Human survival or the survival of capitalism?
12/09/08 23:04
We may have to choose.
To those of you who might be afraid of economics and economic systems, don’t be! They are very simple. All that an economic system does is to make things, consume things and distribute things according to an allocation. That’s all!
Capitalism is equally simple...
“The decadent international but individualistic capitalism ... is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.” — John Maynard Keynes
In a way, that’s a remarkable quotation. Keynes was no revolutionary, but a very conservative and influential economist whose work inspired Western governments in their economic policy for decades, especially in the UK.
But going back to the nature of capitalism: Capitalism’s main characteristics are the accumulation of value, private ownership (of the means of production), production for profit, and hierarchical organisation of the workplace.
I feel much the same about capitalism as did Maynard Keynes. I’m equally perplexed.
I’ve been reading a lot of late about new and emerging theories about economics, politics and social organisation and came across an interesting set of criteria in some material about “participatory economics”. I’m not sure if I could accept all participatory economics’ (parecon for short) theory and ideas but I did like the six values against which these theorists evaluated the effectiveness of various economic systems.
Here they are:
1. Equity, or fair and just outcomes;
2. Caring and mutual respect among all people;
3. Diversity of outcomes which would benefit everyone;
4. Participatory self-management, or having a say in decisions to the extent that one is affected by their outcomes;
5. Efficiency, or not wasting resources;
6. Environmental sustainability.
For me, that is the most sensible and desirable list of criteria for an economic system I have ever seen. But looking at this list, capitalism doesn’t do very well. Let’s see:
• Capitalism generates atomised, self-interested behaviour, not caring and mutual respect among people.
• Capitalism generates inefficiency, since it’s based on individual behaviours.
• Capitalism’s environmental record speaks for itself; it destroys biodiversity.
• Capitalism does not promote self-management, but instead generates a situation where a few make decisions for the many.
• Capitalism does not generate diversity.
• Capitalism’s consumption is characterised by the total neglect of others. Consumers think of only themselves and can ignore the effects of the goods they buy on the environment and on the workers who produced the goods.
I’m not swinging in any political direction here either, since most of the same criticisms can be applied to socialist economic models too.
I’m not so sure about capitalism at all. It’s based on the infinite expansion of consumption. Does that work for you? Try eating more and more, year on year and see where that gets you. It’s an absurd idea I know. Capitalism is as absurd.
The American biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that if the entire world consumes at the same rate as the USA, then we would need four planet earths to sustain mankind now.
Hysterical or common sense? Better believe it’s common sense, since if we don’t address this issue in the twenty first century, there may not be a twenty second.
To those of you who might be afraid of economics and economic systems, don’t be! They are very simple. All that an economic system does is to make things, consume things and distribute things according to an allocation. That’s all!
Capitalism is equally simple...
“The decadent international but individualistic capitalism ... is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.” — John Maynard Keynes
In a way, that’s a remarkable quotation. Keynes was no revolutionary, but a very conservative and influential economist whose work inspired Western governments in their economic policy for decades, especially in the UK.
But going back to the nature of capitalism: Capitalism’s main characteristics are the accumulation of value, private ownership (of the means of production), production for profit, and hierarchical organisation of the workplace.
I feel much the same about capitalism as did Maynard Keynes. I’m equally perplexed.
I’ve been reading a lot of late about new and emerging theories about economics, politics and social organisation and came across an interesting set of criteria in some material about “participatory economics”. I’m not sure if I could accept all participatory economics’ (parecon for short) theory and ideas but I did like the six values against which these theorists evaluated the effectiveness of various economic systems.
Here they are:
1. Equity, or fair and just outcomes;
2. Caring and mutual respect among all people;
3. Diversity of outcomes which would benefit everyone;
4. Participatory self-management, or having a say in decisions to the extent that one is affected by their outcomes;
5. Efficiency, or not wasting resources;
6. Environmental sustainability.
For me, that is the most sensible and desirable list of criteria for an economic system I have ever seen. But looking at this list, capitalism doesn’t do very well. Let’s see:
• Capitalism generates atomised, self-interested behaviour, not caring and mutual respect among people.
• Capitalism generates inefficiency, since it’s based on individual behaviours.
• Capitalism’s environmental record speaks for itself; it destroys biodiversity.
• Capitalism does not promote self-management, but instead generates a situation where a few make decisions for the many.
• Capitalism does not generate diversity.
• Capitalism’s consumption is characterised by the total neglect of others. Consumers think of only themselves and can ignore the effects of the goods they buy on the environment and on the workers who produced the goods.
I’m not swinging in any political direction here either, since most of the same criticisms can be applied to socialist economic models too.
I’m not so sure about capitalism at all. It’s based on the infinite expansion of consumption. Does that work for you? Try eating more and more, year on year and see where that gets you. It’s an absurd idea I know. Capitalism is as absurd.
The American biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that if the entire world consumes at the same rate as the USA, then we would need four planet earths to sustain mankind now.
Hysterical or common sense? Better believe it’s common sense, since if we don’t address this issue in the twenty first century, there may not be a twenty second.
|
O Brave New World!
09/09/08 13:34
Where to from here? My answer is that I’m as unsure as the rest of us.
I do believe in freedom, autonomy and voluntary association as human values in which to aspire.
It surprises me how many people I talk to about freedom who appear terrified of it. I know many people are frightened of freedom, perhaps in the same way that they are frightened of responsibility. I’m not altogether sure where that fear comes from. In psychological terms, it may be from anxiety about maturation, from the desire not to leave the succour and the emotional sustenance of the providing parent. I’m not sure that is right entirely. We live in a world where we do as we’re told, and where we often conform to an infantilised state of mind. Psychologically, I wonder too what this fear of responsibility is about. Is conformity and responsibility an antithesis? It may be. Conformity is the easy way out too. It means copying someone else because another says it’s the right thing to do, rather than feeling or thinking for oneself. It is easier not to think.
There are two aspects of freedom, I believe, and they are “freedom from” that is a negative connotation and “freedom to be” which is its positive opposite. This is a little like the infant growing up. The “freedom from” is a freedom from oppressive and overbearing institutional way of life where we are told how to act, think or feel, rather than do it for ourselves. The “freedom to” part is to experience ourselves as loving, creative, constructive, responsible, actualised, and sometimes fulfilled, human beings. Resisting freedom in social terms may be the same as resisting growing up in human development.
And what of autonomy, how does that differ from freedom? Autonomy is simple. It’s the exercise of responsibility for oneself. It means taking responsibility for one’s own actions and moral decisions.
Perhaps there is a little more than that in our economic world to consider: There is the difference between “having” and “being” and how we define ourselves as human beings. If we define ourselves in economic terms, by what we have, then we lose our identity, our autonomy, if we lose our possessions. We become nothing if we have nothing.
As the psychologist and philosopher, Erich Fromm wrote: Being is about nothing more than the productive use of our human powers. “(Being means)…to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which every human is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be interested…to give.”
Freedom does present problems to humankind that have been overlooked by many individualist liberal philosophers. The major problem with freedom is that it requires individuals to exercise a high degree of personal, social and moral responsibility, rather than have someone else tell them what to do and take decisions for them.
There’s a favourite quote of mine by Nobel Prize winning American economist, James Buchanan, that I have mentioned elsewhere. He is talking about the “parental” role of government and the state:
“With parentalism…we refer to the attitudes of persons who seek to have values imposed upon them by other persons, by the state, or by transcendental forces. This source of support for expanded collectivization has been relatively neglected by both socialist and liberal philosophers, perhaps because philosophers, in both camps, remain methodological individualists.
Almost subconsciously, those scientists-scholars-academics who have tried to look at the “big picture” have assumed that, other things being equal, persons want to be at liberty to make their own choices, to be free from coercion by others, including indirect coercion through means of persuasion. They have failed to emphasize sufficiently, and to examine the implications of, the fact that liberty carries with it responsibility. And it seems evident that many persons do not want to shoulder the final responsibility for their own actions. Many persons are, indeed, afraid to be free.”
Without either freedom or responsibility, one cannot have existence by voluntary association, since voluntary association requires that humans collaborate and cooperate freely and responsibly to achieve their common goals. An intelligent observer of my writing suggested that we might need leaders since we are not necessarily capable of acting consensually, collaboratively and cooperatively. She makes a very good point.
It’s true that our present social systems are based on an authoritarian hierarchy that purports to be democratic. It is far from being truly democratic since other than deciding on the election of the “haves” or the “have mores” there is no general participation in decision-making. I have no influence over issues around health, poverty, education, social welfare and defence, other than those prescribed by alternative candidates. It’s token democracy where strong government is synonymous with state authoritarianism. The combination of the authoritarian state and multi-national capitalism means that I am told how to act, behave, think, work and consume. It erodes my humanity, since I am no longer free, but a thing, a means to someone else’s end. I am homo consumens, the consumer man.
My friend also makes an important point too indirectly about knowledge and belief. We have only very limited knowledge and experience of freedom and the exercise of personal and social responsibility since all aspects of our society are organised around leadership hierarchies where leaders take responsibility for telling others how to act. We might believe that we need leaders, since we have no experience of being without them.
I have two experiences of leadership experiments, both where, at least notionally, I was the leader.
The first was a quirky accident of fate. I was invited to join the board of a large mental health project based in London. They had a problem. They had too much money and were at risk of losing some very large government grants unless they got rid of a lot of cash quickly. Rather unflatteringly, at least so I thought at the time, I was asked to go there since their treasurer (a CPA known to me from university) felt I would know how to spend money "creatively"!
I joined the board of trustees, and within about six months, I was asked to stand to be chairman of the board. It was a trustee's voting nomination that I accepted. I accepted and was appointed.
