy source that must be deliberately kept scarce (money) for our work product (our labor and creativity) to build our modern society. Is it any wonder then, that we'll never have enough? The problems we're now experiencing with money are a reflection of the same struggle we're having with fossil fuels. We have too high a need for continued energy output, but not enough fuel to keep the system going. (I suspect our thinking will eventually shift and we'll solve both those challenges around the same time.)
With seven billion of us here on Earth we have an unimaginable amount of physical labor at our disposal, along with an infinite amount of talent, passion, ingenuity and creativity. Still we fret that we can't provide enough for all of us, and wonder aloud if we need to depopulate in order to survive. Why? Could it be we're choking off our own capacities at every turn by limiting education and personal progress to those who can afford to pay for it, so that someone else can profit off their acquisition of knowledge and self-empowerment?
We hinder our own ability to thrive at every turn by assigning no value to a person's work unless it's in service to a profit-making machine in the form of a job, despite how very much real work remains to be done to promote humanity's cause. We impoverish ourselves too, by funneling the primary fuel that runs our economy (money) into the hands of a very few. We then allow them to hoard it and spend it mainly on themselves, so they can live far better and more comfortably than most of the rest of us. We nod our heads when they promise to allow it to "trickle down" to us, and wait for the soothing rain that never comes.
We are self-destructing piecemeal by allowing our REAL energy - our own labor and creativity - to be used to subvert our genuine needs and values in exchange for the fake energy that is money. We can't eat money, wear it, live in it, drink it or mate with it. We can only pawn it off on someone else in exchange for what we actually need to survive - so long as the other person still clings to the delusion that money is real and possesses tangible value.
Meanwhile, we've been unwittingly destroying our surroundings, killing our fellow species and reducing our own ability to survive over the long-term to support the short-term profit making engines of business enterprise. None of which is pointed in any clear direction that serves as a vision for human destiny or promotes our evolution as a species. The direction of our economy today mainly points toward continuing to preserve and protect the continuation of business itself, while entertaining us (or stressing us into Prozac) in the short run so we don't notice what's happening around around us. We've also been encouraged to divide into groups and fight over concepts and beliefs, which distracts us into missing the reality of our planet's deterioration. We're now slashing our spending on all the stuff that has the potential to ensure a brighter future for us all - things like schools, scientific research, health care, parks, infrastructure and social services - because we fear we "can't afford" to do the things we need to thrive as a species.
These days I observe all the chaos, wars, banking collapses, moral failures, job losses, global contractions and business distress with bemusement, tinged with sadness. I trust that one day we'll wake up and a majority of us will have completely lost all faith in money as a form of energy exchange - seemingly overnight!
What happens after that will depend on what we're doing now to raise our own awareness of our interdependence on each other and on the magic, mystery and wonder that is life itself.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Pending Productivity Crisis
For years now we’ve been experiencing a boom in productivity. Much of our economic growth over the past several decades has been a direct result of those gains. While increased productivity seems like a wonderful thing, when we place it in the context of an eighteenth century economic model we discover that our modernization of manufacturing without a concurrent modernization of the consumption side of the equation is the cause of much of our present misery.
Productivity gains occur when fewer people produce more goods in less time. Industrialization, technology and computerization have all contributed to the shift toward higher automation and more rapid product production. The advantages for businesses are clear: machines don’t require wages, get sick or need benefits, and they can be counted on to produce quality standardized items day in and day out.
The advantages to the average human being of increased productivity are less clear. Certainly more goods are available at lower overall prices, which is helpful to consumers. What sometimes gets lost though is the high quality craftsmanship that used to be the hallmark of our human creativity. While cheaper goods seem to offer us better value, in many cases they just cheapen society by creating more landfill and waste. Sure, a two-dollar hammer may be appealing if I’m low on cash, but if the head falls off and I have to buy ten cheap hammers in my lifetime as opposed to one high quality twelve-dollar hammer, who has really profited – other than the company (likely overseas these days) that produced the two-dollar hammers?
Another problem we’re facing is the fact our economic model was constructed around the idea of people working for wages they could then use to buy those things they need. As we eliminate jobs by the hundreds of thousands, either through increased productivity or by exporting them to cheaper labor pools overseas, what gets forgotten is that the local laborers we’ve cut off from wages today are the very consumers we’re hoping will purchase our goods tomorrow. Productivity has overwhelmed jobs creation – not because we’re a nation of slackards – but because our very industriousness and technological savvy has outstripped our need for manual labor at an ever-increasing rate, even as our population rises and our productive life expectancy increases. Our system is failing because to date it has failed to take into account the need to place cash in the hands of all people, including those whose jobs have vanished, those working less than the standard forty-hour week and those who are reaching adulthood only to discover high paying jobs are fast disappearing – no matter the level of education attained.
