HISTORY & CURRENT EVENTS
The 18th century theorists who outlined the dynamics of economic systems for people to follow and understand were for the most part 'simplifiers'. They employed the scientific principles of reductionism to seek out the easiest to understand patterns of market performance, putting those patterns into words we recognize and identify .... Ownership. Power. Wealth. Need. Utility. Distribution. Give .. and Take. The efforts involved with 'exchange' and the craft to accomplish 'exchange' in beneficial ways. Sometimes mutually, sometimes with competitive bias.
The world has reaped the whirlwinds and the benefits of those ideas and principles. Amidst trade and tirade, we've built societies based on the many ways of making commerce and reward from commerce accessible to people .. to the few, and to the many. We haven't had an easy time of it though, because economics isn't just some theoretical nicety or a recreational pass-time. In the nitty-gritty it is survival. Humans continue to engage in these mutual behaviors in order to survive. And since we are far from being individually self-reliant .. as those who are totally dependent on their own skills and competence for deriving nourishment from the environment, farming and husbandrying the land to stay alive, provide for themselves and family and friends .. we are now co-dependent creatures, committed to being part of far-reaching and complicated social involvements .. bound into the modern systems of survival.
As we reach the starting cusp of the 21st century its really important that we clarify our perceptions of ourselves and our world again. Why? Because the old 'rules' of our economic 'us' have gotten us into uncharted waters, where most of us are adrift, and only the savvy few seem to be reaping the 'excellent' rewards.
Oh, the world for the most part is making life better for a majority of lives screened at any moment. In snapshot pictures, health is better, education and safety are available to more people, and the general benefits of economic integration - whether by design of the hierarchic top, or the daily efforts of vast hosts of workaday laborers including middle class - are the rule, not the exception.
But we are further than ever before from a healthy self-image of who and what and where we are, in all these irrepressible forces - and that wan't always the case. Capitalism once enunciated for its members what was expected. Communism and Socialism also stood to proclaim in easy understandable terms, why their economic organizations should be one way or another, how people were expected to participate, and what people should hope or even expect to gain from devoting themselves to aggreable economic behaviors.
Competition, entitlements, mutual coordinations - all the expectations and all the efforts - all the commitments to social and communal ideals of personal behavior in incredibly extended and intricate participations and levels of organized 'togetherness' - have leapt beyond the normal control and decision devices of the average citizen. They've even leap-frogged the capabilities of upper management and political savants in who's trust we offer over many of our policy making and guidance abilities to. And that's a damned uncomfortable position to be in.
Oh, there are glimpses of the simplicity once in a while. Issues arise that are clearly good or bad, provocative or calming, traditional or adventurous, comfortable or unsettling, handlable or at least adaptable to. Cut and dried events indicating what we must do, how we should act, and some general outcome, are pretty well fixed and predictable. We just have to go through the motions and do what's required, and a restored or improved outcome will be the result. Life is drifting away from those qualities though - on personal levels and also on the larger managerial levels where pundits continually step forth with models and rationalizations of 'how', 'what', 'why'.
In the closing decades of the second millenium (starting from the 1950's to date), sense and perspective have been nudged aside in favor of many new-day 'simplicities'. Unfortunately, 'simple' complexity models work only under the most contrived and imposed conditions. Mathematical schemas based on organization theory and fractal mathematical models seek to monitor - and maneuver in preferred ways - human social systems based on the old saw that 'knowledge (information) is power'. The unspoken hope is that 'insider information' ... by knowing exactly how economic relationships work and what the driving influences are - specifically - one could do good for the populations at large, and oh, by the way, skim off some hefty personal or corporate profits along the way. That's simply compensation for a job-well-done for the world, the corporation, the friends and supporters ... a nod to 'home-team advantage' you might say. All reasonable and well justified.
But there are problems. Not the approach. Not the effort. Not even the dream - wrapped in whatever self-envisioned righteousness (with a sense of profit-making savvy and pride, to boot) could be considered 'misguided'. The problems are that one, the models keep coming up with flaws and perturbative errors, wreaking havoc in unwanted and unexpected areas, and two, the closed-door secret-backroom decision dens are now struggling to control and limit information spread to the broader-world even while the broader world feels entitled to know what is going on, with information that impacts their lives. Participation and decision making - freedom of choice - free market competitions or syntheses based on the right to make those free choices - the power to guide and self-determine our own, their own, lives - are not about to be squelched because the systems at large rely on few minds, quick resposiveness, and timely adaptive planning.
