Our Crisis is Not Economic and It's Beyond "Green"

I wrote this in March, but it makes more sense right now.

The best way to understand the current economic crisis is to see that it is not economic. It is political, but even that designation is inadequate. It is a seismic evolutionary fissure that has yet to be fully identified. This post, and links to a few other exploratory posts on this blog, will seek to outline what I believe to be the prominent features of our situation and the likely avenues for a move into the future.

The reason the current crisis is not economic is that our economy is by any measure unsustainable.

We cannot survive by hallowing indebtedness ad infinitum, both as a government panacea and an individual or family lifestyle or as a prominent feature of much business. A culture of indebtedness is not sustainable.

We cannot survive by palliative tweaks to our current structures under the label of "green." Current advertisements for companies that claim to be going green may lull us into believing that we can survive by moving, this way and that, among existing options such as various fuels.

Even if we could prop up the current system, it would not accomplish the best purpose of an economic system, which is to make it possible for all within it to achieve a measure of relief from poverty, illness and ignorance.

At its best, our global system can be described as an amalgamation of capitalism (widely understood) and philanthropy, defined as the sum total of activities we engage in under the label not-for-profit,. Including educational and medical institutions as well as the plethora of associations and NGOs and governmentl agencies that are non-profit (sic).

Our current system is a faltering machine whose product is benign genocide -- which I define as the sum total of global deaths that result from the way the system is set up. Any honest redoing of our global economy must at least recognize why the current mechanisms fail. Or else we shall be condemned to self-delusion. believing than incremental tweaks are a real solution and celebrating achievements whose celebration is in itself a cause for tears.

The answer to the conundrum created by acknowledging that our present economic system is unsustainable, is an integral politics which is providentially the potential of an Obama candidacy.

Such a politics can communicate that the solution to our problems is not merely a matter of moving beyond religious, racial, gender and cultural barriers, but by creating a culture of integral communication of the elements needed to conquer problems and of integral projects which exemplify such behavior in action.

If Barack Obama is elected, he will be a leader fit for these times. He will, I believe, propose not that we compete to bring our economy back but that we move to a post-oil, post capitalist-philanthropic, post-debt-enslaved, post-consumer culture based on a reclamation of key values that have been sliced and diced in our Balkanized intellectual environment.

The primacy of the individual. This is not conservative or liberal, it is simply the truth.

The primacy of public space as a measure of cultural attainment.

The creation of new human settlements based on a wedding of high technology and values implicit in Christopher Alexander's pattern language. These I envision as experimental nodes where groups live independent of the need to drive cars.

The understanding that being green involves doing so on a scale that requires what the New Testament calls new wine skins. In other words, it makes sense to build something green and integral from bottom to top that can be home and workplace and cultural space for from five to ten-thousand.

Green yes. Beyond green and integral. Absolutely. Changing the world. Understood.

Comments

[cylindar]

Excellent post. Bravo!!

[Stephen C. Rose - Huffpost Blogger]

I want to thank everyone for their responses. I thought this had gotten lost!

Anyway I do want to address one salient point: Whether the future, like the past, will require "work" --carrying things like the garbage and doing the wash and so forth.

It would seem that some of what we call corporate enterprise is about avoiding this and that some green thinking is about hallowing or dignifying it.

My own attitude is that by engineering and design based somewhat on Pattern Language (humanized) principles we can make life a lot easier for everyone.

My own notion has been the creation of human settlements that are designed to eliminate massive amounts of what burden us these days. If Barack gets in I would like to talk to folk like Davit Wilhelm who intersect corporate and green realms. And when the campaign is over I intend to spell some of this out better.

There is no reason why we cannot minimize "work". But it will take the same amount of adjustment it would take us to be willing to ride with strangers instead of driving solo in something that weighs 20 or so times what we do.

[DickTater]

My response to KillTheMessenger below

I thoroughly agree we have no journalism (the only profession even MENTIONED in the Constitution and Founding Articles).
I agree with what you say. However, you seem to be expecting Americans to wake up someday and change this. Chicken or Egg? Corporations hold ALL THE REINS OF POWER in this country, and the biggest is the Media Megaphones. We cannot get smarter when we are intentionally being kept in the dark.