We can’t modernize half the economy (the production side) without taking into account the effects those choices have on the other half (the consumption side.) Profits are suffering because too many people can’t afford to buy all the goods we’re now capable of producing. For years an increase in service jobs has helped ease the pain of lost manufacturing jobs, however many service jobs aren’t provided by for-profit businesses but by government. Teachers, police officers, firefighters, DMV staffers, social workers and so forth all perform vital community services, yet we’re cutting back on their numbers and salaries because we can’t collect enough income tax revenue to support them. And how could we, when our tax roll base (a function of real wages) continues to precipitously decline?
It’s clear our economy needs an overhaul; one that ensures consumers are able to afford the goods we’re producing. At the very least we need to ensure that all people – particularly those presently disenfranchised from the labor pool – can at least afford to eat, provide a roof over their head, heat or cool their homes and access clean water.
These aren’t easy challenges and may require us to take steps quite different from the way we’ve envisioned our present economic system. To continue to ignore them, however, won’t make them go away. Nor will clinging tenaciously to an eighteenth century economic wage model resolve the problems we face in our twenty-first century high technology world.
(Next column we’ll suggest some potential approaches to address these challenges.)
Productivity gains occur when fewer people produce more goods in less time. Industrialization, technology and computerization have all contributed to the shift toward higher automation and more rapid product production. The advantages for businesses are clear: machines don’t require wages, get sick or need benefits, and they can be counted on to produce quality standardized items day in and day out.
The advantages to the average human being of increased productivity are less clear. Certainly more goods are available at lower overall prices, which is helpful to consumers. What sometimes gets lost though is the high quality craftsmanship that used to be the hallmark of our human creativity. While cheaper goods seem to offer us better value, in many cases they just cheapen society by creating more landfill and waste. Sure, a two-dollar hammer may be appealing if I’m low on cash, but if the head falls off and I have to buy ten cheap hammers in my lifetime as opposed to one high quality twelve-dollar hammer, who has really profited – other than the company (likely overseas these days) that produced the two-dollar hammers?
Another problem we’re facing is the fact our economic model was constructed around the idea of people working for wages they could then use to buy those things they need. As we eliminate jobs by the hundreds of thousands, either through increased productivity or by exporting them to cheaper labor pools overseas, what gets forgotten is that the local laborers we’ve cut off from wages today are the very consumers we’re hoping will purchase our goods tomorrow. Productivity has overwhelmed jobs creation – not because we’re a nation of slackards – but because our very industriousness and technological savvy has outstripped our need for manual labor at an ever-increasing rate, even as our population rises and our productive life expectancy increases. Our system is failing because to date it has failed to take into account the need to place cash in the hands of all people, including those whose jobs have vanished, those working less than the standard forty-hour week and those who are reaching adulthood only to discover high paying jobs are fast disappearing – no matter the level of education attained.
We can’t modernize half the economy (the production side) without taking into account the effects those choices have on the other half (the consumption side.) Profits are suffering because too many people can’t afford to buy all the goods we’re now capable of producing. For years an increase in service jobs has helped ease the pain of lost manufacturing jobs, however many service jobs aren’t provided by for-profit businesses but by government. Teachers, police officers, firefighters, DMV staffers, social workers and so forth all perform vital community services, yet we’re cutting back on their numbers and salaries because we can’t collect enough income tax revenue to support them. And how could we, when our tax roll base (a function of real wages) continues to precipitously decline?
It’s clear our economy needs an overhaul; one that ensures consumers are able to afford the goods we’re producing. At the very least we need to ensure that all people – particularly those presently disenfranchised from the labor pool – can at least afford to eat, provide a roof over their head, heat or cool their homes and access clean water.
These aren’t easy challenges and may require us to take steps quite different from the way we’ve envisioned our present economic system. To continue to ignore them, however, won’t make them go away. Nor will clinging tenaciously to an eighteenth century economic wage model resolve the problems we face in our twenty-first century high technology world.
(Next column we’ll suggest some potential approaches to address these challenges.)
Monday, January 25, 2010
Supreme Idiocy
The recent (five votes to four) Supreme Court ruling granting “free speech” status to political campaign contributions will likely go down in history as one of the worst decisions to ever come out of our federal judicial system. This ruling takes us back to those unenlightened days when people of color were considered three-fifths of a person, by effectively declaring that the people with the most money are entitled to carry far more political weight than those without. Money, at least in our nation, flows to the highly successful few: to the uber-rich, the large institutions and the corporations that already wield too much power over the average American.
