The Economy Series
Hello readers. It has been some ten years since I’ve written extensively on economic topics. I intend to revisit them in 2022, because they are starting to loom large in people’s consciousness. They will likely loom larger still in the coming year, as we face the prospect of significant economic turmoil.
Economic turmoil breeds political upheaval. It can lead to revolution or, conversely, to centralized government-corporate control over people’s lives. It can also be a moment where the green shoots of community can sprout, as the tottering structures and habits of our inherited systems collapse to let in new light and air.
Economic breakdown, as part of a larger breakdown in our defining stories, offers the opportunity for something that transcends existing ideological and political categories. It can be a gateway to the restoration of communities and what I will call “qualitative economics.” What I mean by that will become clear in this series of writings. It has actionable significance on a personal, local, organizational, and global level.
To pass through this gateway requires that we don’t get too caught up in the knee-jerk reactions and ideological formulas that come from a superficial understanding of the forces at play. Chief among these is the habit of dividing the actors in our current drama into the good guys and the bad guys. Yes, you might understand something by viewing, say, Klaus Schwab and the WEF, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Finance, Big Oil, or the central banks through that lens, but it obscures more than it reveals. The same for conspiracy narratives, or for turning “greed” into an elemental aspect of human nature. These simplifying, reductionistic explanations for the current mess actually perpetuate it, for they distract us from a more complete, more nuanced, but maybe less emotionally gratifying understanding.
Another set of knee-jerk reactions and ideological formulas stem from traditional political-economic philosophies. However, the entire spectrum from right to left, from libertarian capitalism to Marxist socialism, takes certain assumptions for granted that are not, or are no longer, true. In this series, I will certainly draw from classical economic concepts, but often as a way to uncover their shared covert assumptions. The assumptions go way deeper than anything we’d call “economic”; they go to the level of spirituality, myth, and metaphysics.
Rather than take weeks or months to construct an elaborate essay laying out a framework for economic transformation in the post-Covid world, I will take a non-linear approach, opening a series of windows onto the current situation as well as pathways forward. Zooming in and zooming out, I’ll write about inflation, debt, the Great Reset, war, technology, class, cryptocurrencies, digital currencies, the story of money, qualitative economics, post-growth economics, gift economics, ecological economics, and a lot more.
The perspectives I will offer can inform business models, public policies, popular uprisings, and personal practices. I want to bring them more prominently into our collective database of ideas so that they will be at the ready as the dissolution of the old normal proceeds. I also want to bring whatever clarity I can to today’s bewildering storm of contradictory sense-making. What is going on here? I won’t offer a final answer, much less a new fundamentalism. I aim to offer different questions from an unfamiliar perspective.
I plan to intersperse these economic writings with other essays over the next year. Before I jump into it, I’d like to hear from readers. Do people have an interest in what I’ve described? What questions are in your mind? How may I be of good use to you?
A little preview: That question, “How may I be of good use to you?” is one of five or ten root questions of a new (and ancient) economics. I will elaborate more in future. Thank you.
In the 1980s through the late 1990s, my work was about “creating an economy for the living Earth”. I had 2 books published: Economics as if the Earth Really Mattered, and Invested in the Common Good. Both New Society Publishers, both with forewards by Thomas Berry, numerous articles, and I also worked on projects like community currency, corporate research looking into Earth destroyers (before computer data bases), fighting for the ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest and the tropics, educating people about genetic engineering, food irradiation, etc. etc.
I’m not an economist and had taken no courses either, but I looked to the Earth to create what I called Gaian Economics - one of the first people to use that term. It was all about, ultimately, local/regional (bioregional), grassroots, appropriate scale . . . To me, the most important thing is to integrate the reality of Earth into our economics. Not just in the sense of “resources” - which are, in truth, “gifts of nature” and not commodities or “things” to be extracted and somehow “valued” monetarily, as some are wanting to see happen as a way of, finally, integrating “resource” extraction and the resulting destruction, into the bottom line rather than treating them as externalities as is the current practice. I get why people want to do this, or think it’s a good idea (or at least a step in the right direction) but we cannot put a $ value on Life and Consciousness. All the money in the world cannot bring back extinct species or restore to their original conditions the places we have mined and clear cut and poisoned.
Right now what I see a lot of people struggling with is how to deal with/break up/bring down the current corporate controlled, global, market-based, extractive, etc. economic system. It seems to me that most feel transforming it is the key. Well, maybe it is, but we get stuck at that level because it has so much power and is controlled and maintained by greed, power-over - and this includes the so called “green new deal” stuff, the “great reset” - all that. While we need to transform energy, agriculture, education, infrastructure, all that, the solutions we need are not large scale, top down, billionaire controlled. So I feel we need to let that be for now and work where we live with those who live near and around us to recreate our economies from the bottom up, in ways that fit local places and human and nonhuman needs. There are ways to do this, processes people in communities can use to create plans and strategies to get there.
To me, the missing piece from pretty much all the discussions I’ve read recently on this subject, is the fact that Earth is Alive. Not just as a living system, but conscious, sentient - from the smallest microbe to fungi and glacial erratics and worms and trees and mountains . . . We are actually living within a living being as the cells of our body live within us. All of these modes of consciousness are part of the web we work and live within and all this wisdom and intelligence has a huge role to play that most people simply ignore if they are even aware of it. Yes, we talk about ecology and “healing Earth” and restoration, etc. but as if we are somehow doing it unto. When in fact we are doing it “with”. I hope this reality is part of what you will be sharing on this subject.
I, too, decided not to focus any more of my energy on the economy, yet I seem to be drawn into more and more conversations because of this very important issue, what to me is the actual foundation of the work that needs to be done, not something to add in at the end or mention in passing.
'How may I be of good use to you?' What a lovely invitation. Help me figure out how I may be of good use to others in these collapsing times. I want to serve. Something like that...