An absolute throwing out of the corporations, and regaining our media is absolutely necessary. But who is going to tell us this....the Media?

Catch 22. Only fire and death will purge the festering gangrenous organisms which assail us.....and brought to us by those Magnificent Corporations.

[KillTheMessenger]

I expect America to slowly fade away in the 21st century while Asia takes over the world. I hope it can do so with some amount of dignity and without going on a thermonuclear rampage.

To have been an empire in the past is something wonderful. Look how well the Spanish are doing. Look at the wonderful things the British are doing with their country. Look at how much happier the Germans are now that they have given up their dreams of world domination. Even the Russians are doing a lot better since they have lost the cold war. And it did not exactly hurt the French either to have lost Indochina and North Africa.

It's the same with the US. As soon as this country gives up the dream to be the world's police man, it will be able to focus on itself and get its affairs in order. And then it will be able to focus again on arts and sciences, the only things that really matter for humanity in the long run. The only things we remember about the Greeks and the Romans are their statues and buildings and we care little to nothing about their military exploits.

About the getting smarter thing: sure you can get smarter without tv and newspapers. There is a little thingy called the internet that gets you all the information from all over the world right into your homes. And the libraries have never gone away.

[DickTater]

Again, I agree with you all around. But you act like there is no badguy at the wheel, pumping horrible misinformation and hiding other information.

I am not dependent on tv for news and to inform my worldview. But a full 80-90 percent of america is glued to their tv. Only a small percent know what is really going on....leaving about 70% of our culture in thrall. And no wonder, these same TV companies have done everything possible to kill print media, and they are doing their damndest to kill the internet.

It isn't all so free and easy as you say....there are powerful forces actively keeping americans dumb. It is going to be a long long time until they all shake loose and stagger away from The Mezmerizer.

[Stanley]

The utopien fream has been embarked on time and again with little sustenance. We can envision what it will be like but the cold reality is that some poor bastard has to go out and plant the crops and pick-up the garbage. Most success has been measured by the ability to avoid hard work and provide more time to think. How we then spend that time becomes our definition of culture. Unfortunately, this model always creates the subjegated losers on one side and the powerful warrior/merchant class on the other. No matter how you break down the ideology it is some form of this basic inequality. All politics have just been convoluted efforts to disguise or exploit this fact. What becomes apparent is that there needs to be an technological innovation like we have never seen to minimize the pain of the subjegated worker and a general enlightenment to create a general awareness of commonality of purpose. We are all connected and solving problems together makes them smaller for everyone. Both require manifest shifts that can start in theories or societal visions of utopia but really only happen with spiritual connection to the source of these solutions which lies within each of us. We all have to wake up at the same time for it to work. It's not the system or political vision that needs altering as much as the eyes that view it.

[KillTheMessenger]

That "poor bastard" does not have to be a human being. It can be (and more often than not these days happens to be) a machine. As of now we still need humans to control the machines that do the work of many other humans, but it is only a matter of time and technological advance before even that becomes increasingly less important.

The shocking consequence of this development which has just begun (and will take centuries to come to full fruition) is that the "poor bastards" are not needed. They have no place between the ranks of the machine owners and their machines. This is not a new insight, by the way. Marx saw this in full bloom in his time, although he could not have possibly imagined how quickly the cancer he diagnosed would spread. And he could also not have foreseen which forms it would eventually take on.

As of today we live in a quickly shifting balance of cheap human labor and increasingly productive machine labor which creates enormous wealth that still somewhat trickles down, although the political forces in the US try to dry that trickle up. But at some point in time the trickle will stop all by itself even under the best of circumstances and then we will be left with the question how we redistribute the wealth generated by the machines to the people who are needed as consumers without going through the device of full time employment.