Are you aware that a mere one percent of Americans already own ninety-five percent of this nation’s wealth? That leaves the other ninety-nine percent of us scrapping over the five percent of wealth the uber-rich haven’t happened to get their hands on yet. Not that they’re not trying; the financial debacle of 2008 exposed the lengths to which some corporations are willing to go to capture greater profits for the power elite.
Gifting the wealthy elite – including the mega-corporations they own and operate – additional power to impact the political process is like inviting a convicted pedophile to baby sit your children. The risk far outweighs any possible short-term benefit. Just consider the kinds of mischief that can be made under this new ruling. Hard as it is now for small businesses to compete against mega-corporations, imagine how much harder it will be once those same corporations have the power to make unlimited campaign donations to the individuals who write the legislation that can grant them special favors? Once Wal-Mart can pay off a multitude of city councilmen, state legislators and local congressmen with unlimited amounts of campaign cash, how easy do you think it’ll be to block their expansion into our neighborhoods? How much clout can a small business owner’s political donation provide against such a massive tide of funding?
The beautiful thing about free speech, and the reason it’s been so cherished and protected by our democratic society since the founding of our nation is that it’s FREE. Everyone – rich or poor, black or white, immigrant or citizen, religious or non-religious, man or woman, ideologically popular or ideologically reviled – has the power to exercise it. Information is power, and to be able to communicate with each other lies at the heart of our political process.
We are a nation founded on ideas, built on ideals, and dedicated to the people. Our forefathers grounded our Declaration of Independence in a reverence for life itself – the right to life being foremost of their three most cherished ideals: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If we now allow nonliving institutions to subvert the rights of the living by favoring profits above the quality of our own lives, we’d best acknowledge we’re also subverting the very values and ideals on which our nation is founded.
The profit motive is fundamentally amoral. Profits can be derived, as any good businessman knows, through moral means or through immoral practices. Therefore, elevating the power of profitability over the power of genuine free speech raises an amoral process above our value system. For the most part our nation’s policies reflect our collective moral compass. This latest decision however, made by five men in black robes, vacuums the morality out of our political process so rapidly we can almost hear the “whoosh” of our conscientious input being extracted from the system.
The solution is simple. Whenever a system tips too far in one direction an equal and opposite reaction will occur. Already grassroots organizations are gathering steam to create a constitutional amendment that explicitly denies personhood status to corporations, thus restoring a living person’s status as the thing that we most value. Please visit http://www.freespeechforpeople.org/user/register for more information if you’re interested in participating or supporting such a movement.
And remember, free speech has always been free. When money is free, perhaps it too might be reasonably considered free speech. Until then, let’s call it what it is: legalized bribery.
Are you aware that a mere one percent of Americans already own ninety-five percent of this nation’s wealth? That leaves the other ninety-nine percent of us scrapping over the five percent of wealth the uber-rich haven’t happened to get their hands on yet. Not that they’re not trying; the financial debacle of 2008 exposed the lengths to which some corporations are willing to go to capture greater profits for the power elite.
Gifting the wealthy elite – including the mega-corporations they own and operate – additional power to impact the political process is like inviting a convicted pedophile to baby sit your children. The risk far outweighs any possible short-term benefit. Just consider the kinds of mischief that can be made under this new ruling. Hard as it is now for small businesses to compete against mega-corporations, imagine how much harder it will be once those same corporations have the power to make unlimited campaign donations to the individuals who write the legislation that can grant them special favors? Once Wal-Mart can pay off a multitude of city councilmen, state legislators and local congressmen with unlimited amounts of campaign cash, how easy do you think it’ll be to block their expansion into our neighborhoods? How much clout can a small business owner’s political donation provide against such a massive tide of funding?
The beautiful thing about free speech, and the reason it’s been so cherished and protected by our democratic society since the founding of our nation is that it’s FREE. Everyone – rich or poor, black or white, immigrant or citizen, religious or non-religious, man or woman, ideologically popular or ideologically reviled – has the power to exercise it. Information is power, and to be able to communicate with each other lies at the heart of our political process.
We are a nation founded on ideas, built on ideals, and dedicated to the people. Our forefathers grounded our Declaration of Independence in a reverence for life itself – the right to life being foremost of their three most cherished ideals: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If we now allow nonliving institutions to subvert the rights of the living by favoring profits above the quality of our own lives, we’d best acknowledge we’re also subverting the very values and ideals on which our nation is founded.
The profit motive is fundamentally amoral. Profits can be derived, as any good businessman knows, through moral means or through immoral practices. Therefore, elevating the power of profitability over the power of genuine free speech raises an amoral process above our value system. For the most part our nation’s policies reflect our collective moral compass. This latest decision however, made by five men in black robes, vacuums the morality out of our political process so rapidly we can almost hear the “whoosh” of our conscientious input being extracted from the system.
