Friday, January 23, 2009

A New Kind of Economy-- Revised

"When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money."--Dmitry Orlov as reported by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker January 26, 2009.

I will not provide a conventional economic analysis here for two reasons. The first being that I am not really qualified to do so, and there are plenty of economists talking around if not directly about the implications of Orlov's statement above. The second reason is much more simple, we know what capitalism is, its benefits and detriments, at least to some degree.

What Dmitry Orlov points to for me is a much broader statement about wealth that exists far beyond the parameters set forth by our economy. The fall of the consumption- based economy creates the space for a re-evaluation of other less easily measurable commodities. Re-evaluation and not evaluation because "to evaluate" is too passive a description of what now seems possible. When money is not so available as it has been for the last decade or more, a population who, within a spectrum, in some fundamental way, relied upon currency-backed (or consumption power) self-valuation, is forced to find a new way to measure their worth.

So where to? Social entrepreneurship is on the rise, our political system glimmers with possibility of a better day for more people-- and yet we know that day is many difficult days away. What cynics call an impossible utopia, one defined by mutual human interest, a respect for the humanity of the other which undeniably binds us together, where we recognize the responsibility of the individual to carry the community of all, the other, the neighbor, the stranger, in her heart. As our brilliant President Barack Obama said just a few days ago, "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply." I would amend Obama's statement by staying that the paradigm shift will reach and must reach ALL sectors, not only the political.

All cannot know immense currency-backed wealth-- for if it were-- currency would be forever relegated to worthlessness, a simple law of supply and demand. But love, this is an unlimited resource, one that can make even the most despondent full of worth, of wealth, of hope, of possibility.

The above quote was excerpted from a wholly fascinating article entitled The Dystopians.

Dystopia: An imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression or terror.
Dystopian: Of relating to a dystopia; dire, grim.
Utopia: An ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political and moral aspects.
Utopian: Of relating to a utopia; excellent or ideal but impracticable; visionary.

Dystopian and Utopian are inextricably related world views, one with an overly optimistic formulation and the other formed by sheer pessimism with regards to systems in their current state. But both are acknowledgments of broken systems that cannot be simply gorilla-glued back together; systems that are forever shattered and must be recomposed by a complete reconstitution of values. Competition, limited commodities, these require humans to fundamentally respond in kind with self-interest; it is the fight or flight mechanism, hard-wired for survival. The primacy of currency-backed economics means that while some are fighting for their stock portfolios, the rest are fighting for their lives.

Ben McGrath references three men each of whom are living a different take on a dystopian perspective. The first as mentioned above is Dmitry Orlov, who gave up his house and is living on a sailboat, a vessel he describes as his “survival capsule.” The second subject of the article is James Howard Kunstler, who in his weekly blog, “Clusterfuck Nation” most recently described the American public as “a public so demoralized by their own bad choices that the USA scene has devolved to a non-stop Special Olympics of everyday life, where absolutely everybody is debilitated, deluded, challenged, or needs a leg up, or an extra buck, or a pallet on the floor, or a gastric bypass, or a week in detox, or a head-start, or a fourth strike, or a $150-billion bailout.” And the struggles out in front of us as a quandary: “how do you re-shape [the American people] into a population guided by a sense of earnest purpose, with reality-based expectations, with habits of delayed gratification and impulse control, and a sense of their own history?” Good question.

The third man profiled in this article is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Within The Dystopians, Taleb references a solution, or the inevitable paradigm shift as a reversion to “antiquity, a new classical era.” The problem with a sense that this shift is a “reversion,” especially when coming from someone such as Taleb, is that it implies an inescapable linear sense of time and space; forward or backward, future or history. What about recognizing that a classical age in 2009 is not a reversion but a reconstitution. Herein, we would gather tools used in and learned from a classical age and reconfigure their application to our current state of affairs. The toolbox upon which the U.S. has depended for much of the last century (at least), of dividends, debts, profits, etc., can no longer be applied to the problems of the U.S.; upon this all dystopians and utopians alike must agree.

Nassim Talib is author of The Black Swan a book about how “exceptional, unpredictable event[s]…carry a huge impact.” Talib describes himself on his blog Fooled By Randomness, in this way: “I am interested in how to live in a world we don’t understand very well—in other words, while most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions. I am interested in how to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of “knowledge” into decisions—how not to be a turkey.” Talib’s solution to avoiding Turkey-dom, is trial and error, to tinker. “We need more tinkering: uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination…as we tinker, we have a capacity for choosing the best outcomes.” This tinkering requires immense flexibility of mind, body, and spirit. Perhaps this is why Talib lives by the ancient adage “you find peace by coming to terms with what you don’t know.”

If you are comfortable living in the world and owning what you do not know, is it not easier to respond to an unexpected situation with a solution that has a better outcome? Is this why Carolyn Baker, author of Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Civilization’s Collapse, is so excited by collapse? “ …that’s the exciting thing about collapse—the breaking down of barriers and definitions that don’t work anymore.” Perhaps those barriers and definitions never really stood with foundations to begin with, and were simply created post-facto as a rationalization for randomly occurring synchronicities.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Physics Applied to Human Relationships

All actions have an equal and opposite reaction. Physicists have proven this central law of physics down the to the subatomic scale. So why is it then so difficult to recognize that such a law also exists at the human scale. Causal relationships that can be drawn in any number of directions across multiple points or perspectives, are so great in number and rich with possibility that we must indeed begin to recognize that with every decision, transaction, point of engagement, there are consequences. Or perhaps we do recognize this causal relationship we have with all that surrounds us, but given the magnitude of the results, we choose what is easiest—see the effects that are closest to us and ignore the reverberations beyond our immediate surroundings. The inherent problem here is that we have grown our reaches far beyond our immediate world—the world comprised of our immediate relationships. Globalization has created a new spectrum through which our daily choices travel far beyond our localized experience.