It was an executive chairman's post and part of my job was supporting its management and staff. Within the trust, there was a deeply democratic ethos. Any employee, could attend a board meeting, and exercise voting rights in common with a board member. The only rights I had as chairman were the exercise of a casting vote in a deadlock, or a veto vote that deferred a decision to the next board meeting (that could be exercised only once).
My commercial training, and by day I worked as a chief executive of a computer software company, might have told me that this was a recipe for disaster. On the board, we had legal, financial and medical advisers, experts whose views and advice might theoretically be overturned by a junior employee.
It never worked that way, since there was a deeply respectful management style. Management’s role was not perceived to be one necessarily of leadership, control or authority, but of support, and access to the resources (including human resources) that enabled staff to undertake their work.
In theory, the employees through access and contribution to the board decision process might have caused a manager to be discharged or appointed. It never worked that way, because the role of management was to support and facilitate, rather than control.
What was even more rewarding was that not only did this odd management style that was properly democratic work, but it was enormously successful! It was so successful, in fact, that the Trust was appointed by the UK National Health Service to be its principal adviser and consultant on projects of its type. On a personal note, it was also the most alive and enjoyable place I have worked in my entire life. One of the things that distinguished this special project was the enlightened and involved attitude of its entire staff who cared deeply for what happened in their organization and jointly took responsibility for its wellbeing and its purpose.
In the nineties, I also had the experience of attempting to turn over a technology business to employee ownership and broader management participation. It could not have been more different. Some managers and employees had such profound difficulties in taking on responsibility that they teetered on the edge of sanity. Destructive sub-cultures formed who tried to usurp, seize or break off parts of the business that they could steal for themselves. In the end, I put a stop to it and returned it to its previous paternalistic management style that was, at least, largely benevolent and benign.
Of course, there was a major difference between these environments. The staff of both organizations were well paid, that much they had in common. The mental health organization had growth in its sights, but it was not its main purpose. The mental health project functioned as a trust for the benefit of those in its care; the company was a capitalist enterprise run for the benefit of its shareholders.
Despite a massive investment in culture change programmes, the underlying culture of the company was difficult to change. All that extended ownership achieved was to make manifest the unhealthy, political, opportunistic and often dishonest dynamics that existed in the workplace at almost every level. The ethos was that people worked in order to make its shareholders rich. People were a means to an end. When it was proposed to change ownership, it was seen as an opportunity by some to do to others, what had been done to them.
I’ll continue to think about this dilemma. I am unsure as to whether freedom and capitalism are contradictory forces. In my past, I had thought that, in a way, capitalism might embody freedom, but now I’m undecided. I’ll go away and think about the human values that underpin our capitalist societies. By the way, I’m opposed to socialism in all its previous manifestations too. Capitalism may be the lesser of two evils, where socialism represents authoritarian, and often totalitarian, state control.
More soon…
I do believe in freedom, autonomy and voluntary association as human values in which to aspire.
It surprises me how many people I talk to about freedom who appear terrified of it. I know many people are frightened of freedom, perhaps in the same way that they are frightened of responsibility. I’m not altogether sure where that fear comes from. In psychological terms, it may be from anxiety about maturation, from the desire not to leave the succour and the emotional sustenance of the providing parent. I’m not sure that is right entirely. We live in a world where we do as we’re told, and where we often conform to an infantilised state of mind. Psychologically, I wonder too what this fear of responsibility is about. Is conformity and responsibility an antithesis? It may be. Conformity is the easy way out too. It means copying someone else because another says it’s the right thing to do, rather than feeling or thinking for oneself. It is easier not to think.
There are two aspects of freedom, I believe, and they are “freedom from” that is a negative connotation and “freedom to be” which is its positive opposite. This is a little like the infant growing up. The “freedom from” is a freedom from oppressive and overbearing institutional way of life where we are told how to act, think or feel, rather than do it for ourselves. The “freedom to” part is to experience ourselves as loving, creative, constructive, responsible, actualised, and sometimes fulfilled, human beings. Resisting freedom in social terms may be the same as resisting growing up in human development.
And what of autonomy, how does that differ from freedom? Autonomy is simple. It’s the exercise of responsibility for oneself. It means taking responsibility for one’s own actions and moral decisions.
Perhaps there is a little more than that in our economic world to consider: There is the difference between “having” and “being” and how we define ourselves as human beings. If we define ourselves in economic terms, by what we have, then we lose our identity, our autonomy, if we lose our possessions. We become nothing if we have nothing.
As the psychologist and philosopher, Erich Fromm wrote: Being is about nothing more than the productive use of our human powers. “(Being means)…to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which every human is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be interested…to give.”
Freedom does present problems to humankind that have been overlooked by many individualist liberal philosophers. The major problem with freedom is that it requires individuals to exercise a high degree of personal, social and moral responsibility, rather than have someone else tell them what to do and take decisions for them.
There’s a favourite quote of mine by Nobel Prize winning American economist, James Buchanan, that I have mentioned elsewhere. He is talking about the “parental” role of government and the state:
“With parentalism…we refer to the attitudes of persons who seek to have values imposed upon them by other persons, by the state, or by transcendental forces. This source of support for expanded collectivization has been relatively neglected by both socialist and liberal philosophers, perhaps because philosophers, in both camps, remain methodological individualists.
Almost subconsciously, those scientists-scholars-academics who have tried to look at the “big picture” have assumed that, other things being equal, persons want to be at liberty to make their own choices, to be free from coercion by others, including indirect coercion through means of persuasion. They have failed to emphasize sufficiently, and to examine the implications of, the fact that liberty carries with it responsibility. And it seems evident that many persons do not want to shoulder the final responsibility for their own actions. Many persons are, indeed, afraid to be free.”
Without either freedom or responsibility, one cannot have existence by voluntary association, since voluntary association requires that humans collaborate and cooperate freely and responsibly to achieve their common goals. An intelligent observer of my writing suggested that we might need leaders since we are not necessarily capable of acting consensually, collaboratively and cooperatively. She makes a very good point.
It’s true that our present social systems are based on an authoritarian hierarchy that purports to be democratic. It is far from being truly democratic since other than deciding on the election of the “haves” or the “have mores” there is no general participation in decision-making. I have no influence over issues around health, poverty, education, social welfare and defence, other than those prescribed by alternative candidates. It’s token democracy where strong government is synonymous with state authoritarianism. The combination of the authoritarian state and multi-national capitalism means that I am told how to act, behave, think, work and consume. It erodes my humanity, since I am no longer free, but a thing, a means to someone else’s end. I am homo consumens, the consumer man.
My friend also makes an important point too indirectly about knowledge and belief. We have only very limited knowledge and experience of freedom and the exercise of personal and social responsibility since all aspects of our society are organised around leadership hierarchies where leaders take responsibility for telling others how to act. We might believe that we need leaders, since we have no experience of being without them.
I have two experiences of leadership experiments, both where, at least notionally, I was the leader.
The first was a quirky accident of fate. I was invited to join the board of a large mental health project based in London. They had a problem. They had too much money and were at risk of losing some very large government grants unless they got rid of a lot of cash quickly. Rather unflatteringly, at least so I thought at the time, I was asked to go there since their treasurer (a CPA known to me from university) felt I would know how to spend money "creatively"!
I joined the board of trustees, and within about six months, I was asked to stand to be chairman of the board. It was a trustee's voting nomination that I accepted. I accepted and was appointed.
It was an executive chairman's post and part of my job was supporting its management and staff. Within the trust, there was a deeply democratic ethos. Any employee, could attend a board meeting, and exercise voting rights in common with a board member. The only rights I had as chairman were the exercise of a casting vote in a deadlock, or a veto vote that deferred a decision to the next board meeting (that could be exercised only once).
My commercial training, and by day I worked as a chief executive of a computer software company, might have told me that this was a recipe for disaster. On the board, we had legal, financial and medical advisers, experts whose views and advice might theoretically be overturned by a junior employee.
It never worked that way, since there was a deeply respectful management style. Management’s role was not perceived to be one necessarily of leadership, control or authority, but of support, and access to the resources (including human resources) that enabled staff to undertake their work.
In theory, the employees through access and contribution to the board decision process might have caused a manager to be discharged or appointed. It never worked that way, because the role of management was to support and facilitate, rather than control.
What was even more rewarding was that not only did this odd management style that was properly democratic work, but it was enormously successful! It was so successful, in fact, that the Trust was appointed by the UK National Health Service to be its principal adviser and consultant on projects of its type. On a personal note, it was also the most alive and enjoyable place I have worked in my entire life. One of the things that distinguished this special project was the enlightened and involved attitude of its entire staff who cared deeply for what happened in their organization and jointly took responsibility for its wellbeing and its purpose.
In the nineties, I also had the experience of attempting to turn over a technology business to employee ownership and broader management participation. It could not have been more different. Some managers and employees had such profound difficulties in taking on responsibility that they teetered on the edge of sanity. Destructive sub-cultures formed who tried to usurp, seize or break off parts of the business that they could steal for themselves. In the end, I put a stop to it and returned it to its previous paternalistic management style that was, at least, largely benevolent and benign.
Of course, there was a major difference between these environments. The staff of both organizations were well paid, that much they had in common. The mental health organization had growth in its sights, but it was not its main purpose. The mental health project functioned as a trust for the benefit of those in its care; the company was a capitalist enterprise run for the benefit of its shareholders.
Despite a massive investment in culture change programmes, the underlying culture of the company was difficult to change. All that extended ownership achieved was to make manifest the unhealthy, political, opportunistic and often dishonest dynamics that existed in the workplace at almost every level. The ethos was that people worked in order to make its shareholders rich. People were a means to an end. When it was proposed to change ownership, it was seen as an opportunity by some to do to others, what had been done to them.