PERSPECTIVE
The concept arena where all of these issues collide is 'healthy self-image'. We've gotten ourselves into a world - economic and otherwise - where competent human awareness is esteemed on the one hand and totally belittled on the other. With all the grandiose pronouncements of the Rights of Humanity and the Dignity of Humankind, the imagry doesn't match the performance. The simple wisdom, 'every life is important', doesn't match the oblique but increasingly prominent shift to the old wilderness~wildlife dynamic of 'every life must fight for it's own survival'. The more 'civilized' we become, the more visceral we apparently have to behave. As long as its cloaked in some sort of social decorum or civility of course.
In the larger marketplace where the entities and personages are corporations, it is there that power struggles, competition, conniving and so forth are the rules of survival. Natural selection performs as eminently well in commerce as it does in the forest, jungle, or oceans. And though there are 'laws' in the rule books of nations to cope with some of the negative behaviors, nobody seems to have an over-riding sense that: Human potential is better qualified than merely being capable of repeating the law of 'eat and/or be eaten'.
We've advanced ourselves in the tricks and toys and performances on one hand, while slipping further and further away from what we can do, what we can be, what we hopefully are, as enobled creatures of life. We're clawing our way into back into the gutter of survival techniques, thinking that we're advancing somewhere, and with as much as we achieve, there will be a time when some unforeseen calamity will strike and much will be lost. All because we lost a self-image of ourselves along the way, one that we used to have. Oh, the words are there, but they aren't believed in much anymore, and they've paled to cliches.
This has nothing to do with spiritual beliefs and those images of ourselves. What I'm referring to is our practical life. The who and how and where of social placements and the feeling of individual potential as in "I am a member of" something. By choice, by default, by happenstance, by dream, or by desire, the status-ground of human value is not the same anymore.
The complicatedness of the world has outstripped the best of us. It's running on shear momentum at the moment, and also on the ability of some few individuals to be at the many helms, being hungry enough to play the predator/competitor game for themselves and their organizations. There are overt and obvious goings-on, and there are covert quietly planned goings-on. And all while the everyday and noisesome world - goes forward.
We live in a convoluted world where agendas impact agendas. People and organizations make plans and 6 billion people and untold billions of animals and plant lives reap the fall-out. All, 'because'.
Because humanity doesn't have a philosophy of itself anymore, a practical image which includes human contact and behavior, one that includes the dignity of people and groups, one that stands as a measure of our economic portion of life and responsibility and entitlement. We just - don't know - how the systems really work and who we are, what we are, being involved in them.
The fancy economic math models are self-deluding toys, falling back in line with the impractical notion that organic life is a clockwork that we just have to figure out and then operate. But what does that premise mean, actually? It means that every human life is a piece of replacable function-filling equipment, for which 'dignity' is a word that has no relevance, nor 'purpose' a sense - except for .. communal productivity. The themes of our lives and the performances of our lives have been stretched and dissected and nearly evicerated in the rush to Build More Civilization.
Now, I don't decry 'Civilization Building'. No, not at all. What I do proclaim is that humanity needs to rise in it's competence and wisdom and have a new and clear image of its economic self. Every person. Every group.
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We just don't live in a school-simple world of 'supply and demand'. Oh, there is still 'supply and demand', but it's involved and very intricate, and the effective power to accomplish things comes from the presence of two additional process-sources that arise when supply and demand situations exist.
One is the power to 'create effective wealth' .. done by an accounting notion where debt/credit multiples the amount of 'basic wealth'. This is acheived according to how many times a debt/credit is re-assigned - or - more accurately - how many people or organizations 'co-own' a given wealth or asset at any one moment. It is basically "purchasing power based on the right to claim ownership" rather than on proof of full and clear title, and thus ownership.
A product of that process is creation 'excess-wealth' relative to any current state of an economy. It becomes effective of its own accord in regard to 'future working power' and 'future working states'. It is wealth that isn't crucial to keeping an economy's current status quo safe and functioning, but which can play a crucial role in what the economy can become and grow into. Economic pundits refer to it, but typically, mainly in regard to individuals and families. They call it 'disposable income'. It's recognized in government and political venues at times, and there it's called 'surplus' ... which is typically expected to fund needed social sectors or be refunded to a tax paying segment of the population. It is known in the business sector also though, where it's historically been treated as a sacrosanct debt owed to investors - asset wealth indebted to bond and preferred stock holders or lien holders.