[Henry]

When you take the fundamental look at the economy, you see production, the total of everything produced. Then you see wages, which are considerably "less" than even the "cost" component of production. It is impossible for the sum total of income to "clear" the sum total of production. Introduce "lending" whereby the market can be "cleared" of all production with "deferred" claims on future wages. If you do the arithmetic, you can see that this does not work. Add to this the ups and downs of the interest on the borrowed money which also is claims on future wages and you can see that you need an increasing amount of "extraneous" purchaing power (capital gains on the abstraction of value change) to clear the market. etc etc... it's all trickle down voo doo
Quite simply, the arithmetic does not add. Currently we consume over our heads by "monetization" of our recurring trade deficits...which only makes the balloon increase and hopefull the eventual pop will occur after the time that I'm happily ensconced with 72 virgins. (best case scenario for me)

[KillTheMessenger]

Regarding the virgins I would issue a "beware what you wish for", but the remainder of your analysis is spot on.

:-)

[ConCreteHead]

Stephen, Thank you so much for your post on this subject. I don't consider myself a republican or really a democrat. I consider myself a left leaning libertarian that has no-one to vote for, but OBAMA's message does speak to me if he can actually deliver from the White House.

However, I feel that both parties are doing more and more to accommodate Wall Street’s vision of not only what our countries economic policies are but what Wall Street’s policy is for the global economy.

The biggest problem today is that no one knows how money is actually created. We are a country completely uneducated in not only the creation of currency but how new debt and currency effects the market as a whole. This should be taught from Jr. High School on through College and how it effects different industries/careers so people can get a handle on what our corporate and political leaders have done to our economy and now our country.

This is the link to a 47 minute explanation of what "MONEY" is in our current economic system. Anyone interested in taking a look will see the failed policies dating back to about 1968.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279

I hope anyone reading this will take the time to watch this because it attacks the problem from the middle not the left or the right. Very interesting and will hopefully open some eyes.

Thanks for keeping us informed Stephen, your writing is appreciated.

[TaosJohn]

"The reason the current crisis is not economic is that our economy is by any measure unsustainable."

Absolutely!

This post is PERFECT. Right on the money. And you're not the only one who feels that way! Thank you, brother.

[KillTheMessenger]

Our crisis is intellectual. Uninformed voters deprived of logical thinking ability elect power drunk politicians with similar traits which then prepare the breeding grounds for generations of short sighted, greed driven business people. The result is that the voters lose. Which Forrest Gump succinctly summarizes as "Stupid is as stupid does."

Vote stupid again and be prepared to suffer the consequences.

[DickTater]

I don't see how you can ignore, that the populace gets all it's news from the Boob Toob.

When your "national journalism" is displayed to the prols thru the TV and Radio
you can expect wonderfully informed population....if the TV was a wonderfully fair and open and informative device. it had every possibility of being that device, unfortunately we don't have that.

We have a terribly slanted, corporate device which does more to obscure than to clarify.

[KillTheMessenger]

I don't ignore it. It is one of my indicators for how stupid Americans really are. The first time a European gets his hands on the remote of a US tv he notices that there is no news on tv. The first time we read your newspapers we find that you don't have a press. All you have is machinery to make you feel good about yourselves and to sell ads between endless opinion pieces. Journalism is virtually extinct over here, if it has existed to begin with.

So why don't you have that? Because you like watching what you got and think it's the best invention since sliced bread. And that is the reason why it will never get better. The intellectual failure of the tv generation simply perpetuates itself in an endless downward spiral.

[DickTater]

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Corporate Media (TV and Radio)
I wonder how we'll ever get OUR message across on that Hostile Media playing field.

GE and TimeWarner don't want us to stop being consumeristic fools.

Our whole country is held in thrall, prob. to the tune of 80%, gobbling up whatever TV feeds them.
If you think TV news and Political coverage is bad, what about the vast majority of their airtime....telling you to keep buying stuff and everything is ok. Hell, even the News is chopped up with commercials telling you to keep buying Viagra and everything is just fine.

Nothing has kept our eye off the ball like the Consumer Lords.

[Stephen C. Rose - Huffpost Blogger]

If Barack wins, I trust him to begin deeper explorations than we have had since the sixties. We are at the start of a swing that I thought might not happen until around 2020. The "Force" seems to be speeding things up. I think folk like Rachel Maddow will emerge to create a media that is somewhat less dunderheaded than at present.

[Stephen C. Rose - Huffpost Blogger]

The reference to this blog is to my personal blog which is concerned presently with electing Barack Obama. But behind that concern is an enduring commitment to a post-green world.

http://stephencrosehome.blogspot.com