I’ll continue to think about this dilemma. I am unsure as to whether freedom and capitalism are contradictory forces. In my past, I had thought that, in a way, capitalism might embody freedom, but now I’m undecided. I’ll go away and think about the human values that underpin our capitalist societies. By the way, I’m opposed to socialism in all its previous manifestations too. Capitalism may be the lesser of two evils, where socialism represents authoritarian, and often totalitarian, state control.
More soon…
Economics may be bad for your health! - Part 2
11/08/08 13:51
Benefits of economic growth
Economic growth has long been the goal of conventional economics and politics. It is both the prize and the credo that governs our daily lives. I am unsure as to whether infinite growth is either achievable, sustainable, or for that matter desirable or beneficial to society as a whole.
The arguments in its favour go something like this:
1. Increased consumption is good for you! Greater consumption equals greater prosperity. The economic assumption is that consumption is related to utility, where utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of the consumption of goods. Put very crudely, greater consumption is a measure of success, wealth and good fortune.
2. Increased earnings means increased taxation that in turn creates better healthcare, education and welfare services (or some cynics might say, more money to spend on wars!).
3. Economic growth creates jobs. Higher employment means less poverty. This is something of a fallacy. In some parts of Europe, including where I live in France, there is something called “structural unemployment” that is brought about by structural changes in the underlying needs of the local economy and the geographical distribution and concentrations of the population. In short, there is a mismatch between people living in a place and the employment opportunities available to them there, that is only capable of remedy over time, usually long periods of time.
That’s the theory, at least!
So what’s the problem?
1. Is infinite economic growth sustainable or desirable?
I read a report last year by an economist who predicted that very soon the world's manufacturing capacity will outstrip its ability of consumption. Simply put that means soon we will be able to make more than we need or can ever hope to use. So what happens then?
If you have a house, two cars and all the other things you need, why would you want to own more houses, or three cars, or even two washing machines? Infinite growth in consumption makes no sense. Does increased ownership lead to greater utility or satisfaction? Of course, it does not and there is a law of diminishing returns when people have more money than things to spend it on. That is to say, the utility of ownership diminishes, and when that happens so does the value of goods, which in turn creates more economic pressures.
For sections of the population who experience dire poverty and unemployment, economic growth may provide a remedy, but the evidence is that high economic growth can cause greater inequality and a real increase in relative poverty (Brookings Institution 2007), since it is the better educated and already wealthy that tend to benefit from economic growth rather than the less well off.
2. Damage to the environment through increased pollution that is a consequence of economic growth is becoming a real problem for the entire world. Of course, a benefit of growth might be the investment in technologies that create less pollution. To-date this appears to have been viewed as a lower priority than the pursuit of wealth for its own sake.
3. Increased inequality gives rise to more crimes and social problems. Between 1960 and 1990 the US crime rate went up by some 300%. While crime rates in the USA may have peaked out now, there is nevertheless a strong correlation between economic growth and increasing crime rates.
4. High economic growth is a slave-driver and has led to longer hours worked with a commensurate increase in personal and social anxiety. An economist might argue that this reflects the fact that people value money more than leisure or quality of life. How would they know when they have no leisure? That takes me to my next point…
5. The American Medical Association maintains that stress is a significant determinant in 80% of all our illnesses (that is not to say it’s the only cause). It could be argued that heart disease, obesity and stress related illnesses are a direct consequence of economic growth.
So what of increased prosperity? What of economic growth?
They have created as many new problems as they have solved.
It may be time to look for a better way.
I do not believe that politics holds all the answers either. Left-wing, right-wing or centrist mass politics have all shown themselves to be deeply flawed.
It is not something that the cult of the presidential individual can possibly apprehend. Barrack Obama or John McCain will make no difference, nor will Gordon Brown or Nicholas Sarkozy. I am unsure as to how well the ideology of nation states will serve the world in the long-term either.
One thing is for sure, if we want a better world, then we will all have to take responsibility for its wellbeing, all of us, without exception. That is the underlying principal of true democracy that we claim to hold so dear. It is not enough, as we have in the past, to argue for political freedom alone; there is social, personal and psychological freedom to consider too.
Economic growth is not the Holy Grail.
So what next?
Economic growth has long been the goal of conventional economics and politics. It is both the prize and the credo that governs our daily lives. I am unsure as to whether infinite growth is either achievable, sustainable, or for that matter desirable or beneficial to society as a whole.
The arguments in its favour go something like this:
1. Increased consumption is good for you! Greater consumption equals greater prosperity. The economic assumption is that consumption is related to utility, where utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from or desirability of the consumption of goods. Put very crudely, greater consumption is a measure of success, wealth and good fortune.
2. Increased earnings means increased taxation that in turn creates better healthcare, education and welfare services (or some cynics might say, more money to spend on wars!).
3. Economic growth creates jobs. Higher employment means less poverty. This is something of a fallacy. In some parts of Europe, including where I live in France, there is something called “structural unemployment” that is brought about by structural changes in the underlying needs of the local economy and the geographical distribution and concentrations of the population. In short, there is a mismatch between people living in a place and the employment opportunities available to them there, that is only capable of remedy over time, usually long periods of time.
That’s the theory, at least!
So what’s the problem?
1. Is infinite economic growth sustainable or desirable?
I read a report last year by an economist who predicted that very soon the world's manufacturing capacity will outstrip its ability of consumption. Simply put that means soon we will be able to make more than we need or can ever hope to use. So what happens then?
If you have a house, two cars and all the other things you need, why would you want to own more houses, or three cars, or even two washing machines? Infinite growth in consumption makes no sense. Does increased ownership lead to greater utility or satisfaction? Of course, it does not and there is a law of diminishing returns when people have more money than things to spend it on. That is to say, the utility of ownership diminishes, and when that happens so does the value of goods, which in turn creates more economic pressures.
For sections of the population who experience dire poverty and unemployment, economic growth may provide a remedy, but the evidence is that high economic growth can cause greater inequality and a real increase in relative poverty (Brookings Institution 2007), since it is the better educated and already wealthy that tend to benefit from economic growth rather than the less well off.
2. Damage to the environment through increased pollution that is a consequence of economic growth is becoming a real problem for the entire world. Of course, a benefit of growth might be the investment in technologies that create less pollution. To-date this appears to have been viewed as a lower priority than the pursuit of wealth for its own sake.
3. Increased inequality gives rise to more crimes and social problems. Between 1960 and 1990 the US crime rate went up by some 300%. While crime rates in the USA may have peaked out now, there is nevertheless a strong correlation between economic growth and increasing crime rates.
4. High economic growth is a slave-driver and has led to longer hours worked with a commensurate increase in personal and social anxiety. An economist might argue that this reflects the fact that people value money more than leisure or quality of life. How would they know when they have no leisure? That takes me to my next point…
5. The American Medical Association maintains that stress is a significant determinant in 80% of all our illnesses (that is not to say it’s the only cause). It could be argued that heart disease, obesity and stress related illnesses are a direct consequence of economic growth.
So what of increased prosperity? What of economic growth?
They have created as many new problems as they have solved.
It may be time to look for a better way.
I do not believe that politics holds all the answers either. Left-wing, right-wing or centrist mass politics have all shown themselves to be deeply flawed.
It is not something that the cult of the presidential individual can possibly apprehend. Barrack Obama or John McCain will make no difference, nor will Gordon Brown or Nicholas Sarkozy. I am unsure as to how well the ideology of nation states will serve the world in the long-term either.
One thing is for sure, if we want a better world, then we will all have to take responsibility for its wellbeing, all of us, without exception. That is the underlying principal of true democracy that we claim to hold so dear. It is not enough, as we have in the past, to argue for political freedom alone; there is social, personal and psychological freedom to consider too.
Economic growth is not the Holy Grail.
So what next?
Economics may be bad for your health! - Part 1
11/08/08 11:45
Recession! What recession?
So what is this new economic crisis? Are we moving towards the Armageddon of western economics? What does and will recession mean?
Economists define recession as a decline in the production of gross domestic product for six-months based on measures taken in two three month periods.
Neither the USA nor the UK are experiencing what is described as “negative growth” currently, although there is a widely held belief that we may be heading towards recession.
A lot of factors are being cited as the cause of our current economic difficulties, among which are:
1. The crash in the housing market.
The boom in the housing market was an absurd phenomenon.
House prices in the UK were rising at rates of more than six times the rate of inflation in some years.
Suddenly the world was awash with property millionaires. Someone who had bought a London house for £72,000 ($144,000) in 1983 and stayed put, woke up to find their property is worth £1.6 million in 2007! ($3.2 million). A new two bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Oxford, close to a railway line came onto the market last year at around £500,000 ($1 million). Think about it, one million dollars for a small apartment in a small city outside London!
The average age of a first time house buyer is currently somewhere in the mid-thirties age range. So where do the rest live? How do teachers, nurses, doctors, police and essential service staff ever afford these prices? The answer is they don’t.
It had to stop, and stop it did. House prices are going down in the UK. Economic reports from the USA say that house prices there are over-valued by at least 40%, although by UK standards house prices in the USA look dirt-cheap! Prices have fallen by up to 25% in the past year in (some parts of) the USA.
House price equity in an overblown, pumped-up market is fool’s gold. It is wealth created by a market without any corresponding new value. It has provided a mirage of prosperity by fuelling consumer spending and debt.
To put all this in perspective, the average house price in the UK (across all regions) is about £220k ($440k), the average salary is somewhere in the region of £22k - £26k ($44k - $52$k).
So people have taken risks with borrowing, sometimes taking out loans of between 8 and 10 times their annual salaries in order to own a home. It should come as no surprise therefore that the housing market is in deep trouble.
2. So-called high-risk lending, the “sub-prime” market is collapsing. Sub-prime lending involves lending money for greater returns to poorer people who would not otherwise be able to afford conventional home loans. It’s an economic contradiction that sustains poverty. If one is poor access to money comes at a higher price than if one is rich.
