The world has certainly been turned upside down by the Covid pandemic and many of our institutions are showing their age and limitations.
The Generals are spending significant amounts of public wealth on a war that was won thirty years ago and any more than can be invented. Our political system is offering us a choice between a deranged clown and a demented puppet, both with significant communication issues. Even the supposed Masters of the Universe are finding the systems they have developed seriously unsettled by the situation.
What lessons do we learn, other than what is obvious? That the foundations of a society are every bit as important, if not more so, than the towering structures built on it.
Nature is a process of trial and error, of sorting out what works and for how long. It might be time to consider some different methods of understanding who we are and where we are going.
For example, the cultural foundation of the West is monotheism. Logically though, a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images and storyline on it.
Though no society could function by simply reveling in sentience and so the Ancients settled on this father figure lawgiver as the symbol of life and the basis of society. After thousands of years and various resets, giving rise to multiple branches, it does not quite serve as effectively as it once did, to organize society.
Although the conceptual shadow, of conflating the ideal with the absolute, remains strong. Whether it is of wealth, or individualism, or communism, or happiness, or any number of other goals and ideals various peoples and groups put forth as the ultimate state.
The problem is that we live in a reality that is more a cycle between binaries. More the yin and yang, than God Almighty, or whatever our particular creed puts forth. Even matter is more the tension and balance between positive and negative charge, than it is any base substance. So even the nihilism of materialism suffers under the illusion of this focused reductionism.
The fact is that our mental functions are fundamentally reductionist, as we spend our lives sorting through the masses of information for the signals most important to us. Yet nature is more complicated. As Newton put it, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” We live in a cyclical, reciprocal, feedback generated reality and while we are constantly seeking that ideal state, it is the constant blowback of our actions as a species which is our greatest concern. We are not going to colonize space, if we can’t even get along with our own planet. The noise we discard remains the context giving structure and substance to the signal we extracted. The network is foundational to the node.
For example, in our current economic system, we treat money as the signal to extract and store, from the noise of society and the economy. Yet markets need money to circulate, in order to function. So we keep having to add more and find more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted.
Given money functions as a contract, with the asset backed by a debt, storing the asset requires sufficient debt to back it. One method is to squeeze the flow of money to the regular economy, requiring it to run on ever more debt and drawing that investment money back into circulation. Think all those mortgages, car, student, credit card loans, etc, bundled and sold as investments.
The other is to have the government as debtor of last resort. The capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in otherwise surplus investment capital. Where would it go, otherwise? Derivatives?
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, yet a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium. Fat, as well as muscle and bone, are stores. Roads are a medium, while parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, while the hall closet is a store. The average five year old understands the difference, but economists apparently lack that level of insight.
The functionality of money is in its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water passing through our bodies. It really does function as a public utility, like roads and needs to be treated as such. It is an economic lubricant, not a fuel. The problem isn’t so much injecting it where it is most effective, barring current levels of corruption, but pulling it out, when there is an excess. Logically the government could tax out what it currently borrows, but since we are trained to think of it as property, rather than a contract between the individual and the community, that isn’t possible.
So if, make that when, given the current mess cannot continue much longer, people came to understand its true function, they would learn to store value in more tangible assets.
There simply isn’t the investment potential to save the amounts we need, but we all save for many of the same reasons, from housing and healthcare, to raising children and retirement, that if these could be invested in directly, as community assets and networks, than maybe we wouldn’t have such atomized cultures. Society and the environment would be stores of value and not just resources to be mined.
Yet what are the chances of this happening? Logically one thing we should be able to change are our beliefs, but most often they are what we cling to most tightly, in times of stress.
Though as Philip K. Dick put it; “Reality is what doesn’t go away, when we stop believing in it.”
