Developed as part of Stories from 2050
What makes me hopeful about 2050 is the growing incompetence of the current economic system to truly solve any of the global issues we face. While before the #pandemic there was a lot of noise interfering with the reception of a message pointing to the economic system and its governing forces as the root causes of most of our negligence, destruction and suffering, #Covid made it blatantly obvious that the governing structures of our world are hopelessly obsolete and actually an obstacle to human progress.
But the same #system you criticize created a number of vaccines in a record time! So what do you mean, you ask?
Yes, we got the vaccines so that we could return to the so-called ‘normal’ much faster. But what is the ‘normal’? Jobs, Saturday shopping trips, consumption, waste, stress, boom-bust cycle, another UN report where we learn we crossed yet another planetary threshold, evening news where we learn...uhm..nothing actually, and so on. I like to think about the ‘normal’ as a value system that generates the very behavior we see around us. A #behaviour that is grossly #unsustainable. And while most of us have had a hunch that something is off, it may require a complete ideological uprooting to see the structure for what it really is. John McMurtry, University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada, put it well when he said: “Presupposing and identifying with the value system one has been indoctrinated in day in day out as a native member of a society creates a mental block against exposing its presuppositions and mind-sets. It is assumed as the structure of one’s own being, and so critical observation of it risks the collapse of one’s identity.”
Add all the #cognitive dissonance, sunk cost effect, group mentality, etc. and it is virtually impossible to expect we will change the course of our actions in time by means of political discourse and decision-making. So we seem to be stuck with the bickering political parties, sound bites and empty slogans that basically say we need more of the behavior that got us in trouble in the first place. And so we learn that the ‘human stuff now outweighs all life on the planet’ or that we are hurtling towards a planetary ‘temperature threshold not recorded in 34 million years’. We learn that virtually none of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets have been fully met and that in fact “vertebrate species populations have fallen, on average, by more than two thirds since 1970, and by nearly one third since 2010.” And of course the tale would be incomplete if it wasn’t for an omnipresent backdrop of billionaires getting richer and richer….faster, actually, at the time of a global pandemic that has thrown countless people into #poverty.
It would be foolish to think this litany has to do with a wrong calibration of otherwise a functional system. We can reshuffle our tax schemes and churn out new legislation until we are blue in face, yet the required deep systemic changes will not be achieved. One simply cannot keep fixing that old clunky car indefinitely. At some point in time, it needs to go, all of it, so that a new, better model can be put in place. What is interesting is that the current, old economic model actually does what it’s supposed to. The students of history of economic thought are well aware of the fact that the current structure in place has been set up to protect and serve the wealthy elements in our society. This is neither a controversial nor conspiratorial statement but a matter of fact. Theoretical formulations of the concepts of market, price, property and others that underpin the contemporary capitalist variation of monetary-market economy were put forth by the high priest of economic thought a long time ago. Much of it reflected the state of the society back then - a small handful of HAVE vs. awful lot of HAVE-NOTs. But that is in no way an excuse to continue the way we’ve had. Consider the following quote from Adam Smith who, in his ‘magnus opus’ published in 1776 expressed the following: “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
James Madison, one of the architects of the US Constitution, furthered this by expressing a need to keep the wealthy and powerful in control of the poor majority. According to him: “In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.”
These are just a few examples of how the system has been set up from the beginning. Therefore, let’s not feel bewildered at the fact that the richest 1% own almost half of all global wealth or that a majority of the global population (60%) still live in poverty. The system does what it is supposed to.
But what is the way out? Once we realize that the entire #economic system does not actually ‘economize’ as it should but together with the institutions built around it serves a very narrow sliver of interests, a true out-of-the-box thinking comes to play. Sure, we can try to go down the path of #policy #advocacy - an endeavor responsible for countless burn-outs and disenchantment about how much can actually be achieved. What seems to be a much better path, however, is the path of bottom-up pressure coupled with community education and targeted activism. We need to get our act together and stop relying on institutional policies, because they can’t really address the root causes but merely treat the symptoms.
The potential of our time is immense! It is so large that probably none of us can truly imagine how our world could be transformed if it were to be released from the shackles of an outdated paradigm. Consider #AI, for instance. Just recently, a problem of protein folding scientists have been working on for 50 years has been solved by the application of AI. Imagine a world where we unleash the full potential by shifting the focus from an economy based on quantitative growth that has been destroying the planet to an economy that focuses on societal advancement. How do you think human values would change if we were not indoctrinated from the very beginning to selfishly pursue the profit motive but instead to contribute to the society at large. An economic system that would be perfectly aligned with the natural laws and would treat our #planet as a system it is. An economic system that would have the ability to correct and adjust in response to changing conditions around us as opposed to the current system which if it doesn’t grow, people suffer.
There is no point in disregarding the idea as ‘#utopia’. We know the current system does not work and to perpetuate it means to sentence countless #species of flora and fauna to extinction, including the human species. So instead, let’s start a transition to a much more sophisticated system that will allow for a full use of the potentials #human minds hold. We can start by pursuing the following five transitional pillars as described in a recently published book, The New Human Rights Movement.
The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, John McMurtry, Pluto Press, 1999
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776, par. V.1.2
Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787, Robert Yates, Alston Mygatt, p.183
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