Falling house prices in the USA and to some extent, the UK, means a risk of negative home equity at a very high price. Home repossessions are increasing fast. There is an increasing rate of defaults that means that banks lose money and so do the mortgage companies.
3. So we have:
• Shortage of mortgage funding and banks teetering on the edge of solvency
• Decline in market confidence that affects all sectors of the economy
• Property prices that became vastly overvalued
• Increase in supply accompanying falling demand, with housing costs still running at levels in the UK that are inaccessible to average wage earners, young people and essential service providers
4. Next! There’s the ever-increasing oil price pushing up costs. There is the rising cost of food too that is not necessarily all tied to the cost of oil.
5. One more…the booming house price mirage fuelled consumer borrowing. A falling house market and lowered confidence in the rest of the economy means that people are taking on less debt and looking to save. This in turn means lower consumer spending. Lower consumer spending means lower production that increases the chance of a recession. It is interesting to me that that financial prudence, as I might see it, and a move away from consumption for consumption’s sake has an adverse economic consequence. I’ll come back to that in part 2.
Summary
There are a number of factors involved in our current economic difficulties, but the two main issues as I see them are the decline of an over-heated housing market and a decrease in consumer spending.
Part 2 will be about whether economic growth is beneficial to us all. My feelings are that it is not such a good thing after all. We may need to change the way we view our economic lives.
So what is this new economic crisis? Are we moving towards the Armageddon of western economics? What does and will recession mean?
Economists define recession as a decline in the production of gross domestic product for six-months based on measures taken in two three month periods.
Neither the USA nor the UK are experiencing what is described as “negative growth” currently, although there is a widely held belief that we may be heading towards recession.
A lot of factors are being cited as the cause of our current economic difficulties, among which are:
1. The crash in the housing market.
The boom in the housing market was an absurd phenomenon.
House prices in the UK were rising at rates of more than six times the rate of inflation in some years.
Suddenly the world was awash with property millionaires. Someone who had bought a London house for £72,000 ($144,000) in 1983 and stayed put, woke up to find their property is worth £1.6 million in 2007! ($3.2 million). A new two bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Oxford, close to a railway line came onto the market last year at around £500,000 ($1 million). Think about it, one million dollars for a small apartment in a small city outside London!
The average age of a first time house buyer is currently somewhere in the mid-thirties age range. So where do the rest live? How do teachers, nurses, doctors, police and essential service staff ever afford these prices? The answer is they don’t.
It had to stop, and stop it did. House prices are going down in the UK. Economic reports from the USA say that house prices there are over-valued by at least 40%, although by UK standards house prices in the USA look dirt-cheap! Prices have fallen by up to 25% in the past year in (some parts of) the USA.
House price equity in an overblown, pumped-up market is fool’s gold. It is wealth created by a market without any corresponding new value. It has provided a mirage of prosperity by fuelling consumer spending and debt.
To put all this in perspective, the average house price in the UK (across all regions) is about £220k ($440k), the average salary is somewhere in the region of £22k - £26k ($44k - $52$k).
So people have taken risks with borrowing, sometimes taking out loans of between 8 and 10 times their annual salaries in order to own a home. It should come as no surprise therefore that the housing market is in deep trouble.
2. So-called high-risk lending, the “sub-prime” market is collapsing. Sub-prime lending involves lending money for greater returns to poorer people who would not otherwise be able to afford conventional home loans. It’s an economic contradiction that sustains poverty. If one is poor access to money comes at a higher price than if one is rich.
Falling house prices in the USA and to some extent, the UK, means a risk of negative home equity at a very high price. Home repossessions are increasing fast. There is an increasing rate of defaults that means that banks lose money and so do the mortgage companies.
3. So we have:
• Shortage of mortgage funding and banks teetering on the edge of solvency
• Decline in market confidence that affects all sectors of the economy
• Property prices that became vastly overvalued
• Increase in supply accompanying falling demand, with housing costs still running at levels in the UK that are inaccessible to average wage earners, young people and essential service providers
4. Next! There’s the ever-increasing oil price pushing up costs. There is the rising cost of food too that is not necessarily all tied to the cost of oil.
5. One more…the booming house price mirage fuelled consumer borrowing. A falling house market and lowered confidence in the rest of the economy means that people are taking on less debt and looking to save. This in turn means lower consumer spending. Lower consumer spending means lower production that increases the chance of a recession. It is interesting to me that that financial prudence, as I might see it, and a move away from consumption for consumption’s sake has an adverse economic consequence. I’ll come back to that in part 2.
Summary
There are a number of factors involved in our current economic difficulties, but the two main issues as I see them are the decline of an over-heated housing market and a decrease in consumer spending.
Part 2 will be about whether economic growth is beneficial to us all. My feelings are that it is not such a good thing after all. We may need to change the way we view our economic lives.
Isn't it about time we asked...?
09/08/08 21:06
Isn’t it about time we asked:
1. Why religions which teach acceptance, tolerance and love, achieve little more than racial and social divisiveness and hatred?
2. Why there is still poverty, famine and starvation in a world that is capable of producing all that it needs for everyone?
3. Why over a million people have been killed in a war in Iraq that was allegedly about that country producing Weapons of Mass Destruction when there were none?
4. Why war is waged against Iraq in the cause of the war against terror when the Bin Ladens were an enemy of Saddam Hussein, but one-time friends of the Bush family?
5. Why in the war against Iraq, the allied forces went in and protected the Ministry of Oil and its oil wells and left that country’s cultural and historical heritage to looters?
6. Why we support infinite economic expansion that is impossible to sustain and makes us into economic slaves fraught with anxiety in its service?
7. Why we support authoritarian social and political structures that have failed us time and time again, rather than choosing social, personal and psychological freedom, and exercising responsibility for the world we live in?
8. Why ownership, being successful and making money is preferable to loving, personal relationships, being creative and building real quality of life?
9. Why Britons and Americans on average now spend around a working day or month or more, making friends on MySpace and Facebook rather than making friends in real life? (How many of your friends on social networks would give up a day to help you with a real problem in your life?)
10. Why we support commodity capitalism that turns everyone into “things” in support of its values of selfishness and greed and undermines the spirit of trust and cooperative human development?
11. What lasting benefit America has achieved for the world in any war it has waged since 1945? (Which wars have been won and for what?)
12. What the hell we are doing?
So what are we doing and thinking? It feels like time for change. Now who is going to be the first to tell me that I’m naïve and idealistic?
Back to the future, part 4 - Afterthoughts - about the mind
07/05/08 07:53
In my earlier blogs on "Back to the future", I talked a little about mind. Theories about the mind abound. I see the mind as a distinct human capability that facilitates our rational (or irrational) understanding of the world. It's our biological survival mechanism, no more than that. The mind is simply a tool, one tool through which we seek to understand the world. It works by detecting similarities and differences in the world around us, of associations and dissociations too. It's like a pattern recognition engine and as such it operates at a relatively slow speed. I see our world of feelings, emotions and intuition existing separately and outside this concept of mind. Intuition, our sense of knowing without any rational basis for understanding, is something that operates at far higher speed than our minds and is capable of even changing our rational perception of time.
The mind functions with stress. There is healthy and unhealthy stress. Certain levels of stress are necessary for our survival. Without stress we would do nothing and accomplish nothing. We need stress to create and to work, we even need levels of stress to cause us to get out of bed in the morning! Stress is the first resort of the mind beyond its rational powers of pattern recognition. It can be healthy.
We live in a world now where there are billions of decisions being taken each second, where stress levels are increasing to almost universally intolerable levels. The American Medical Association wrote that stress is a major determinant in 80% of our illnesses. Note that stress is not a cause although it can be. But 80% of our illnesses are brought about by stress, stress running at high and unendurable levels. That is completely mind-boggling.
It's no surprise then that the people who survive best in our corporate cultures are those who can cope with higher levels of stress than others. The people who inhabit the mahogany or glass corridors of power within our corporate worlds are those who can endure potentially unhealthy levels of stress.
They also tend to be those who, in my view, have the most highly developed and well-articulated powers of intuition. Intuition is of great benefit in overcoming stress. Intuition coupled with an actualised and aware emotional self produces the charisma we look up to in our leaders. It is their sense of awareness, self-esteem and confidence that gives them the ability to lead and attracts our admiration of them. My notion of a psychologically well-developed and stable individual is one where they have an integrated and actualised mind (intellect), intuition and advanced state of emotional development, somewhere near self-actualisation.
I'll come back to that point but want to stay on track in developing this idea of mind. Beyond stress, our human defence mechanisms start clocking in. The first of these is our tendency towards "fight or flight". I learned recently from a friend that there are companies now that teach methods of understanding and working with our flight or fight responses to situations. I have experience of other organisations that use biofeedback mechanisms to help control the panic that this state evokes.
I'll share one very evocative example of what this fight and flight stuff feels like. A long while ago, I gave an hour-long talk on the future of computer architectures. 130 people had paid £200 each to hear me speak.
The first nasty little demon that went to work on me, firing up my stress levels to fight and flight proportions was that wicked little demon that I call my inner critic, sometimes it's my conscience but generally this small monster is less helpful than that. I see conscience as part of my emotional affective make-up but the "inner critic" is part of my mind and that's an important distinction.
So off it went, this demon talked to me and said things like, "So these guys have paid £26,000 to hear you talk for an hour? What do you think of that? Do you feel hearing you is worth that sort of money? Who are you trying to kid? No way is what you have to say in an hour is worth £26,000 ($52,000). So this had better be bloody good! Are you sure you are up to this?" It went on and on, this little monster fired up my anxiety to almost terror levels. I wanted to run away!
