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It’s the economic chain that kills us
Our fragmented society is built up in chains of economic relationships that compete with each other. To hold up those chains we need to grow to sustain our perceived welfare but in the process we take away all value out of our surroundings. Let us show this with some examples.
Fragmented focus on efficiency: Productivity tends to focus on just one product and concentrate on mass production through efficiencies. This produces a strong global centralization and standardization of product creation and assembly processes. Since the consumer’s end user price is under pressure due to open competition every shackle in the chain, from resource to production, assembly and distribution, is being squeezed, reducing value in chain. The resources are chosen to be the cheapest, the product is made as small as possible, the components are mass produced and shipped across the world for assembly in a mechanical plant preferably in low wage countries and then shipped across the world for distribution through retail or directly to the end user. The larger the volume (growth) the more efficiency one can build in the process by eliminating local content, human labor, etc. The products become cheaper, up to the point of throw away consumables but with a destruction of resources along the way and without precedence. The cheapest labor is even replaced by automation and distribution done in massive loads.
If you look at any consumable that you deal with in your daily life you will find that the local content (read labor, creative contribution, values) is reduced to an absolute minimum. The only labor may be the logistics and retail effort which can be done with people with the lowest skills, reducing cost price to a minimum and employing the lowest bidder on the verge of illegality.
So every product we buy is a debt to our own community since the local values have been eliminated. Where does our money come from to even have access to consumables if we hardly produce value locally? Debt.
Consequence driven: Our local community is consequence driven. What does that mean? If means that we organize ourselves in reaction to our lifestyle. Our roads need to be broadened to cope with logistics and massive civil movements of people trying to find labor elsewhere. Our health care needs to be organized to help us cope with consumer diseases. Our taxes regulations need to be sharpened to try to cope with all pollution and local criminality.
The costs of the consequences are covered by taxes on the consumer economy, hence the chain that has no local content needs to grow to cover the consequences. The debt increases to our local community that gets sicker and sicker by need of economic growth push. Consume as much as you can to finance the effects of overconsumption.
Government is responsible: The common public perception is that government takes care of everything. Indeed the complexity is seemingly so big that individual awareness that the public opinion finds it easiest to rely on formal structures than consider one’s own responsibility. The luxury of a world full of consumables is of course perceived as the greatest achievement of humankind and very difficult to relinquish. Why less if we are used and stimulated for more and more?
The consequences are related to the government who has absolute no authority or means to do something about it. That is why it reacts with bureaucracy and massive investments in consultants, simply because civil servants have no clue and do not wish to be confronted with a responsibility that they cannot carry. Decisions are made in decades where crises occur in matter of days. The only solution they can think of is to invest more in regulation, layers of bureaucracy, research documents and debt increases. It is easy to plan a bigger or new road. It is impossible to create a clean environment. The latter cannot be contracted as it requires the responsibility of society as a whole.
Solution: These chains hence are killing us and driving economies of growth into larger weakness of the same economies up to the point of instability and crisis after crisis. The solution lies in creating again local for local content transforming society in self sufficient communities cutting the ties with the chains. To do that people have to take responsibility and relinquish dependencies by creating their own securities and wellness. This is easier said the done yet we have no choice. Those communities that take the lead in such development face all kinds of problems that even require to restructure their legal systems, governance, etc. But it is worth it for the sake of peace and sustainable progress. Otherwise the chains of dependency will literally kill us as food, water, resources and even financials cannot be organized to sustain the living standards of the past. Now we have a choice, soon we have none.
“City of Tomorrow” game
Putting Planet, People, Profit, Passion and Progress into Practice
Recently we played the entrepreneurial “City of Tomorrow” game for the first time. In the STIR foundation we support the idea of integral human development as expressed in the chapters 15 and 16 of my free book last year, not just the rational side of it as our system is educating our children today. As Sir Ken Robinson so beautifully stated in his much applauded TED talk “the current education systems kill creativity” and Mitra shows in his “hole in the wall“, children have a much higher self-learning ability than our schools appreciate or even stimulate. Yet despite the famous anthropological and anthroposophical views and knowledge on the development of the human consciousness through spiritual, emotional, physical and rational experiences, the system remains the system, locked up in bureaucracy and self supporting prejudice.
We see that current educational formats serve a paradigm in which politicians see the human being as a little robot in the machinery of money driven/dependent economies of growth. Such robots need to learn how to behave like robots within a system, brainwashed about the importance of money, a job, debt, fashion, consumerism, the state, their dependence on the system, etc. The learn to calculate and write a letter but nothing about the importance of social relationships, feelings, spirituality, sustainability or responsibilities.
