Intellectual resurrection or mental diarrhea? You decide.
I know I've been carrying these thoughts around with me for a long time now, and I've even squawked a bit of it at some people, but this is the first time I will try to get them down in writing. These ideas will purposefully be published as fragments instead of in a linear structure because they are pieces of a puzzle which the reader must assemble into their own schema.
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The limitation of capitalism is morality. You cannot operate in a purely capitalistic system and expect that the economics will follow our moral values.
(Are you a communist then?)
It is a fallacious dichotomy to believe that if one does not believe in capitalism, then one must believe in communism. Obviously, communism has been applied in amoral ways as well, so that's not what I'm talking about. Simply put, there are as many ways to organize ourselves economically as we can think of. That's a tautology, really. It's only that in recent history we have been conditioned to strictly think in these two terms. There have been plenty more ways civilizations have operated economically in the past, and there are even more ways we have yet to try or think up.
(Well, then, what do you propose as an alternative?)
The crux of the matter is: instead of choosing an economic system as the focus of society and then allowing our morality to be derived from that, can we first decide what our values are and then design our economics around that? Can we evolve or quantum leap into a Humane Economy?
(Won't someone, some company, undercut the rest who try to operate in a humane manner?)
Why do oligopolies exist? What is the solution to the Prisoners' Dilemma? Organizations and individuals will implicitly adhere to norms that benefit the collective when they realize that that situation is also optimal for themselves. Furthermore, the collective will tend to impose penalties, whether social, legal, or economic, on those who deviate from that norm.
(This sounds like a chicken or egg problem.)
The answer is how you define what a chicken egg is. The confusion comes from whether a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg that contains a chicken. You simply have to choose which is the primitive (and whether you believe in evolution or not), then you will have your answer.
I believe the egg always comes first, so I believe we must first work to establish humane companies before we can give birth to the Humane Economy. Fortunately, a few already exist. If we build upon those and simultaneously expand those numbers, we can mimic the natural processes of resonance or crystallization to develop larger, sustainable structures.
(Why bother to do this?)
We are currently limiting ourselves, our true potential. Since we have been wired for survival, we have simply recreated that necessity within our society. Our society is built on the extortion of our livelihoods. However, we are reaching the point where our population is very large but only a minority percentage is required to create enough resources for all of us to thrive. Consequently, the remainder will necessarily be treated as economic excess. At some point, we, as a society, will have to choose between the right to life or the right to livelihood.
To free ourselves of this paradox, we must transcend our self imposed prison of survival. And if we can do so, we will transform into a Generative Society, a society where our focus is creating, not surviving.
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More to come later...
--
The limitation of capitalism is morality. You cannot operate in a purely capitalistic system and expect that the economics will follow our moral values.
(Are you a communist then?)
It is a fallacious dichotomy to believe that if one does not believe in capitalism, then one must believe in communism. Obviously, communism has been applied in amoral ways as well, so that's not what I'm talking about. Simply put, there are as many ways to organize ourselves economically as we can think of. That's a tautology, really. It's only that in recent history we have been conditioned to strictly think in these two terms. There have been plenty more ways civilizations have operated economically in the past, and there are even more ways we have yet to try or think up.
(Well, then, what do you propose as an alternative?)
The crux of the matter is: instead of choosing an economic system as the focus of society and then allowing our morality to be derived from that, can we first decide what our values are and then design our economics around that? Can we evolve or quantum leap into a Humane Economy?
(Won't someone, some company, undercut the rest who try to operate in a humane manner?)
Why do oligopolies exist? What is the solution to the Prisoners' Dilemma? Organizations and individuals will implicitly adhere to norms that benefit the collective when they realize that that situation is also optimal for themselves. Furthermore, the collective will tend to impose penalties, whether social, legal, or economic, on those who deviate from that norm.
(This sounds like a chicken or egg problem.)
The answer is how you define what a chicken egg is. The confusion comes from whether a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg that contains a chicken. You simply have to choose which is the primitive (and whether you believe in evolution or not), then you will have your answer.
I believe the egg always comes first, so I believe we must first work to establish humane companies before we can give birth to the Humane Economy. Fortunately, a few already exist. If we build upon those and simultaneously expand those numbers, we can mimic the natural processes of resonance or crystallization to develop larger, sustainable structures.
(Why bother to do this?)
We are currently limiting ourselves, our true potential. Since we have been wired for survival, we have simply recreated that necessity within our society. Our society is built on the extortion of our livelihoods. However, we are reaching the point where our population is very large but only a minority percentage is required to create enough resources for all of us to thrive. Consequently, the remainder will necessarily be treated as economic excess. At some point, we, as a society, will have to choose between the right to life or the right to livelihood.
To free ourselves of this paradox, we must transcend our self imposed prison of survival. And if we can do so, we will transform into a Generative Society, a society where our focus is creating, not surviving.
--
More to come later...
posted by Andrew at 1:14 AM
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