The greatest opportunity for change is when the old systems break down and that is currently happening. What new systems will emerge?
I would like to offer up several observations, as to how the old ways of thinking can be changed. If anyone wants to run with them…
As mobile, intentional creatures, with a narrative based culture, we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which even physics codifies as measures of duration. The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it, aka, causality and conservation of energy. Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, sound. Think frequencies and amplitudes.
How might this affect how we see the world? Given that our culture is narrative based, we tend to be more focused on the ends, than the means. Yet we now live in a world where we are destroying the very environment from which we rose, in order to store abstract units of value, as the goal in life. If we better understand the over-all circularity, the thermodynamic feedback loops driving everything, we might better appreciate how reality actually functions and why we seem to be at such odds with it.
For one thing, everyone has a deep seated need for connection that is often described as spiritual, but our religious model posits some unfathomable ideal of knowledge and judgement, to which we might meekly aspire, yet the ideal is not the absolute. Logically a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, bubbling up through life, not an ideal of knowledge, wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. While no culture could function by simply reveling in sentience, it can be quite emotionally, socially and politically corrosive to think of the ideal as absolute. For one thing it takes the premise of the ideal, which is always ephemeral and grants it universality. On a personal level, it means no person can ever live up to a standard that is beyond comprehension, but also it becomes a tool for political forces to take all authority unto themselves. Remember that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures and when Western society went back to such bottom up systems, it required a separation of church and state, effectively culture and civics. Which is another very broad issue that will have to be addressed by some generation, if not ours.
As for our current economic paradigm, capitalism, it assumes the validity of a market based economy, but that is a fallacy.
As mass society evolved, it developed a system of finance and money as a medium of exchange and collective voucher system/accounting device.
Markets need money to circulate, in order to function, but as these goal oriented creatures, we see it as the signal to extract from the noise of society and the economy, to save and store. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more corrosive, metastatic ways to store what has been extracted.
Even though Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, while fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old senses the difference, but economists seem to lack that level of insight.
Since much money functions as a contract, with the asset backed by debt, in order to store the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated.
Anyone with even the most passing knowledge of the capital markets should realize they simply could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in otherwise surplus capital. Where would it go otherwise? Derivatives? Apple stock? The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
The functionality of money is in its fungibility. It is a lubricant, not a fuel. we own it like we own the section of road are are using, or the fluids and air passing through our bodies. The fact is that money, like roads, are a public utility and need to be thought of as such. As in, “taking the punch bowl away, when the party gets going.” Not just pouring more vodka in, when it runs low.
We all cannot save what amount to vouchers, as a way to secure our future. There simply isn’t the viable investment potential out there. Currently we are blowing up other countries, with a lot of the public debt and this will prove to be a poor long term investment.
We do save for many of the same reasons, such as raising children, housing, healthcare, retirement, etc, so if these could be invested in directly, as community assets and networks, rather than trying to save for them individually, we would have stronger societies and healthier environments, as stores of value and not just resources to be mined.
I could go on, but the basic point is that we do have some serious thinking to do, about the assumptions we have built our cultures around. The fact is that we are not going back to the ways things are and either we find ways to move forward, or we can continue to muddle along and hope either Biden or Trump will save us.