The solution is simple. Whenever a system tips too far in one direction an equal and opposite reaction will occur. Already grassroots organizations are gathering steam to create a constitutional amendment that explicitly denies personhood status to corporations, thus restoring a living person’s status as the thing that we most value. Please visit http://www.freespeechforpeople.org/user/register for more information if you’re interested in participating or supporting such a movement.
And remember, free speech has always been free. When money is free, perhaps it too might be reasonably considered free speech. Until then, let’s call it what it is: legalized bribery.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Where are we going?
So far, humanity really hasn't set a "vision" for where it wants to go or what it wants to become. Defining our own trajectory may be exactly what we need to propel us out of our present reality, which is powered by mass unconscious consumption, to a reality based on conscious creativity and grounded in a deeper sense of purpose.
We've been frantically consuming material resources for many centuries now, because in some part of our unconscious mind we recognize that consumption is part of what we humans have been chartered to do. Everything we observe in the universe consumes something and transforms it into something else; that's part of the grand recycling/evolutionary process of creation. Nothing gets wasted and everything eventually gets changed.
I suspect that what we've failed to realize so far is that we're not really here to consume increasingly more stuff until we deplete our natural resources and die off; we're here to consume just enough resources to enable us to live comfortably and sustainably while we create new life experiences for ourselves, which we can then consume and transform into higher wisdom. The nice thing about consuming experiences and transforming them into wisdom is that there isn't a top stop on growth anymore when wisdom becomes our focus. Consciousness doesn't take up any more room or require higher caloric intake as it becomes smarter. Willful ignorance uses just as many calories as does wisdom! In fact, the wiser we become about our world, the more likely it is we'll require fewer resources to function more effectively within it.
The key then is for us to be fully present to whatever experiences we're having and learn as much as possible from them. Don't sleepwalk through an experience while daydreaming about where you'd rather be or what you'd rather be doing - HAVE each experience fully and richly so that whatever it has to teach becomes yours to know. To do so requires courage, an openness to new ideas and the patience to "ride out" even the most difficult of experiences, while trusting that there is always something more to be learned from wherever we happen to find ourselves in life.
I'm so looking forward to seeing what evolves as humanity slowly opens its eyes to the need to set a course for our shared future. The process of "coming together" around a shared set of values and ideals may not be easy to undergo, but I suspect it's necessary for us to make the next leap in human evolution. It's time then, for us to begin talking about who we are, why we think we're here, and where we'd like to go as we journey toward the future.
I encourage you to think about these things whenever you're communicating or interacting with others, because the young people who encounter you will likely be searching for some greater sense of themselves. What are your words and actions saying to them about humanity, about its strengths and weaknesses, about its possibilities and problems, about your beliefs about us - and therefore about THEM? Even as you explore your own beliefs through your thoughts, words and deeds, know that what you are and do has the power to influence the thoughts and feelings of others. Take responsibility for your messages by anchoring yourself in your deepest truths about who you really are and what you're really capable of being, doing and creating. Express and BE that to the best of your abilities. Then you can rest assured that whatever you're bringing into the world and to the minds of other people will be a universal truth - because you ARE the universe in person.
We've been frantically consuming material resources for many centuries now, because in some part of our unconscious mind we recognize that consumption is part of what we humans have been chartered to do. Everything we observe in the universe consumes something and transforms it into something else; that's part of the grand recycling/evolutionary process of creation. Nothing gets wasted and everything eventually gets changed.
I suspect that what we've failed to realize so far is that we're not really here to consume increasingly more stuff until we deplete our natural resources and die off; we're here to consume just enough resources to enable us to live comfortably and sustainably while we create new life experiences for ourselves, which we can then consume and transform into higher wisdom. The nice thing about consuming experiences and transforming them into wisdom is that there isn't a top stop on growth anymore when wisdom becomes our focus. Consciousness doesn't take up any more room or require higher caloric intake as it becomes smarter. Willful ignorance uses just as many calories as does wisdom! In fact, the wiser we become about our world, the more likely it is we'll require fewer resources to function more effectively within it.
The key then is for us to be fully present to whatever experiences we're having and learn as much as possible from them. Don't sleepwalk through an experience while daydreaming about where you'd rather be or what you'd rather be doing - HAVE each experience fully and richly so that whatever it has to teach becomes yours to know. To do so requires courage, an openness to new ideas and the patience to "ride out" even the most difficult of experiences, while trusting that there is always something more to be learned from wherever we happen to find ourselves in life.