In a clear word, it is wealth gained along side of the more obvious 'profit in excess of cost' (which is accumulated, or, returned as dividends on basic stock principle investments). It is the world recognizing that Joe is $100.00 wealthy because he can collect on the $100 dollars from whoever owes it to him, and Fred and Xavier are $100 dollars wealthy since they each have $50 dollars in their banks, of the money Joe loaned them. The $100 shows up in the economy as $200 of revenue generating assets.
When someone or some group can claim sufficient-title to wealth, that wealth can be used to leverage or secure other transactions. The wealth is real but it is based on contingient and sufficient title to the wealth or assets. The wealth can wholly or in part be used as disposable income at the corporate and political levels of entities/lifeforms, and, it is as trust- worthy as the intent to repay a promissory debt in full.
In the overall picture of economic process, the dependability on wealth per se rests in wise allocations - re-allocations actually - of any excess wealth. 'Wise allocations' means placing it where collateral systems are healthily supported and encouraged, and where the functional health of all involved and disparate parts of the system are supported ... kept active and involved.
The importance for human dignity is that its absolutely crucial for the quality of human life that these intricately involved flows and constant re-distributions of wealth be done in total support of the living potential - not just of the supra-organism called international-trade, but also of human membership, at and in all its levels and locations, and of the total life space that people exist in also.
That includes the biological and botanical lifespheres of the planet, and the mineral, atmospheric and temperate parts also. In the rush and capacity to 'create wealth' we squander part of it in a way that evolutionary nature never does - so we aren't fully in-step with being a healthily evolving species. Nature re-utilizes all of its assets by gaianly re-distributing it to other systems - from those that are no longer actively functioning, to those that are. Nature also maintains the value of its assets and wealth by cooperatively co-integrating assets into plural simultaneous uses. But, humanity hasn't followed that practice. We trash much of what we produce and mess the environmental spaces we're residents in, instead of re-distributing and maintaining dynamic re-integrations ... the re-sourcing of assets ... allowing them to be new energy/inputs 'sources' all over again and again.
One of the first ways to secure the value of human life is to personally and societally act in real re-distributive ways, making recycling a normal and routine lifestyle, not an extraordinary effort or cost. We have to determine ways to enable wealth retention, which means mimimizing waste and heat-sink loss ... allowing the fewest amount of assets to fall into dis-use. Also, we need to look to re-envigorating sectors through sharing what may have been dormantly unproductive someplace else.
And then too, we focus on re-dignifying People. Because that is our premiere goal.
Human society depends on the one feature that isn't always accentuated as we've gone about doing things and thinking of each other. That is the ability to rise to the occassion and fill in for anyone else - no matter the task or event, no matter how simple or complex. Each raw new human has the potential to do what someone else is capable of. The potential to comprehend what is involved in any given situation and make decisions. The potential to evaluate and make things happen. The potential to be as responsible for the welfare of others as we are of ourselves.
We must come to recognize again that maintaining human dignity means maintaining self-worth, else-worth, value and utility - in the ability to do for and to do with each other - to act as repositories of experience and wisdom and memory of human abilities.
It means not being flustered by the fact that there are these other multiple sources of energy-and-wealth - through which we accomplish things for each other and - inevitably - to each other. That is the new wisdom that I intimated about at the beginning of this essay. Beyond the single event/process of 'supply & demand' are the many interwoven involvements of many supplies and many demands, many needs and many opportunities - all interdependent in smooth flows and priorities of actions, done to accomplish one outcome or another, many accomplishments or others.
The time we devote and the freed-wealth we bring to bear, on and with and to each other is most significant - equal with and more than dealing with 'one supply ~ one demand' at a time. Its the latitude which we have for deciding what we want to accomplish in life, over and above having to accomplish in life - especially when our awarness requires that we harness and consider all the many priorities involved - at the same time. Free-time, freed-wealth. Extra-time, extra-wealth. Committable time, committable wealth. Taking developing or accessible resources and planning where to spend them is the crux of life - all life - and it's the premiere preoccupation of human beings. We are forever concerned with necessities and embellishments - today's requirements, and the extras - which themselves can grow to become necessities. Humans are engaged in a type of ongoing creativity, not only knowing what has to be done, but what may exploringly be done. Our existence is the constant gauging of and engaging in possibilities and potentials and creative embellishments.