The paradigm that we support is totally opposite which is why both are difficult to match. The way a complex human society is structured in either paradigm differs enormously which is why the current educational system will sooner see our propositions as a threat to them rather than an opportunity. It is even worse than that. The current education system has no identity of its own because it is chained in dependence to the money which allows it to exist. This comes from central government which dictates the normatives that the schools need to comply with. So the education system has hardly any opinion of its own, just a hierarchy controlling that what is done is done according to the guidelines that allow them to stay alive financially. They are themselves expensive robots in a system.
So we are not seen as a threat to the educational content (who cares?) but for their financial continuation. That is why the system remains closed to all influences from outside, even common sense.
Transforming from one complexity to another
If we cannot change the system we can in fact stand next to it. We should never forget that even the most locked up human organization consists of people. And individually people do become aware of the need of a new society and other ways of education. Some, not all, are willing to use this personal awareness and influences to take action within the structures in which they are employed. They become the internal transformative hero’s that link already with change and seek internal opportunities that make a difference.
We positioned our initiatives on human awareness right at the place where the young adults would leave school to start their life in the real world. Our program is called “entrepreneur of your own life“, linking the increasing requirement of entrepreneurship in the old money driven economies with the self-leadership and sense of responsibility in the value driven society that we are trying to develop. We asked the high schools to allow us to give their students a view into real life with a bit of our counselling. It is also in the interest of the school to pay attention to this even though they find it difficult to let the real world enter their world. When we propose to provide a low cost bridge through our game they become enthusiastic.
We had done one of such days already before in a multicultural setting trying to show the tremendous opportunities of cultural diversity in a community if you choose to make the best of it together. It had been a great day . Now we were facing a highly technical setting with 500 students in two groups.
One of the coaches, Jules Ruis, suggested to make the day into an adventure and the students into hero’s. Overnight he developed a simple game but with great educational value. It was based on economics but could easily and secretly be changed into buddinomics by me.
The ingredients of the game are:
- a large bunch of students 17+ years old
- technological innovation companies that show their innovations
- coaches that carry specific information
- a bunch of camera’s
- a value system in exchangeable cards
We played that day with about 200 students that started without knowing much more than that they would have to collect information at the stands of the enterprises and the coaches that walked around as wild cards. They had been teamed up with people from different years, whom they did not know personally, and the elderly student was made team leader.
They had to assemble the team, work together towards the end of the day, trying to figure out what they had to do to win? During the evolution of the day and every encounter with a coach the complexity of the game would rise, requiring the teams to perform and place the product exhibitions and information into new perspectives.
Watch the filmbook (in Dutch) of the day here
The end of the day was spectacular from an awareness point of view. It was amazing for us to see how self-leadership and adaptability got these youngsters on their way and how fast they managed to adjust their views with new input. At the end of the day they were allowed to present their views in public and with cameras present. For the highest years present the presentations were key because they were invited to continue the game for another year. Their prices:
- a job
- a scholarship
- a starting capital for a new business
The effects of the game had not just affected the students. The high school had become so motivated that it started to open up for reorganization and further partnership with the foundation and others. The game will be played now at least twice a year and every year again with all the students. While we do so we are going to step up the challenge every time inviting the students to deal with real life complex problems within the simulation of the reality of the game.
The business enterprises also started to readjust their activities and organization inspired by the game. Most found each other during the game to partner up in purpose driven ventures. They also committed to further invest in the initiatives led by the foundation and based on local for local cooperatives between government, technical innovations, education and science, social innovation.
And even the local government representatives were so enthusiastic that they proposed to open up their structures for more student involvement and participation. At the end all participants will become partner and judge of the final game of all students: defining their own city of tomorrow, based on their own home town and for which they can take responsibility themselves with what they have learned at school and are triggered to learn by placing their knowledge into their daily reality, simulated in complexity by the game.
The entire process is sponsored by the partners to maintain our independence and avoid any client/supplier relationship or chain dependencies. This way the game can be purpose driven in which the virtual reality transforms into reality.
Expanding our ambitions:
On 12.12.12 we now wish to play the game for 4 consecutive days in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) with students from all over Europe. The game will then be called “Europe of Tomorrow” giving already away what the main topic of the event will be. The game will be combined with an international congress on sustainable progress. It will again be great fun to see how our young adults will react to the modern reality and eventually change the world through their own new levels of consciousness and adaptability.
The day after economics
Economics is out. We cannot keep progress or wellness away from people who cannot afford it. We cannot morally play with lives of millions or billions of people to fill the pockets of a few deadly soles. The era that this was tolerated is ending fast. We are entering a new era of wealth, the one that is not based on economics but on something else. I have called it Sustainocracy, just to give it a reference to talk about. What is the difference?