I'm so looking forward to seeing what evolves as humanity slowly opens its eyes to the need to set a course for our shared future. The process of "coming together" around a shared set of values and ideals may not be easy to undergo, but I suspect it's necessary for us to make the next leap in human evolution. It's time then, for us to begin talking about who we are, why we think we're here, and where we'd like to go as we journey toward the future.
I encourage you to think about these things whenever you're communicating or interacting with others, because the young people who encounter you will likely be searching for some greater sense of themselves. What are your words and actions saying to them about humanity, about its strengths and weaknesses, about its possibilities and problems, about your beliefs about us - and therefore about THEM? Even as you explore your own beliefs through your thoughts, words and deeds, know that what you are and do has the power to influence the thoughts and feelings of others. Take responsibility for your messages by anchoring yourself in your deepest truths about who you really are and what you're really capable of being, doing and creating. Express and BE that to the best of your abilities. Then you can rest assured that whatever you're bringing into the world and to the minds of other people will be a universal truth - because you ARE the universe in person.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Jobs or Work?
This morning we learned that the U.S. jobs market shed another 263,000 jobs in September, bringing the unemployment rate up to 9.8%; a 26 year high. By the way, that's not counting those who are employed only part-time because they can't find full time work, or those who have dropped out of the job market entirely. If we add them in, some sources estimate that we'd be looking at an unemployment rate above 15% of the able-bodied American population.
This problems begs an important question: how long has human society suffered from this thing called "unemployment" and what can we do to fix it? Why do we even have such a thing as unemployment, when there's clearly so much work that needs to be done around the place? We're all aware that our national roads and bridges have fallen into shameful disrepair; our sewer and water infrastructure is crumbling and imploding all around us; our energy delivery systems are at least fifty years outdated; our schools are suffering from student/teacher ratios as high as 40-1; essential services like police and firefighting are being slashed below safe levels; our elderly find themselves isolated and without appropriate home and/or nursing care; millions of our children are being left at home without adequate after-school care; we're still dependent on foreign oil sources that are rapidly declining; our food sources and manufacturing capacities have been shipped overseas and are out of our quality control; our medical facilities are overwhelmed, understaffed and incapable of handling the needs of the larger populace - have I missed anything here?
It doesn't take us long to realize that our early ancestors had no experience with unemployment problems. In a hunter-gatherer culture or an early agrarian culture, not to work meant certain death for one's family and for oneself. Our ancestors couldn't afford to wait for someone "in charge" to promise them a paycheck before picking up a spear, a hoe or a bucket to attend to their daily needs. They understood what mattered, and took care of life's business without worrying about whether their 401k plans were intact, whether they had medical insurance, if they'd been promised adequate time for their lunch breaks or whether their environment was a friendly place in which to work. What's happened to us? How is it we've lost touch with so many basic truths about what it means to be alive? We've been lulled into putting our need for money before our own survival, and as yet we don't even know it. We've become like frogs sitting in a slowly boiling pot of water - the heat is rising yet we're too sleepy and unaware to jump out of the pot and save ourselves from dying. At least we haven't woken up to the hard truth yet.
What it will take for human beings to awaken to the fact that we're slowly destroying ourselves with our unhealthy co-dependence on corporations to inspire us to work? Can't we see that by allowing our corporations to control our work ethic by using the bait of money, we've handed over to them the power to determine exactly what work gets done - that which is most profitable for their bottom lines - as well as how much of it gets done. Everything else - what truly benefits human society, what honors and supports our environment, our resources and the life forms with whom we share space - gets left behind in that endless corporate quest to earn a few dollars.
Our modern human family can no longer afford to view itself as "nuclear," and thus separate from all others. That's become a clear recipe for disaster in an increasingly shrinking world. What happens in the rest of the world affects what happens here, and vice-versa. "Their" pollution has become "our" problem; "their" suffering (political and social disenfranchisement) has become "our" pain (9/11). This breakdown of humanity into "usses" and "thems" must therefore end if we're to thrive. After all, we're sharing space on this planet and are in this life together, come what may.
What then, if we toss out our mortgages and money, our loans and debts and simply pull together as a species to accomplish our objectives for the greater good? How much more might we achieve if we chose to love and trust each other more than we depend on money to keep us safe from potential disaster?
I'm simply posing the question. For me, the answers are not to be found by studying my bankbook or brokerage account. They're in my heart, which knows the right thing to do. I'd love to hear yours.