Fortunately I had been trained in giving presentations and I knew what I had to do. To make matters worse, my pre-booked taxi to take me to the conference venue failed to show. After remonstrating with the taxi firm, one did finally arrive, but got stuck in traffic close to the venue. I needed to be on time, not to let my audience down and ended up running the last few hundred yards to the venue. I drank water and got myself in good order for the presentation. But I was still in fight or flight mode.
I walked onto the podium and the conference organiser put on one of those radio microphones, the sort that hangs round your neck. It fell to my left and suddenly what I could hear being amplified around the room was my heart beat running at about 140 beats per minute or so. Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom through every loud speaker in the hall. I could hear it and so could my audience. I grabbed the mike and shoved it over to the right side of my chest. This rapid heartbeat is typical of fight and flight. It was beating so fast and my mind had sent messages to my body to pump out the adrenalin needed to run and run very fast.
But I knew this one very well. I had learned the first few minutes of that presentation off by heart. No notes were needed; I could have given the presentation in complete darkness. I started speaking, going for the high-impact opening of the sort that grabs the audience's attention. I knew after two minutes that I had them hooked, I could see them listening and being engaged by what I had to say. It was at this point that I felt my heartbeat slow, my body relax, my intuition take over and that I switched over to working in a way that I instinctively knew would carry me through this performance. My talk was very well-received. So it is possible to get through fight and flight but only by reversion to our intuitive, emotional or feeling selves.
Going one step further down this process, one on from fight or flight, is the reaction to walk away. This really is a biological response. We have all seen it work in cats and dogs, for example. When dogs and cats sense a bad smell or someone they don't like, what they do is get up and walk away. It is often the very best way of dealing with danger, just getting up and walking away from it and moving into some safer space.
Finally, the last resort of the mind is the unconscious. The unconscious is the place where we often stuff fears, anxieties, anger and feelings about ourselves and others that are too difficult for us to cope with. I wrote about this in my blog "Back to the Future part 2". There I wrote, "The unconscious is the last resort of the mind. I don't trust mind. I recognise it serves my sense of survival well but that is as far as it goes. The unconscious is that place where we push down all the muck, slime, hurt, pain, anger, anxieties and all those other things that are too difficult for us to face and to look at about ourselves. It's the stuff that we repress in our unconscious that frequently comes back to bite us. We project these "shadow" parts of ourselves onto others often to justify doing hurt and violence towards them. It's these dark parts of our unconscious that we turn outwards to do hate, violence, racism and prejudice, or else we turn it inwards to do addictions, depression, suicides and other crippling behaviour."
I'll stick with this view. The unconscious is a very powerful defence mechanism. The trouble with it is that it leaks!
It leaks through projections, its outward turning manifestation or those crippling behaviours I talk about here. It also leaks into our conscious mind through dreams and comes out in our behaviour towards others, often our very worst behaviour.
We all have unconscious selves, none of us have mastered the art of remaining fully conscious, although I am trying in all that I do every day to become more and more conscious but I do not believe that I will ever reach a state of enlightened full and actualised consciousness. I have lots of fears and anxieties too that I know exist in things that I have pushed down into my unconscious mind. Frequently, I try to call these fears and anxieties to account, to try and understand them. I know that simply by taking a good long look at them often, by holding them in my hand, allowing myself to experience what I need to feel I can work to understand what is happening in my unconscious mind, by drawing out and admitting what I feared into the open.
It's not always easy to do this. I know that in facing some of my anger and fears that I have had to allow myself to feel rage, deep sadness and to weep. It's hard to do that often especially in a world that encourages us to disregard aspects of our feeling selves or that encourages us to believe that sadness and weeping is a form of weakness, and that anger is basically wrong. But it is what we need to allow to happen in ourselves in order to recover our wholeness, our ability to function as properly feeling and balanced human beings.
Finally, I'll repeat some words from Ian Lungold that have been haunting me lately. He said, "Remember your mind is not your friend!" He talks about the hostility of the unconscious parts of our selves of the sort that would have us kill others or ourselves. He is so right. So remember your intellect is not your friend! If you take nothing else from this, take this message home.
The mind functions with stress. There is healthy and unhealthy stress. Certain levels of stress are necessary for our survival. Without stress we would do nothing and accomplish nothing. We need stress to create and to work, we even need levels of stress to cause us to get out of bed in the morning! Stress is the first resort of the mind beyond its rational powers of pattern recognition. It can be healthy.
We live in a world now where there are billions of decisions being taken each second, where stress levels are increasing to almost universally intolerable levels. The American Medical Association wrote that stress is a major determinant in 80% of our illnesses. Note that stress is not a cause although it can be. But 80% of our illnesses are brought about by stress, stress running at high and unendurable levels. That is completely mind-boggling.
It's no surprise then that the people who survive best in our corporate cultures are those who can cope with higher levels of stress than others. The people who inhabit the mahogany or glass corridors of power within our corporate worlds are those who can endure potentially unhealthy levels of stress.
They also tend to be those who, in my view, have the most highly developed and well-articulated powers of intuition. Intuition is of great benefit in overcoming stress. Intuition coupled with an actualised and aware emotional self produces the charisma we look up to in our leaders. It is their sense of awareness, self-esteem and confidence that gives them the ability to lead and attracts our admiration of them. My notion of a psychologically well-developed and stable individual is one where they have an integrated and actualised mind (intellect), intuition and advanced state of emotional development, somewhere near self-actualisation.
I'll come back to that point but want to stay on track in developing this idea of mind. Beyond stress, our human defence mechanisms start clocking in. The first of these is our tendency towards "fight or flight". I learned recently from a friend that there are companies now that teach methods of understanding and working with our flight or fight responses to situations. I have experience of other organisations that use biofeedback mechanisms to help control the panic that this state evokes.
I'll share one very evocative example of what this fight and flight stuff feels like. A long while ago, I gave an hour-long talk on the future of computer architectures. 130 people had paid £200 each to hear me speak.
The first nasty little demon that went to work on me, firing up my stress levels to fight and flight proportions was that wicked little demon that I call my inner critic, sometimes it's my conscience but generally this small monster is less helpful than that. I see conscience as part of my emotional affective make-up but the "inner critic" is part of my mind and that's an important distinction.
So off it went, this demon talked to me and said things like, "So these guys have paid £26,000 to hear you talk for an hour? What do you think of that? Do you feel hearing you is worth that sort of money? Who are you trying to kid? No way is what you have to say in an hour is worth £26,000 ($52,000). So this had better be bloody good! Are you sure you are up to this?" It went on and on, this little monster fired up my anxiety to almost terror levels. I wanted to run away!
Fortunately I had been trained in giving presentations and I knew what I had to do. To make matters worse, my pre-booked taxi to take me to the conference venue failed to show. After remonstrating with the taxi firm, one did finally arrive, but got stuck in traffic close to the venue. I needed to be on time, not to let my audience down and ended up running the last few hundred yards to the venue. I drank water and got myself in good order for the presentation. But I was still in fight or flight mode.
I walked onto the podium and the conference organiser put on one of those radio microphones, the sort that hangs round your neck. It fell to my left and suddenly what I could hear being amplified around the room was my heart beat running at about 140 beats per minute or so. Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom through every loud speaker in the hall. I could hear it and so could my audience. I grabbed the mike and shoved it over to the right side of my chest. This rapid heartbeat is typical of fight and flight. It was beating so fast and my mind had sent messages to my body to pump out the adrenalin needed to run and run very fast.
But I knew this one very well. I had learned the first few minutes of that presentation off by heart. No notes were needed; I could have given the presentation in complete darkness. I started speaking, going for the high-impact opening of the sort that grabs the audience's attention. I knew after two minutes that I had them hooked, I could see them listening and being engaged by what I had to say. It was at this point that I felt my heartbeat slow, my body relax, my intuition take over and that I switched over to working in a way that I instinctively knew would carry me through this performance. My talk was very well-received. So it is possible to get through fight and flight but only by reversion to our intuitive, emotional or feeling selves.
Going one step further down this process, one on from fight or flight, is the reaction to walk away. This really is a biological response. We have all seen it work in cats and dogs, for example. When dogs and cats sense a bad smell or someone they don't like, what they do is get up and walk away. It is often the very best way of dealing with danger, just getting up and walking away from it and moving into some safer space.
Finally, the last resort of the mind is the unconscious. The unconscious is the place where we often stuff fears, anxieties, anger and feelings about ourselves and others that are too difficult for us to cope with. I wrote about this in my blog "Back to the Future part 2". There I wrote, "The unconscious is the last resort of the mind. I don't trust mind. I recognise it serves my sense of survival well but that is as far as it goes. The unconscious is that place where we push down all the muck, slime, hurt, pain, anger, anxieties and all those other things that are too difficult for us to face and to look at about ourselves. It's the stuff that we repress in our unconscious that frequently comes back to bite us. We project these "shadow" parts of ourselves onto others often to justify doing hurt and violence towards them. It's these dark parts of our unconscious that we turn outwards to do hate, violence, racism and prejudice, or else we turn it inwards to do addictions, depression, suicides and other crippling behaviour."
I'll stick with this view. The unconscious is a very powerful defence mechanism. The trouble with it is that it leaks!
It leaks through projections, its outward turning manifestation or those crippling behaviours I talk about here. It also leaks into our conscious mind through dreams and comes out in our behaviour towards others, often our very worst behaviour.
We all have unconscious selves, none of us have mastered the art of remaining fully conscious, although I am trying in all that I do every day to become more and more conscious but I do not believe that I will ever reach a state of enlightened full and actualised consciousness. I have lots of fears and anxieties too that I know exist in things that I have pushed down into my unconscious mind. Frequently, I try to call these fears and anxieties to account, to try and understand them. I know that simply by taking a good long look at them often, by holding them in my hand, allowing myself to experience what I need to feel I can work to understand what is happening in my unconscious mind, by drawing out and admitting what I feared into the open.