Modern economics is “the financial science to deal with shortages”. It has to do with money that is spend to purchase material goods, valued against the degree of desire and scarcity of the object. Entire nationwide economies are based on this system that places the availability of resources in the hands of people who make it available only to the highest bidder. Maintaining shortages raises the economic perspectives and it has become a game to deal with this in a globalized world for the benefit of those who can control certain material elements. We see this in commodities, housing, energy, food, loans, etc. This automatically means that people need money to gain access to wealth. Money is only made available to those who have work and work is only valued with money if it fits in the robotics of the system. In an other blog I already asked why the care taking activities of a housewife with small children was not valued in a money system while the labeling of packages in a logistics process is. Is the one more valuable then the other? Of course not, but the system determines what gets paid and what not. This regulated choice creates a society and the morality in it. The woman with small children gets no money and has not right to access wealth and the factory worker does. It is a choice and this choice needs to be turned around because it does not suit the general purpose anymore of sustainable progress. On the contrary. Extremely talented people necessary in all kinds of human needs are forced to work in the system on positions that contribute to problems simply because the system is organized that way.
And if you have no job you are obliged to get a debt in order to maintain a degree of wealth or wishes to survive, no matter what talent one has. Some do not even have access to the debt system and perish, supported by this inhumane system.
Dead end
The system of economies that are based on speculation around shortages are making our lives unsustainable, expensive and unstable. These systems collapse and receive a growing opposition of the general public that is willing to rise against those who block abundance to the masses. We simply have to recognize that economics has reached a dead end. Economies of growth only mean that they expand further the disaster just to finance the unbalanced debts of the past. The debts of countries rise simply because they produce only costs and no value anymore, despite the massive amount of talented people they contain.
There is a desperate need to deblock these human talents and make them work together on sustainable progress. That is what I call “the day after economics”. What is this other option?
Sustainocracy
We need to recognize that our resources on Earth are finite, but our talents grow in abundance. The more finite the material resources (food, water, oil, etc) are the more valuable they would become for all people if we want to sustain a minimum of living standard or even survival. We cannot sustain a financial system that speculates on the availability of resources in scarcity. It becomes a source of blackmail, not just over the pockets of the people but also playing with their lives. Capitalist economics are likely to become the genocide of the 21st century where certain people are willingly, for their own benefit, to keep life supporting and saving resources away from the public by pure financial speculation, causing death, war and disaster. We have already seen the consequences of this in commodities like grain, wheat, water, oil, etc. and the effects on global stability.
Sustainocracy therefor represents the “science of talented abundance through cocreation”. This meand that human scientific knowledge, productivity and progress is owned by the species and not members thereof. Human talent is value of humankind and should not be dealt with in confinement of scarcity but in abundance for progress. This means that every invention, every insight should reach all members of the species not just a selected few.
In Sustainocracy only one continuous goal is important for all members of a community: sustainable human progress, according to the definition described in a previous blog:
“continuously working together on a healthy, vital, safe and dynamic human society within the ever changing context of our natural local environment”.
This statement allows no political debate or speculation since the goal is for all members of the global community. Everyone can take responsibility for this sustainable progress by contributing with one’s own competences, talents and energy. All elements of such society are measurable, feeding in open reflection the interaction of people in the community. Application of knowledge and personal energy is key to address the changes provoked by any change that is being made. It gives a common purpose to a society.
Sustainocracy is Talent + Energy + Purpose = Sustainable Progress
The community based on sustainocracy does not necessarily need money to produce progress. Resources are used but only become valuable when introduced in the result driven processes. The results are delivered to the benefit of everyone in the community. There is no need to speculate with scarcity of resources since the community will become creative, using the local means that it has available to it. Communities become cohesive in human interaction on a local for local basis trying to avoid dependence on other communities. If such relationships are needed to exchange material resources then reciprocity is organised in exchange of talents. Payment in times of needs are not done in money but in talent which will help communities to deploy automatically the human and material resources needed to assure community progress and intercommunity relationship, even if particular communities have scarcity of resources but abundance in talents.
Money could be used to value the individual contributions to progress making the variables of “talent” (competences, knowledge and creativity) and “energy” (motivation, teamwork, involvement, etc) instruments of value that can receive recognition on individual level and maybe some sort of adhered status. The level of value can be determined by the community in a democratic process.
In all cases the local for local communities would become small local pearls of self sufficient centers in which sustainable progress would be carried by all members of the community. A woman who gives birth would as important as a man who helps to build a house. Community choices would be prioritized according the level of sustainable progress everyone desires, lead by the circumstances, not greed.
Sustainocracy represents peace and progress, a modern new way to step up the human evolution using our accumulated abilities and levels of awareness for the benefit of all, starting with the future perspectives of our children and the way we educate them today on how to take responsibility using talent and energy.
Sustainocracy has become the system to value talent and reciprocity in Sustainocratic processes)