This problems begs an important question: how long has human society suffered from this thing called "unemployment" and what can we do to fix it? Why do we even have such a thing as unemployment, when there's clearly so much work that needs to be done around the place? We're all aware that our national roads and bridges have fallen into shameful disrepair; our sewer and water infrastructure is crumbling and imploding all around us; our energy delivery systems are at least fifty years outdated; our schools are suffering from student/teacher ratios as high as 40-1; essential services like police and firefighting are being slashed below safe levels; our elderly find themselves isolated and without appropriate home and/or nursing care; millions of our children are being left at home without adequate after-school care; we're still dependent on foreign oil sources that are rapidly declining; our food sources and manufacturing capacities have been shipped overseas and are out of our quality control; our medical facilities are overwhelmed, understaffed and incapable of handling the needs of the larger populace - have I missed anything here?
It doesn't take us long to realize that our early ancestors had no experience with unemployment problems. In a hunter-gatherer culture or an early agrarian culture, not to work meant certain death for one's family and for oneself. Our ancestors couldn't afford to wait for someone "in charge" to promise them a paycheck before picking up a spear, a hoe or a bucket to attend to their daily needs. They understood what mattered, and took care of life's business without worrying about whether their 401k plans were intact, whether they had medical insurance, if they'd been promised adequate time for their lunch breaks or whether their environment was a friendly place in which to work. What's happened to us? How is it we've lost touch with so many basic truths about what it means to be alive? We've been lulled into putting our need for money before our own survival, and as yet we don't even know it. We've become like frogs sitting in a slowly boiling pot of water - the heat is rising yet we're too sleepy and unaware to jump out of the pot and save ourselves from dying. At least we haven't woken up to the hard truth yet.
What it will take for human beings to awaken to the fact that we're slowly destroying ourselves with our unhealthy co-dependence on corporations to inspire us to work? Can't we see that by allowing our corporations to control our work ethic by using the bait of money, we've handed over to them the power to determine exactly what work gets done - that which is most profitable for their bottom lines - as well as how much of it gets done. Everything else - what truly benefits human society, what honors and supports our environment, our resources and the life forms with whom we share space - gets left behind in that endless corporate quest to earn a few dollars.
Our modern human family can no longer afford to view itself as "nuclear," and thus separate from all others. That's become a clear recipe for disaster in an increasingly shrinking world. What happens in the rest of the world affects what happens here, and vice-versa. "Their" pollution has become "our" problem; "their" suffering (political and social disenfranchisement) has become "our" pain (9/11). This breakdown of humanity into "usses" and "thems" must therefore end if we're to thrive. After all, we're sharing space on this planet and are in this life together, come what may.
What then, if we toss out our mortgages and money, our loans and debts and simply pull together as a species to accomplish our objectives for the greater good? How much more might we achieve if we chose to love and trust each other more than we depend on money to keep us safe from potential disaster?
I'm simply posing the question. For me, the answers are not to be found by studying my bankbook or brokerage account. They're in my heart, which knows the right thing to do. I'd love to hear yours.
Monday, September 14, 2009
A Return to Sanity
I went utterly insane once, so believe me when I tell you I know exactly what it feels like. For a time during my experience I believed I was immortal and didn't need to ever eat or sleep again. I believed I could stare at the sun and receive cosmic information in the form of digestible light packets. I believed all I had to do was wish for something and it would come true for the world. I believed I could pick up an angry rattlesnake that had accidentally become trapped in our bedroom and lovingly set it free. (Thankfully for me, my husband nixed that idea and handled the snake with a bucket and pole from a distance!)
After a time my hallucinations switched from euphoric to paranoid. I then began to believe that roving gangs of murderers were chainsawing my neighbors to death. I believed aliens had landed, were capturing people, injecting nanobots into their bloodstreams and firing them off to "seed" distant stars with their spawn. I believed China had dropped nuclear weapons on major American cities, and that our world had been transformed into a poisoned, fiery hell. For a time I believed I was the only one left alive.
Being that crazy was not a pleasant experience. For much of the time I found myself unable to communicate with anyone, as I was completely lost in a mental landscape that no one else could visit, see or experience with me. In that sense I really was alone in the universe. At last, when I tried to steal an ambulance so I could go to the ocean and turn myself into a dolphin, the outside world finally recognized I was a danger to myself and possibly others. They hauled me off to the hospital for some much needed medical attention. After three days in intensive care and months of slow and painful mental and physical recovery, I gradually found my way back to sanity. In doing so I've learned some fascinating things about what insanity is. I'd like to share them.
Insanity, I've discovered, is a rejection of reality in favor of a narrative in the head. The man who insists he's Napoleon Bonaparte, the woman who talks to invisible people, the catatonic who curls into a ball and shuts out all sensory input - they're all having the same insane experience. It's only their story and method of holding onto their story that's different.