It's not always easy to do this. I know that in facing some of my anger and fears that I have had to allow myself to feel rage, deep sadness and to weep. It's hard to do that often especially in a world that encourages us to disregard aspects of our feeling selves or that encourages us to believe that sadness and weeping is a form of weakness, and that anger is basically wrong. But it is what we need to allow to happen in ourselves in order to recover our wholeness, our ability to function as properly feeling and balanced human beings.
Finally, I'll repeat some words from Ian Lungold that have been haunting me lately. He said, "Remember your mind is not your friend!" He talks about the hostility of the unconscious parts of our selves of the sort that would have us kill others or ourselves. He is so right. So remember your intellect is not your friend! If you take nothing else from this, take this message home.
Back to the future, part 3
07/05/08 07:50
On reading parts 1 and 2 of this blog, a friend said to me, "Do you think the world can be changed by a minority of conscious people, when so many are content to remain blinkered?"
I'm going to answer this but I will try and do it as factually as I can. This is straight off the top of my head without the aid of textbooks.
Big changes in our world are on their way. You can either believe that or bury your head in the sand, but big changes will happen anyway. There is nothing we as individuals can do to prevent those. Here I'm going to focus on the economic and political outlook. I know a little about economics and I'll just give you the benefit of my limited education.
Let's say it's correct that soon world production capacity outstrips consumer demand. What happens then? That's simple enough to answer: Prices will fall as companies are forced to compete to protect their market share. As prices fall, profits are put under pressure. As profits come under pressure, markets fall. If markets fall long and hard enough, it's called a recession, or a slump or a crash. When that happens, unemployment increases. As unemployment increases, so does social unrest. So that's one hypothesis that may underpin social change.
Also at present the USA is the dominant political and economic power in the world. It is dominant, not because Americans are nice people or that they make good movies. It is dominant because it is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. It is sheer economic power that underpins the USA's power and influence, nothing else. This may change in the near future.
Despite what some people might say, George Bush is no fool. He has bolstered the American economy by allowing the dollar to devalue against other currencies by approximately 33% over the past five years. What that means effectively is that American goods are a third cheaper than they were five years ago in world markets, if the selling prices have remained the same. There has been some inflation in the USA too but nevertheless, this devaluation is very significant. A country cannot continue to devalue its currency indefinitely. In effect, it's reducing the price of the dollar and ultimately that has the same result as reducing the price of goods.
Let's go another way for a moment. I understand that the price of electrical, leisure and clothing goods have fallen in the UK over the past couple of years. I seem to remember that the price drops have been dramatic, like in double figure percentages. Two factors may be in play here: One is that supply may be outstripping demand in these areas already. The other might be the influence of China and its developing economy with its lower costs coming into play in the new global economy. Certainly we have benefited economically from the exploitation of lower cost labour from countries in Eastern Europe that have recently joined the European Union.
Now let's go to China. China's economy is in a very early stage of capitalist development. Its economic capacity is huge. It's vast and it's many times greater than that of the USA. So what happens if China becomes the new economic super-power of the 21st century? What will happen if China, not the USA, is pulling the strings on the world stage? There's another factor, the costs structures in China are perhaps below 10% of what they are here in the west. What happens to our markets if we reduce the cost of goods by 90%? Could you manage on 10% of your wages? These are rhetorical questions.
We could try and keep the Chinese at bay through tariff barriers and other means of market exclusion, but we left that kind of stuff behind twenty or so years ago. We're living in a global free capitalist economy now. No-one wants to get back high degrees of state regulation again, economically or otherwise. If anything they want the degree of State control reduced still further. That after all is what George Bush is actually doing at present!
There's the other factor too. Our western businesses need access to the Chinese markets to bolster their flagging profits and to realise growth. There is not too much more dramatic economic growth that can be achieved here in the west anymore. We have full supply already.
One last thing: Most of our economic development and most of our technology development in the west over the last sixty years have been caused by wars. It's no wonder that the Germans and the Japanese economies have grown to be so strong. Their countries had the opportunities to rebuild and modernise their economic infrastructures as a result of being completely devastated in the second world war. In the UK, we tried to keep doing the same old thing but then everything changed as international competition in world markets intensified, particularly during the last twenty years of the 20th century.
But think about all that new technology we have now, miniaturised electronics and the like. Most of our brave new world of electronics has been developed as a result of, or at least the pace of its development has been supported by, war. By going out and killing people! There was the cold war too, there were not too many people killed in that one, but it did have that certain feeling that if the cold war had gone hot, then we might reasonably have contemplated the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust.
I'll leave you with that thought again. What happens when and if China displaces the USA as the world's new economic and political superpower? Who becomes the third world then? If you know the answer, then let me know. I'll end with a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte who said, "Let China sleep, for when she awakes the whole world will know."
Well, it's wakey-wakey time in more ways than one!
Footnote: This was written originally in October last year before the collapse of the “sub-prime” mortgage market, the banking crisis – the extent of which is not yet known (and may not be known until after the US presidential elections), and the recent surge in oil prices.
I'm going to answer this but I will try and do it as factually as I can. This is straight off the top of my head without the aid of textbooks.
Big changes in our world are on their way. You can either believe that or bury your head in the sand, but big changes will happen anyway. There is nothing we as individuals can do to prevent those. Here I'm going to focus on the economic and political outlook. I know a little about economics and I'll just give you the benefit of my limited education.
Let's say it's correct that soon world production capacity outstrips consumer demand. What happens then? That's simple enough to answer: Prices will fall as companies are forced to compete to protect their market share. As prices fall, profits are put under pressure. As profits come under pressure, markets fall. If markets fall long and hard enough, it's called a recession, or a slump or a crash. When that happens, unemployment increases. As unemployment increases, so does social unrest. So that's one hypothesis that may underpin social change.
Also at present the USA is the dominant political and economic power in the world. It is dominant, not because Americans are nice people or that they make good movies. It is dominant because it is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. It is sheer economic power that underpins the USA's power and influence, nothing else. This may change in the near future.
Despite what some people might say, George Bush is no fool. He has bolstered the American economy by allowing the dollar to devalue against other currencies by approximately 33% over the past five years. What that means effectively is that American goods are a third cheaper than they were five years ago in world markets, if the selling prices have remained the same. There has been some inflation in the USA too but nevertheless, this devaluation is very significant. A country cannot continue to devalue its currency indefinitely. In effect, it's reducing the price of the dollar and ultimately that has the same result as reducing the price of goods.
Let's go another way for a moment. I understand that the price of electrical, leisure and clothing goods have fallen in the UK over the past couple of years. I seem to remember that the price drops have been dramatic, like in double figure percentages. Two factors may be in play here: One is that supply may be outstripping demand in these areas already. The other might be the influence of China and its developing economy with its lower costs coming into play in the new global economy. Certainly we have benefited economically from the exploitation of lower cost labour from countries in Eastern Europe that have recently joined the European Union.
Now let's go to China. China's economy is in a very early stage of capitalist development. Its economic capacity is huge. It's vast and it's many times greater than that of the USA. So what happens if China becomes the new economic super-power of the 21st century? What will happen if China, not the USA, is pulling the strings on the world stage? There's another factor, the costs structures in China are perhaps below 10% of what they are here in the west. What happens to our markets if we reduce the cost of goods by 90%? Could you manage on 10% of your wages? These are rhetorical questions.
We could try and keep the Chinese at bay through tariff barriers and other means of market exclusion, but we left that kind of stuff behind twenty or so years ago. We're living in a global free capitalist economy now. No-one wants to get back high degrees of state regulation again, economically or otherwise. If anything they want the degree of State control reduced still further. That after all is what George Bush is actually doing at present!
There's the other factor too. Our western businesses need access to the Chinese markets to bolster their flagging profits and to realise growth. There is not too much more dramatic economic growth that can be achieved here in the west anymore. We have full supply already.
One last thing: Most of our economic development and most of our technology development in the west over the last sixty years have been caused by wars. It's no wonder that the Germans and the Japanese economies have grown to be so strong. Their countries had the opportunities to rebuild and modernise their economic infrastructures as a result of being completely devastated in the second world war. In the UK, we tried to keep doing the same old thing but then everything changed as international competition in world markets intensified, particularly during the last twenty years of the 20th century.
But think about all that new technology we have now, miniaturised electronics and the like. Most of our brave new world of electronics has been developed as a result of, or at least the pace of its development has been supported by, war. By going out and killing people! There was the cold war too, there were not too many people killed in that one, but it did have that certain feeling that if the cold war had gone hot, then we might reasonably have contemplated the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust.
I'll leave you with that thought again. What happens when and if China displaces the USA as the world's new economic and political superpower? Who becomes the third world then? If you know the answer, then let me know. I'll end with a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte who said, "Let China sleep, for when she awakes the whole world will know."
Well, it's wakey-wakey time in more ways than one!
Footnote: This was written originally in October last year before the collapse of the “sub-prime” mortgage market, the banking crisis – the extent of which is not yet known (and may not be known until after the US presidential elections), and the recent surge in oil prices.
Back to the future, part 2 - On consciousness, unconsciousness and intuition
07/05/08 07:47
Time varies according to one's perception of it and how one is perceiving it.
It bends, warps, slows down and speeds up.
I remember being involved in a motorcycle accident a long time ago. A car pulled out in front of me when I was travelling at about 40 miles per hour. It was just feet away, I had no time to think, no time to apply the brakes. My motorcycle struck the car square on between the front and rear doors, and I was sent flying through the air. My body continued to travel at the same speed as the bike through the air. Perhaps it was two or three seconds in time, perhaps it was less than that before I came crashing to the ground. In whatever brief time it was, I saw whole passages of my life – it felt like minutes of film footage. I was totally conscious of what was happening too, and seemed to have time to prepare myself to land in a way that caused me the least physical damage. My mind would have just shut down and probably done denial of the event had it been in control. But it wasn't anymore. I believe that what happened is that my intuition had taken over completely, it created my time, and its perceptions saved my life. Hitting the ground at 40 mph is not something I would recommend. It really hurts! But intuitively I landed in a way that did me the least physical damage.