Science has physiologically classified us as tool makers and after that, thinkers, when in fact we are makers of ideas more than makers of tools. We fabricate in 'possibility spaces' that are more real and more reachable than the physical goals we finally do attain.
Life is a constant unceasing process of making decisions, of making compromises, and of holding firm to ideas - to achieve certain goals - in the face of competition and even in the face of cooperative requests for mutually coveted energy and wealth. We don't live in a 'simplistic' world. We never have, never did, and never will. We reasonably no longer have the luxury of perceiving simplisticly. It's time to rise-to-the-occassion and act as involved competent decision makers in what the world can become. It means that we must invent new processes of opportunity in the arenas of social action and political expectations and economic companionship and environmental co-existence.
The opening cusp of the 21st century of the Common Era finds us poised to coodinate economic/social powers that were and transform them into the economic/social powers that should be. Every person - from birth - should have the right to experience opportunities and stimulations for growth. Every person is entitled to be nurtured in environments where respect and dignity are offered and entitled in self-same acts of intention and concern.
The 'models' we must use are not firm rules nor absolute requirements. Rather, every person has the ability to live and enact their tendencies and their potential, to know what's at stake and what's valuable - in the present here and now, and especially in the potential future - where what is less meaningful today can be all important tomorrow, and vice versa.
These metamodels I'm referring to are 'processes-of-encounter' - which means that systems strive to ensure their survival - using 'continued functioning' as the hallmark of success. As things are done to us, as we do things to others, efforts have unforeseen outcomes along with any anticipated goals. This points wonderfully to the capacity and deep innateness of systems to function sensitively to every facet of organization whether we're conscious of them or not. Blending and adaptability are the foundation of every system's performance - regardless of sentience, premeditation, or control.
In thiis pluralistic world we've come to appreciate ourselves as, instinctive and automatic actions don't guarantee the best benefits or the greatest survival. That is all the more reason that we have to recognize all sources of economic power production, and not to jump at regulating and hampering that production. Rather, we must see when its being applied, and how and where. To be part of the monitoring process, and then, through the enaction of political mechanisms and economic devices, make ourselves privy to evaluating if the efforts are beneficial or potentially destructive to our staying vibrant and functional.
A case in point is the genetically implanted 'lethal gene' being marketed in food crop seeds by several global companies. It's their intention to make farmers or combines buy new food producing seed stock every year.
It's all well and good to try and control a product and have a customer base come to purchase from you, but in this instance its potentially disastrous for all life on the planet. There are no controls or limits on how plants in the wild could cross infect each other genetically. There are transmission vectors that could take this fertility-killing gene and spread it to plants that would suddenly stop reproducing. And in short order all the life forms that depended on those plants and others would lose their life-supporting nourishment. The cascade could be catastrophic ... simply because some people wanted an economic and locked in 'gain', and they didn't have the foresight to recognize the ramifications of what could happen in a world where a bad gene just ran away with being too successful - even during a short run. They couldn't see the impplications and they didn't have the systemic insight to weigh the long term dangers the health and life against the myopic and short termed gains of wealth and power.
The fight against these kinds of genetic mis-manipulations is being waged by people not overwhelmed by the information they receive and enabled by their ability to recognize the flows and blends of power and processes - financial, scientific, political, et cetera. They can look beyond the simple model of supply and demand - which on the surface can make those genetic manipulations look reasonable and worthwhile and innocently beneficial.
But we can't allow ourselves - any of the world's citizens - to be blinded by the old models and guidelines. The coming Systems Era of human performance needs to see all peoples as competent evaluators of the Common Good. We need the social instruments and communications channels reaching into every sector of decision making, where opportunities and explored options are respected, but we build in the right to say 'no', not just yet.
We have cars that can go 120 mph 160 kph, but for the safety of road travellers, speed limits moderate performance to within safe parameters . Not every skill has to be used to the maximum in order to make it worth while. And no one should feel incapable of handling the informations or implications of economic dynamics.
We've grown past the primer stage of global economic performance. It's time to take our social and personal economic committments and knowledge to the next plateau. We're coming into an era of eco-gnomics, economic/ecological wisdom - "knowing" - how to read systems performances and look ahead to what we can expect - for bad or good - and what should be encouraged and what should not.
/ Ceptual Institute / Essay Oct. 1999
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