As a matter of fact, once I began to heal and look around the world again, what I noticed was that virtually every person I saw was having an insane experience to one degree or another. The only difference was with the narratives people were telling themselves. Interestingly enough, what I observed was that if the narrative a person substituted for reality was considered "socially acceptable" by his or her chosen peer group, then that person was considered sane, no matter how crazy or false their narrative might be. That explains how the "birthers" found semi-legitimacy through the news media, how creationists have managed to build quasi-reputable museums, how people have been able to stand outside health care rallies and with a straight face talk about Obama's "death panels." Insanity, it seems, is a matter of degree. The more persuasive a person who's telling a narrative can be, the more people he can convince to believe his story. The more people who believe in his story, the less likely that story is to be perceived as bat-shit crazy. And the more people who have forgotten how to do reality checks because they've been seduced their entire lives by easy narratives, the more gullible rubes there are for the storytellers.
Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Axis of Evil. Torture as a legitimate interrogation method. A suspension of constitutional rights in order to preserve our constitution. Nobody knew the levees in New Orleans could fail. Iraq and Al Queda were connected through 9/11. They hate us for our freedom. President Obama is a secret Nazi/Facist/Communist/Socialist/Muslim/Racist. Killing abortion doctors preserves our sacred right to life. We "can't afford" to reduce our dependence on oil.
Since when did we become a nation so obsessed with crazy narratives that we've lost the ability to get in touch with reality? I suspect it's been going on for years, and that this weakness has been built into the way we educate our children. We send perfectly good and inquiring minds to school, where we tell them the narrative of human history and grade them well if they spit it back to us without "error." Nowhere in that process is critical thinking, questioning and new exploration lauded - at least not until the narrative has been firmly imbedded in them.
And after all, we're also a nation primarily raised on Biblical narratives that include talking snakes, unseen demons and angels, a guy who put two of every animal in a boat and sails it away, whole cities that were leveled by the angry "finger of God" for their bad behavior. The list goes on...
One difficulty with changing all this is that as we've industrialized we've moved farther and farther away from our touchstone with reality - the natural world. We read about full moons and new moons in the weather section of the news, but how many of us can still look at the sky and know what phase of the moon we're observing at night? How many of us genuinely understand the Earth's rotation and spin in relation to the sun and seasonality? Perpaps our growing disconnect from nature explains why it's so easy for us to ignore things like rainforest destruction, the extinction of polar bears, melting ice caps, rainfall changes and the rising pollution and exhaustion of fish in our oceans. The narratives we're telling ourselves are so much nicer than the truth that we collectively cling to them in desperation, despite all evidence to the contrary!
During my wildly insane period, had I been able to stop the voices in my head and simply BE PRESENT with what was happening, I would have noticed that none of these things I believed were actually true. This, I suspect is what awaits humankind around a very near corner. Avoidance of the truth can only carry us so far, then the narrative will break down in favor of reality. Either we'll act out the narrative only to discover later it wasn't true, which is what led to the war in Iraq; or reality will crush the narrative, as will happen when twenty feet of water flood Manhattan and bury Florida when all our glaciers melt.
Letting go of the narratives we've all been taught to believe in can be deeply unsettling to the mind. It's even harder when the people you love don't want to let go of the stories. They'll try to drag you back into their shared belief system, because when something isn't demonstrably true there's a sense of safety in numbers. The more people who accept the narrative the more likely (or so people think) it is that the story is actually true. It's why religions are so fond of bearing witness and procreating - more little religious believers to promote the story.
The Flat Earthers didn't want to accept it when the news came to them that the Earth was round. It's what Holocaust deniers and alien abductees share; an eagerness to convince others that their narrative is correct and thus control the story.
Humanity, by virtue of its ability to tell imaginative stories, has the capacity to move information across the generations. Perhaps it's time we began to realize the weighty responsibility that attaches to that privilege. If we're going to tell stories to each other, let's at least make an effort to get our stories right. Worst case, let's freely acknowledge that a theory is still a theory, so the truth can always find an open window into humanity's psyche.
Anything less is utterly insane.
After a time my hallucinations switched from euphoric to paranoid. I then began to believe that roving gangs of murderers were chainsawing my neighbors to death. I believed aliens had landed, were capturing people, injecting nanobots into their bloodstreams and firing them off to "seed" distant stars with their spawn. I believed China had dropped nuclear weapons on major American cities, and that our world had been transformed into a poisoned, fiery hell. For a time I believed I was the only one left alive.