I was very fortunate. I had some very bad bruises, grazed knees, and I had chipped a tiny piece of bone from one of my knees. After the shock, I stood up much to the amazement of two policemen whose car had been travelling too close behind me and had collided with a lamp-post at the roadside to avoid hitting the car that blocked their way.
So here in my flight through the air was a sense of not only time slowing down, but also of time almost stopping; of my intuition showing me that my life was valuable in its moments of my life's reflections and having "time" to prepare myself to land.
Some sportsmen, I have heard said and Lungold also makes this point, see their games whether soccer or basketball in slow motion as they fly over the ground at high speed. This is also how intuition works. Our mind has its cycling time a little like a camera operating slowly. Our intuition varies perceptions of time to suit our consciousness and intent.
On the mind: It's said to operate at approximately twenty four frames per second. It is worth noting that one twenty fourth of a second is too slow to take a photograph with a camera without some artificial support, like a tripod. Handholding a camera using that speed would usually cause camera shake and distort the image. That is how slow it is and how slow our mind works at its fastest.
In part 1 of this piece, I felt that I was not really clear about the importance of consciousness, that it is consciousness, both individually and collectively that upholds our social worlds.
It is shifts in consciousness, not technology, consumption, money markets or any aspect of our physical environment or social, political and economic systems that causes change. Back in 1962, when Kuhn wrote about "paradigm shifts", he talked about scientific revolutions occurring when a body of beliefs, what we are calling consciousness, could no longer uphold the reality they created.
There are conflicting realities in science too that co-exist, and one may embrace one or the other or synthesise or combine them in a new form of consciousness.
It is consciousness that governs our perceptions of the world that in turn creates our realities. How and what we perceive is our reality, to that extent a philosopher might say that truth is relative. I am not that sure that discussions of absolute or relative truth are that helpful in a world that is governed by consciousness and our perceptions of that world.
Consciousness also produces ideologies that uphold the status quo. Ideo is from the Greek word meaning ideas and logos to the systematic organisation of ideas and doctrines. What is really fascinating are the many different ways we have chosen to translate logos to suit the context. Logos is translated in the bible to mean the 'word of god'; it also gives us the word logic meaning rational or scientific reasoning, so even an ideology has different realities. They are man-made and upheld by our consciousness. They are often contradictory and conflicting.
Being conscious of consciousness frees us to perceive and feel deeper within ourselves and within our world. It gives us the power to question our knowing and where it comes from.
Consciousness is very powerful and empowering. There are many in the world who would wish us to be neither conscious or intuitive, since both states of being liberate us into the freedom by which we might see their realities for what they are. Turn on your TV and tune into Fox. They have a reality in which I would rather not believe. But the media bombards us with ideas about reality, the urge to consume and to uphold repugnant values. Perhaps it's the reason I don't enjoy much TV. Its mental and feelings blancmange; bland tasteless food for the mind that keeps us in a state of unconsciousness where we exist and survive and do not live at all.
But I want to talk about the unconscious here too for a moment. The unconscious is the last resort of the mind. I don't trust mind. I recognise it serves my sense of survival well and I would not be without it, but that is as far as it goes. The unconscious is that place where we push down all the muck, slime, hurt, pain, anger and all those other things that are too difficult for us to face and to look at about ourselves. It's the stuff that we repress in our unconscious that frequently comes back to bite us. We project these "shadow" parts of ourselves onto others often to justify doing hurt and violence towards them. It's these dark parts of our unconscious that we turn outwards to do hate, violence, racism and prejudice, or else we turn it inwards to do addictions, depression, suicides and other crippling behaviour.
One last point about consciousness, unconsciousness and control: Here's a question. How much media coverage have you seen of ordinary Iraqi families doing the things that ordinary people do – of laughing, crying, kissing, hugging, caressing, mourning, feeling sad or frightened, sometimes happy, enjoying meals together, going about their normal daily work, joking and having fun? Have you seen any? Anything at all?
I have every cause to believe that Iraqis are normal people too, just like the rest of us. So what do they show us then? Images of violence and hatred, our dark shadow projection onto them. Keeping us in a state of unconsciousness is what justifies our going and bombing the shit out of them. So where were the weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? Where are the national ties to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda? There may be terrorists there, at least US Marine General Conway tells me they are there. But how many terrorists are living in the USA? How many mindless murders take place there each and every week? How many Columbine High School massacres will it take before we learn? And Oh! I forgot that naughty man, Saddam, spirited the WMD away by magic. He waved his wand and abracadabra, alacazam, they were gone. Oh yeah! As I might say to Marine General Conway, "Tell that one to the marines!"
Enough of that. Just a final word on intuition: Intuition might be thought so powerful that over the centuries, people holding power have discouraged us from, even killed us, for believing in it. I don't think it's that scary myself and it's never done me any harm, only the opposite. David Beckham, the footballer, does it very well too.
Powerful people know about intuition very well; after all it is their own intuition that keeps them in power. But intuition contradicts our rational scientific thinking, it is knowing without proof and it's not the same as religion either. Lungold talks about women, witchcraft, intuition and the inquisition. During the inquisition and beyond, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of women were put to death for so-called witchcraft. To be a witch was to have a "heretical" belief either good or bad that could not be substantiated by rational proof. That's intuition. I'm not sure about the heresy either. The Catholic Church was probably the biggest murderer of women in the inquisition. Of course, the only heretical belief one was allowed to hold was that proselytised by the Catholic Church itself. I have every reason to believe that the Church has rewritten its particular story to suit its own purposes too. A knowledge of basic Greek and the bible shows how much we have distorted that story.
There are many things I have written about here that might inflame anger amongst some people. I don't believe that being conscious or intuitive is harmful. I do believe that it might carry with it the choice of profound emotions that I talk about elsewhere here: Emotions like forgiveness, understanding, forbearance and compassion.
Consciousness and intuition have nothing to do with hate. Hate has everything to do with remaining in the dark place of unconsciousness.
It bends, warps, slows down and speeds up.
I remember being involved in a motorcycle accident a long time ago. A car pulled out in front of me when I was travelling at about 40 miles per hour. It was just feet away, I had no time to think, no time to apply the brakes. My motorcycle struck the car square on between the front and rear doors, and I was sent flying through the air. My body continued to travel at the same speed as the bike through the air. Perhaps it was two or three seconds in time, perhaps it was less than that before I came crashing to the ground. In whatever brief time it was, I saw whole passages of my life – it felt like minutes of film footage. I was totally conscious of what was happening too, and seemed to have time to prepare myself to land in a way that caused me the least physical damage. My mind would have just shut down and probably done denial of the event had it been in control. But it wasn't anymore. I believe that what happened is that my intuition had taken over completely, it created my time, and its perceptions saved my life. Hitting the ground at 40 mph is not something I would recommend. It really hurts! But intuitively I landed in a way that did me the least physical damage.
I was very fortunate. I had some very bad bruises, grazed knees, and I had chipped a tiny piece of bone from one of my knees. After the shock, I stood up much to the amazement of two policemen whose car had been travelling too close behind me and had collided with a lamp-post at the roadside to avoid hitting the car that blocked their way.
So here in my flight through the air was a sense of not only time slowing down, but also of time almost stopping; of my intuition showing me that my life was valuable in its moments of my life's reflections and having "time" to prepare myself to land.
Some sportsmen, I have heard said and Lungold also makes this point, see their games whether soccer or basketball in slow motion as they fly over the ground at high speed. This is also how intuition works. Our mind has its cycling time a little like a camera operating slowly. Our intuition varies perceptions of time to suit our consciousness and intent.
On the mind: It's said to operate at approximately twenty four frames per second. It is worth noting that one twenty fourth of a second is too slow to take a photograph with a camera without some artificial support, like a tripod. Handholding a camera using that speed would usually cause camera shake and distort the image. That is how slow it is and how slow our mind works at its fastest.
In part 1 of this piece, I felt that I was not really clear about the importance of consciousness, that it is consciousness, both individually and collectively that upholds our social worlds.
It is shifts in consciousness, not technology, consumption, money markets or any aspect of our physical environment or social, political and economic systems that causes change. Back in 1962, when Kuhn wrote about "paradigm shifts", he talked about scientific revolutions occurring when a body of beliefs, what we are calling consciousness, could no longer uphold the reality they created.
There are conflicting realities in science too that co-exist, and one may embrace one or the other or synthesise or combine them in a new form of consciousness.
It is consciousness that governs our perceptions of the world that in turn creates our realities. How and what we perceive is our reality, to that extent a philosopher might say that truth is relative. I am not that sure that discussions of absolute or relative truth are that helpful in a world that is governed by consciousness and our perceptions of that world.
Consciousness also produces ideologies that uphold the status quo. Ideo is from the Greek word meaning ideas and logos to the systematic organisation of ideas and doctrines. What is really fascinating are the many different ways we have chosen to translate logos to suit the context. Logos is translated in the bible to mean the 'word of god'; it also gives us the word logic meaning rational or scientific reasoning, so even an ideology has different realities. They are man-made and upheld by our consciousness. They are often contradictory and conflicting.
Being conscious of consciousness frees us to perceive and feel deeper within ourselves and within our world. It gives us the power to question our knowing and where it comes from.
