This article raises a very basic issue. That the old order has to start crumbling, before people are willing to question the premises underlaying human civilization and examine alternatives.
As mobile organisms, we evolved a sequential thought process to navigate our environment, which is attenuated by narrating our journeys to each other and building cultures and civilizations from the cummulative knowledge.
As such, this linear and direction focused effort creates the impression that we are going somewhere and have built, especially in the West, an ideals oriented culture, which effectively translates that if some is good, more is better, from morality to money. Yet nature is composed of infinite feedback loops, that allow waves to build and subside, as the energy disperses.
Three of the most essential paradigms being assumed are time and God and money.
The sequential experience amounts to the point of the present, “moving” from prior to succeeding events, past to future, Which even physics codifies as measures of duration, while the evident physical process is action/change turning future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this present state, as events coalesce and dissolve.
This makes time an effect of activity, similar to temperature, pressure, color, etc. As such, thermodynamic feedback loops are far more foundational to our reality, than the sequencing of time. Even galaxies, as cycles of energy radiating out and mass/structure coalescing in, amount to cosmic convection cycles.
A simple, but effective understanding of reality is this basic dichotomy of energy and the forms it manifests. As biological organisms, we evolved around the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing and circulating the energy driving us on, to future events. Along with a nervous system to sort through and process the forms and information coalescing out of this process, as they fade into the past, for lesson to apply to future encounters. Especially as much of this activity is occurring at the speed of light and so our instincts and emotions, both associated with the heart and gut, can react, before the more conscious functions can lumber into gear and organize coherent thought. So energy and form go opposite directions of time.
Which leads to the issue of God. Logically a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, bubbling up through life and from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the new born, than the wise old man. Yet just as our emotions are filtered through the cognitive thought process, in order for us to function as singular beings, so to do societies need to filter through some collective structuring, in order to function as coherent entities. Thus our top down religious models.
Good and bad are not some cosmic duel, between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken and there is no middle ground, other the energy of the chicken flowing into the fox.
Yet this top down structuring is not absolute, but only ever a node in some larger network. While entities go future to past, processes go past to future. Think factories; The product goes start to finish, while the process goes onto the next, consuming material and expelling product. As do individuals go birth to death, future to past, while the species goes onto the next generation, shedding the old. As does consciousness go from one thought to the next, while thoughts form and dissolve.
All the while the feedback of individual experiences affects the direction of the process. For example, some of the energy radiated away from manufacturing provides the wages and profits motivating it.
The primary issue with our current economic model of capitalism is that money functions as the contract enabling mass societies to function. Essentially vouchers/accounting devices, with one side an asset and the other a debt. The problem is that we experience it as quantified hope and try saving and storing it. Going to the issue of idealism and more must be better.
As a contract, it makes for a very effective medium, for the efficient transfer of value around the economy, but a very poor store of value, as every asset is balanced by a debt and so the build up of assets requires an equal accumulation of debts, that invariably become unsustainable.
As analogies, in the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store, or for cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store. In these examples, it is obvious they cannot be confused.
So the function of capitalism has mutated from the effective transfer of value, around the markets, to the manufacture of money, as an end in itself.
Then the question is as to how this excess is stored. After the Crash of 29 and the start of the Depression, Roosevelt instituted the New Deal. Given this is the point where the national debt started to grow and never looked back, it is apparent the function of this government borrowing and spending, intentional, or not, was not only to put unemployed labor to work, but unemployed capital, as well. Then when WW2 started, this process kicked into overdrive and the military became the box into which much of the surplus wealth was poured, presumably stored as the safest of investments, government debt. Which was then shifted up another gear, by Reaganomics.
So my argument is the feedback loop created, amounts to blowing up third world countries, as a way to use up the wealth being siphoned out of first world economies. With the public left responsible for guaranteeing the return of this value. Potentially setting up a situation where disaster capitalism/predatory lending comes home to roost and public properties are sold at firesafe prices, as those controlling the process know who their future employers will be.
As such, it is a dynamic which needs debating publicly, as there is no viable long term return to this investment and even many of those currently benefiting are going to see the bottom drop out, as those piles of wealth sitting in bonds implode, in a world awash in guns and collapsing legal protections.
