A really big change...
In this episode, we explore how to tackle a change so huge that it must and will transform the life of everyone on the planet…
This is a follow-on from that previous episode, ‘A deadly addiction’, where we explored how the key behaviours that dominate our global economics and cultures - concepts such as personal possession, ‘property rights’ and the like - are best understood as symptoms of an addictive, deadly disease. And to put it bluntly, if we don’t eradicate that disease from the world as completely as we’ve eradicated polio and smallpox and the like, then we’re dead. All of us.
Yeah, that bad…
So what can we do about it? It’s a huge, huge change - the largest change that humans have faced for perhaps the last ten thousand years. And we have, at best, only a few decades remaining in which to do that change. Ouch…
Yet don’t worry: it is still doable - don’t doubt that. And yes, we can do it just with small-changes - in fact it’s probable that small-changes will be the only way we can do it. That’s all we’ll need: small-changes that we each choose to make, as an expression of our commitments and choices about the wider world, and that each, in their own quiet way, make life quietly better for everyone. And also, crucially, use each small-change to show a better way than that which possessionism provides - instead, a way that makes life more worthwhile, more purposeful, more satisfying, more just plain fun.
But yeah, this is where people often get the wrong idea about this, so I’d best put this sign up straight away:
…because this really isn’t about politics in the usual sense - it’s much more pragmatic than that. The reality anyway is that most current politics can’t help at all in this, because in practice it’s just a bunch of variations on the same possession-addiction. In terms of the axes of the Political Compass, left versus right is a squabble about who possesses what, whereas authoritarian versus libertarian is a squabble about who ‘controls’ and possesses whom: it’s all still the same delusions of ‘possession’. Or, to put it another way, it’s basically just a bunch of two-year-olds squabbling over who gets to sit in which deckchair on the Titanic, paying no attention at all to the fatal flaws in the ship’s design, or the shoals of icebergs all round that are lining up to collide with those flaws…
The usual politics won’t help with this: for something this huge, we literally have no choice but to work together with everyone else to make it work. It doesn’t matter if our our previous political opponents or anyone else would do things differently from us, are not the same ethnic base as us, the same religion, the same social-milieu, or even if we just don’t like them anyway: if we don’t find a way to work with them, as equals, then we’re all going underwater. Which would definitely be Not A Good Idea…
So if we really do want play at politics, then that politics must come only after we’ve dealt with the addiction. But whatever form it takes, that politics ain’t goin’ nowhere useful or survivable unless we stop hiding from a whole bunch of very real, absolute, non-negotiable constraints, and accept that we can’t continue to ignore them for any longer if we’re to have any chance of finding our way out of this mess.
Where do we start? Well, one key point is that, historically, the delusions of possession arise as from a regression to a two-year-old’s mindset, demanding service from others, but refusing to accept any responsibility for or within the wider world. Households and societies alike ultimately depend on interlocking mutual responsibilities to make things work; cultures that work that way can be, and usually are, fully sustainable - and proven to be so for tens of thousands of years, in some cases. By contrast, the possessionist addiction sets out to destroy the mutualities and interlocks, and generally attempts to reject any responsibility at all - and then hunts for somebody else to blame when things don’t work any more. If we’re to succeed in reaching towards true sustainability, we must eradicate every trace of the possession-addiction, and rebuild around that core of responsibilities that are mutual, and that interlock across everything, everywhere, everywhen, across the entire globe.
The catch is that it’s not just the addiction itself that we have to eradicate - we also have to dismantle and rebuild everything that’s been built on top of that addiction. To use an economics example, note how much has been built layer-by-layer over the centuries on top of the myth of ‘personal possession’:
Yes, financial-derivatives are mostly a scam, and a debt-based mortgage is literally a ‘death-pledge’ that drives life-theft on a truly massive scale. But switching to some supposed ‘alternative-currency’ won’t help in the long run, and neither would ‘going back to barter’ - they’re all ultimately based on the same possessionist delusion. They’re all just kludges that attempt to make possessionism seem to work, when in reality it simply can’t - hence futzing around in those areas will really just be a waste of energy and effort, especially in the longer term. Or, to put it in more visual form:
Ultimately, they all have to go: every one of them, all the way back to those first myths of possession. And it’s not just in economics, it’s in everything that that disease has infiltrated. Everything: no exceptions at all, anywhere. If we allow any exceptions, we’ll end up right back where we started, heading full-tilt towards total extinction. Not A Good Idea…
So, to give a few examples of the infection-sources that we’ll need to eradicate, rebuild, or both:
every form of possession in every aspect of economics - from microeconomics to largest-scale macroeconomics, from the smallest household to the entire planet as a whole, across every possible timescale;
every form of possession in every aspect of trade - at every scale, from person-to-person all the way through to global-scale trade and logistics;
every aspect of the entire money-system - currency, finance, derivatives, stock-dividends, loans, savings, pensions, monetary-taxes, monetary fines, all of it;
all property law relating to ‘rights of possession’ - though note that for most people, a stewardship- or responsibility-based asset-management model ends up looking very similar to what currently exists within a possession-based economics;
all law relating to so-called ‘intellectual property’ - in part because, again, it’s built on the same delusion of ‘possession’, in part because trying to treat virtual information as if it’s a physical thing is inherently absurd, but perhaps even more because the claim of such ‘rights’ almost always incorporate elements of arbitrary expropriation from others;
all law that enables ‘loopholes’ to evade the responsibilities in the law - in essence, restructure to emphasise the underlying principle (‘the spirit of the law’), with the formal text (‘the letter of the law’) representing guidelines and worked-examples rather than arbitrary hardwired rules;
all purported ‘rights’ - given that the means to enact any ‘right’ is actually based on mutual interlocking responsibilities, it makes everything simpler if we start from there in the first place, without the risks and red-herring distraction of ‘rights’.
Every one of those concerns will need to be tackled worldwide, with no exceptions - because, again, any exceptions will enable breakouts of the same disease, that, again, could well kill us all.
The complication is that every culture is different, and will need its own locally-specific solutions to each of those issues - yet still always deliver the same effective outcomes in each case. That’s why no grand theory of politics is going to work here; no ‘-ism’, no prepackaged supposedly one-form-fits-all ‘The Answer’, none of that stuff. Instead it has to be strictly pragmatic - involving everyone, whether we like it or not.
Yes, of course this is huge - almost unbelievably huge. We know this. And we also know that if we try to tackle any of this head-on, the resistance to those needed changes will likely also be so huge that all we’d do is make things worse. But so what? - we can do this. The way that does work is what Australians would describe as ‘white-anting’ - nibbling away at the foundations of possessionism until it quietly collapses under the weight of its own inane contradictions. In other words, small-changes. Always, small-changes, down in the detail of our everyday lives. Each one small, but each one also always linked to the big-picture. That’s the way that works.
Over the next few episodes, we’ll start to explore more of the practical tactics for this, such as how to find the right ‘fit’ in a fast-changing world, and how to use a simple checklist to help make sense of some of these issues, and help build towards an architecture of responsibility. See you there!
Nice post Tom, here's to the death of global oligarchy, and the subsequent opulence which drives the "keeping up with the Jones's" syndrome.