Consciousness is very powerful and empowering. There are many in the world who would wish us to be neither conscious or intuitive, since both states of being liberate us into the freedom by which we might see their realities for what they are. Turn on your TV and tune into Fox. They have a reality in which I would rather not believe. But the media bombards us with ideas about reality, the urge to consume and to uphold repugnant values. Perhaps it's the reason I don't enjoy much TV. Its mental and feelings blancmange; bland tasteless food for the mind that keeps us in a state of unconsciousness where we exist and survive and do not live at all.
But I want to talk about the unconscious here too for a moment. The unconscious is the last resort of the mind. I don't trust mind. I recognise it serves my sense of survival well and I would not be without it, but that is as far as it goes. The unconscious is that place where we push down all the muck, slime, hurt, pain, anger and all those other things that are too difficult for us to face and to look at about ourselves. It's the stuff that we repress in our unconscious that frequently comes back to bite us. We project these "shadow" parts of ourselves onto others often to justify doing hurt and violence towards them. It's these dark parts of our unconscious that we turn outwards to do hate, violence, racism and prejudice, or else we turn it inwards to do addictions, depression, suicides and other crippling behaviour.
One last point about consciousness, unconsciousness and control: Here's a question. How much media coverage have you seen of ordinary Iraqi families doing the things that ordinary people do – of laughing, crying, kissing, hugging, caressing, mourning, feeling sad or frightened, sometimes happy, enjoying meals together, going about their normal daily work, joking and having fun? Have you seen any? Anything at all?
Enough of that. Just a final word on intuition: Intuition might be thought so powerful that over the centuries, people holding power have discouraged us from, even killed us, for believing in it. I don't think it's that scary myself and it's never done me any harm, only the opposite. David Beckham, the footballer, does it very well too.
Powerful people know about intuition very well; after all it is their own intuition that keeps them in power. But intuition contradicts our rational scientific thinking, it is knowing without proof and it's not the same as religion either. Lungold talks about women, witchcraft, intuition and the inquisition. During the inquisition and beyond, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of women were put to death for so-called witchcraft. To be a witch was to have a "heretical" belief either good or bad that could not be substantiated by rational proof. That's intuition. I'm not sure about the heresy either. The Catholic Church was probably the biggest murderer of women in the inquisition. Of course, the only heretical belief one was allowed to hold was that proselytised by the Catholic Church itself. I have every reason to believe that the Church has rewritten its particular story to suit its own purposes too. A knowledge of basic Greek and the bible shows how much we have distorted that story.
There are many things I have written about here that might inflame anger amongst some people. I don't believe that being conscious or intuitive is harmful. I do believe that it might carry with it the choice of profound emotions that I talk about elsewhere here: Emotions like forgiveness, understanding, forbearance and compassion.
Consciousness and intuition have nothing to do with hate. Hate has everything to do with remaining in the dark place of unconsciousness.
Back to the Future, part 1 - Where is it?
07/05/08 07:44
Two things recently inspired me to write this blog. The first was a work project that I had undertaken recently; the second was a video by the late Ian Xel Lungold on the Mayan calendar that I watched recently with great fascination.
The Mayan calendar, that can be interpreted in hindsight to have portended many of the great events and changes in our history, runs out in 2012. Many have interpreted this to be something of a watershed, a turning point for mankind; a time of some massive and fundamental changes in the world. Not the end of the world by any means, but perhaps the beginning of some different sort of world. I can believe that and feel some optimism about it too. I hope…
Economists predict that very soon the world's manufacturing capacity will outstrip its ability of consumption. Simply put that means soon we will be able to make more than we need or can ever hope to use. So what happens then? What happens to our economic, social and political systems that are already beginning to creak under the strain of change? What happens to stock exchanges and money? If you have a career in the financial services industry and are looking to change, now might be a good time to consider that move.
The speed of technology change has accelerated beyond belief. I started my career in computing long ago. What took years at the outset of my career can now happen in minutes, even seconds. At the beginning of this piece I talked about a recent work project of mine. Without wishing to mention my client's name, it was one of the world's largest mobile phone manufacturers. This company now launches a new mobile phone handset at the rate of one a month. Yes, one new mobile phone each and every month. What this means is that they have decided that the life of an average mobile phone to be just a year; from product launch to obsolescence in a year! They don't even call some of them mobile phones anymore; they are "multi-media communications computers!" Even my own phone takes photographs, keeps a calendar, has an MP3 player…what else…? Oh yes! Then there's an FM radio in it as well. But predominantly I use it to make phone calls and send text messages. It's well-made, well-designed and reliable so why would I wish to change it in a year? I have kept my last couple of mobile phones for a good few years and see no reason to consume more for consumption's sake.
But speed of change has accelerated beyond our conception of what was possible just a few years back, and it is accelerating exponentially all the time. Our knowledge, belief, economic and manufacturing systems are moving at a speed far faster than our social and political systems can keep pace. It's no small wonder that our social structures are beginning to creak and that our political systems seem to be holding on by a thread. It's no romantic illusion either. If you don't believe it then go make yourself a very strong cup of coffee and wake up!
What implications does this have for us ordinary mortals? Do you remember that idea about having a career? I am reminded of a couple of conversations recently one with a law and psychology graduate friend turned farmer, now turned national training expert, and the guy who moved me into my home, the removal guy was an Oxford-educated, ex stockbroker. Then there's me, I call myself a management consultant to cover a variety of sins! So what am I? Well, I'm a change, transformation and transition specialist, a programme director, a turnaround person, an expert in information technology and telecommunications, a venture capital appraiser, a psychologist, an ex-chairman of a large mental health project, an ex-chief executive of a software company, a general manager, a communications specialist, a facilitator, a strategic planner and a strategic marketing expert…and sometimes a writer…done a bit of broadcasting, some futures consulting…Okay so how many was that? More than ten for sure! Get the picture?
There are no single careers anymore. Every single knowledge-based discipline with which mankind is involved is moving at the speed of light or else it's moving fast towards obsolescence, like my mobile phone and that's just six months old now!
Take another example…a safe profession; let's be a doctor, a physician. That's an interesting trade, one that I might suggest controversially is more regulated and controlled by the economic interests of the pharmaceutical industry than the social needs of mankind. It's those guys who currently dictate the speed of medical developments and progress, but even that world is about to be busted apart. We have the genome now, a map of our physical bodily universe – a means of understanding our physical condition and potentially the knowledge to be able to cure its ills, we have the means to manufacture chromosomes, and last year it was announced that a scientist had manufactured a living organism synthetically in a laboratory (Guardian newspaper, 6 September 2007). So what will a doctor's profession be in future? If a doctor is to keep pace with developments in medicine and our world of physical knowledge then it is conceivable that she might have to undergo continuous training and education for her entire working life. Or else she might choose to just carry on writing those prescriptions that keep the pharmaceutical industry plump and happy. Somehow I doubt that will happen.
Our world is changing. It's getting better too. As Lungold points out we are transcending an age of ethics in corporate responsibility: one where the bad guys are being weeded out and held to account. I'll just run a quick internet search on recent corporate scandals and see who we can come up with. The list on Wikipedia, mainly for those qualifying as prize-winners in "imaginary arithmetic", include Enron, Barings Bank, Merrill Lynch, AIG, WorldCom, Kmart and there's even a couple of very big pharmaceutical companies in there too. It's a long list now. But I simply want to make the point that businesses who dishonestly exploit their customers or their shareholders for their own financial benefit or power interests are going to fail in a world where ethics, social and personal responsibility are coming to be recognised as universal values. It's not before time and I'll say more about time itself here too.
Some people may find this speed of change frightening; certainly it is awe-inspiring. It's no wonder that we feel that change is running past us; that we feel we can't keep up with it any more.
Lungold talks about this very well, about the limitations of mind. He says rightly that the mind is man's survival equipment. It works slowly and it's like a pattern recognition engine detecting similarities and differences to build a picture of our world. It does construct knowledge as pictures too, pictures taking the form of all our senses: sight, sound, taste, smell and physical experience. It works at about the speed of twenty-four frames per second, that means we can take twenty-four decisions a second in a world where billions of decisions are being taken each and every second. Lungold cleverly points out that the mind is limited in speed and easily deceived, that the guys who do special effects in the movies already know this well. I believe Lungold was on the right track.
So what do we use instead? Lungold and I believe the same thing here and it's called intuition. Intuition is our own sense of the world, and repository of inner personal knowledge, it's our ability to sense and know immediately without reasoning. It's what the very best sportsmen know and use all the time. Just think of David Beckham playing soccer, do you think that he's using his mind like "click-decide, click-decide, click-decide"? No, he has very high speed intuition and that combined with his enormous and well coordinated physical abilities makes him one of the greatest footballers there is; the same goes for great, basketball players and lots of other sportsmen too. I'll write more later about intuition and my current sense of it later. Important questions for me are how one gets in touch and stays in touch with intuition. I'm working on it and I am already very intuitive!
So what's going to happen and why 2012? Frankly, I don't know. I'm not a futurist or a soothsayer. I'm not that sure about 2012 either, but big change will happen and happen soon enough. It will be to coin that overused phrase and now hackneyed cliché, first used by Thomas Kuhn to describe the revolutions that occurred in the world of science, a massive paradigm shift in our entire world. (Brother, can you spare me a paradigm?) It will be an entire shift, not an evolution, but a revolution in our consciousness. It may be a whole series of shifts, who can tell? But one thing is for sure, this post-industrial world we inhabit will go through some big changes and it will be soon and it will be fast.
Time as a universal accurate concept itself took hold then because it was what was used to control and regulate the workforce. Perhaps in a post-industrial age, our concept of time may change. The best I would hope for is that time will be used no longer to oppress our daily existence, but perhaps it might embrace those Mayan concepts too in a new and better world.
NB The video "The Mayan Calendar comes North parts 1 and 2" presented by the late Ian Xel Lungold is available to view for free on Google.