Being that crazy was not a pleasant experience. For much of the time I found myself unable to communicate with anyone, as I was completely lost in a mental landscape that no one else could visit, see or experience with me. In that sense I really was alone in the universe. At last, when I tried to steal an ambulance so I could go to the ocean and turn myself into a dolphin, the outside world finally recognized I was a danger to myself and possibly others. They hauled me off to the hospital for some much needed medical attention. After three days in intensive care and months of slow and painful mental and physical recovery, I gradually found my way back to sanity. In doing so I've learned some fascinating things about what insanity is. I'd like to share them.
Insanity, I've discovered, is a rejection of reality in favor of a narrative in the head. The man who insists he's Napoleon Bonaparte, the woman who talks to invisible people, the catatonic who curls into a ball and shuts out all sensory input - they're all having the same insane experience. It's only their story and method of holding onto their story that's different.
As a matter of fact, once I began to heal and look around the world again, what I noticed was that virtually every person I saw was having an insane experience to one degree or another. The only difference was with the narratives people were telling themselves. Interestingly enough, what I observed was that if the narrative a person substituted for reality was considered "socially acceptable" by his or her chosen peer group, then that person was considered sane, no matter how crazy or false their narrative might be. That explains how the "birthers" found semi-legitimacy through the news media, how creationists have managed to build quasi-reputable museums, how people have been able to stand outside health care rallies and with a straight face talk about Obama's "death panels." Insanity, it seems, is a matter of degree. The more persuasive a person who's telling a narrative can be, the more people he can convince to believe his story. The more people who believe in his story, the less likely that story is to be perceived as bat-shit crazy. And the more people who have forgotten how to do reality checks because they've been seduced their entire lives by easy narratives, the more gullible rubes there are for the storytellers.
Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Axis of Evil. Torture as a legitimate interrogation method. A suspension of constitutional rights in order to preserve our constitution. Nobody knew the levees in New Orleans could fail. Iraq and Al Queda were connected through 9/11. They hate us for our freedom. President Obama is a secret Nazi/Facist/Communist/Socialist/Muslim/Racist. Killing abortion doctors preserves our sacred right to life. We "can't afford" to reduce our dependence on oil.
Since when did we become a nation so obsessed with crazy narratives that we've lost the ability to get in touch with reality? I suspect it's been going on for years, and that this weakness has been built into the way we educate our children. We send perfectly good and inquiring minds to school, where we tell them the narrative of human history and grade them well if they spit it back to us without "error." Nowhere in that process is critical thinking, questioning and new exploration lauded - at least not until the narrative has been firmly imbedded in them.
And after all, we're also a nation primarily raised on Biblical narratives that include talking snakes, unseen demons and angels, a guy who put two of every animal in a boat and sails it away, whole cities that were leveled by the angry "finger of God" for their bad behavior. The list goes on...
One difficulty with changing all this is that as we've industrialized we've moved farther and farther away from our touchstone with reality - the natural world. We read about full moons and new moons in the weather section of the news, but how many of us can still look at the sky and know what phase of the moon we're observing at night? How many of us genuinely understand the Earth's rotation and spin in relation to the sun and seasonality? Perpaps our growing disconnect from nature explains why it's so easy for us to ignore things like rainforest destruction, the extinction of polar bears, melting ice caps, rainfall changes and the rising pollution and exhaustion of fish in our oceans. The narratives we're telling ourselves are so much nicer than the truth that we collectively cling to them in desperation, despite all evidence to the contrary!
During my wildly insane period, had I been able to stop the voices in my head and simply BE PRESENT with what was happening, I would have noticed that none of these things I believed were actually true. This, I suspect is what awaits humankind around a very near corner. Avoidance of the truth can only carry us so far, then the narrative will break down in favor of reality. Either we'll act out the narrative only to discover later it wasn't true, which is what led to the war in Iraq; or reality will crush the narrative, as will happen when twenty feet of water flood Manhattan and bury Florida when all our glaciers melt.
Letting go of the narratives we've all been taught to believe in can be deeply unsettling to the mind. It's even harder when the people you love don't want to let go of the stories. They'll try to drag you back into their shared belief system, because when something isn't demonstrably true there's a sense of safety in numbers. The more people who accept the narrative the more likely (or so people think) it is that the story is actually true. It's why religions are so fond of bearing witness and procreating - more little religious believers to promote the story.
The Flat Earthers didn't want to accept it when the news came to them that the Earth was round. It's what Holocaust deniers and alien abductees share; an eagerness to convince others that their narrative is correct and thus control the story.
Humanity, by virtue of its ability to tell imaginative stories, has the capacity to move information across the generations. Perhaps it's time we began to realize the weighty responsibility that attaches to that privilege. If we're going to tell stories to each other, let's at least make an effort to get our stories right. Worst case, let's freely acknowledge that a theory is still a theory, so the truth can always find an open window into humanity's psyche.
Anything less is utterly insane.
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