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Game over
For many decades the world economy has been much like the family game, Monopoly. This game has reached its end. Soon the winner will be known, the game will be over and can be wrapped up and saved until humanity can get another go.
The comparison with the game is not at all that strange. Monopoly is all about the importance to possess things. The only way to loose is when one has less than someone else. The people who possess streets can build houses and hotels to speculate with income from those who pass by. The obsession that is generated by those who play at that having end of the game is tremendous. Deals are closed to enable the construction of power zones where investments guarantee more income from the unlucky ones that by chance land inside the area and have to pay by the rules of the game. The only other way to go broke is when investments have been too ambitious when one hits the chance card to pay taxes for every house or hotel. Government has a say too in the game.
In real life the game of economics is no different. The bank in Monopoly plays a facilitating role while the greed of the players slowly produce the shake out until a few remain. The loosers get bored and step out in apathy, blocked to play while the winners build their power positions in exitement to see how they can outsmart the others still in the game.
In real life the bank has become yet another player that asks for interests on investments with an interest to place as much money as possible in the debt with interest system. The bank has been emptied already in various occasions but the obsession of the remaining players was so large that they filled it with fake money just to keep on going. Meanwhile the interest on debt remained exponentially in growth. This you can do once, twice, but not all the time. The amount of players left over in the game is continuously reduced but the playing board remains the same. Those who are out of the game cannot play anymore because the entire board is occupied by those who remain in the game. One can only wait until the game is over and that occurs when one has it all.
That stage has been reached in real life. We are close to global game over. America is broke and wants to get a little deeper in the red. Greece can only go further in the red if some of the previous red is cancelled. Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain …..are all out of the game. Germany is indecisive and France waits. China is about to pick up the chance card which asks them to pay for the consequences of excessive growth. Who is the winner?
The winners are a bunch of people where all the money goes out of interest rates, the bankers who play the game out of self interest. They do not facilitate the game but changed the rules a long time ago in favor of themselves by making money on money. But interests cannot be paid anymore, properties are all under mortgage and people are reluctant to play this game anymore as it went beyond their control. The only players left are the few people who at the receiving end of interest rates and they have started to play eachother with tricks and turns.
The game is over. The initial players are dead or out of the game. The ones left do not have anyone else left that will be able to pay for their claims, but themselves. And they do not want to play the game among themselves anymore because that would be playing with winners where the only destiny is to loose.
The game is over. Time has come to clean up, become normal people again, to liberate those billions of people who were blocked to play, the greedy forget their obsessions and return to normal human life and evolution. The non greedy will stop to pay for debts they did not make. We become humans again instead of pawns on a gameboard. We may have to learn again how that feels and works. It has been so long ago that we lived in a world without someone pulling strings on us. It will be weird to be free again……Game over? Let’s reshuffle start to play again….all of us.
Invisible monsters
Our lifestyle and human organisation are packed with invisible monsters that affect our comfort of life and prospect of a sustainable future. These monsters are real but the fact that they cannot be seen caused their neglected by the large public. Often it seems that “what one cannot see does not exist” type of mentality reigns.
We protect our children from the traffic in the streets by telling them to look twice before crossing. We even make them touch a car to get a feel of how hard the material is that would hit you. But do we know how healthy the air is in which the children play? Do we know how healthy the food is that they eat? The water they drink?
Millions of people around the world get sick because of the short and long term effects of air pollution and malnutrician. Our children are affected by these invisible monsters at school, in the street where they play and even at home where they are supposed to feel safe.
We can take responsibility for the safety and health of our selves and our children for those things that we can see and touch but when it is invisible and beyond our control we cannot. The problem of the invisible monsters is that we may be scared of them but they have been created by our life style. The consumer society has been structured in such a way that health is secondary to profit. So these invisible monsters are in fact us, through our behaviour.
Even if we would want to take responsibility we cannot because we depend on the global industrial and delivery processes that we created to produce and distribute our products. We depend on our cars to get us from A to B and our supermarkets to supply us with our food.
We don’t know who controls what and where what comes from. Our responsibilities have been taken over by complex power systems and processes that provide us with the luxury of comfort and the discomfort of invisible monsters. We have built economies around consumption of goods. New economies have risen around the effects of consumption and the pain caused by the invisible monsters. But if we want to attack those monsters we have to attack our selves and everything that we have created so far: our systems, our lifestyle and our economies.
Those monsters have grown so big lately that they have become a larger crisis than all crises summed up. Who is going to deal with these monsters before they eliminate us like myxomatose did with the rabbits? Because that is what they are, self inflicted deceases that eat us up from the inside. They represent a humanitarian crisis, an economic urgency and a severe risk for our current and future generations.
It is high time to work together, make those monsters visible and take responsibility to eradicate them from our existance.
http://www.aireas.com is one of such initiatives that gives it a try.
Free e-book in 20 chapters for a better world
Free book (first chapter)
Back in 2004, when I was writing and editing my very first publication in Dutch (Title in English would have been: Handbook for the future Market leader) I introduced the 5K method or “the five keys to business success in the 21ste century. People asked me why I publish my book in Dutch and not directly in English for the global market? Good question.
Most business models came from the United States with very well known guru’s that made name with their publications. The universal business truth was often directly made synonym to the USA. It is a huge country with obvious post war business successes that had conquered the world. What had a small Dutchman to add to all this wisdom? Why would anyone accept a business theory coming from the lowlands of Europa that had known the golden age back in times of East Indies?
That was one of reasons why I was not too keen on addressing the world market immediately. Who would care?
The other reason was that I got insight and awareness on what I had to mention after returning to Holland with my family after 27 years of absence. The culture shock was tremendous as well as my amazement how my original country of birth had changed. The warmth that I had felt back in the early 70’s had totally disappeared. Instead I found a cold, materialistic culture of complaining people with a heavy, very authoritive and bureaucratic government that even ruled on the amount of balls you could have in your soup so to say.
So writing my book and looking for solutions I had a look first at Holland. The fact that all this coldness had cost me my second marriage and left me to take care of my two small children also helped to concentrate on anything but the chance to have to travel. Whatever happened I simply wanted to be home to take care of my daughters when school was out.
Gradually I got to understand that the issue that I was addressing was not simply a Dutch one but involved the entire world, the entire human species.
When in 2008 the credit crisis struck I had already critically analysed various business sectors s.a. banking, supermarkets and garbage collection. It became clear to me that simple consultancy work as an author would get me seated with powerful people with the advise to do something about it. These people would maybe listen to me but hardly pay to hear that they had to change mentality and the way they do business. These people would want to hear how they could get back to old profitability again as fast as possible. And that insight I could not provide to them.
It became clear to me that I had to address the Global Shift issue by taking responsibility myself. I started the STIR Foundation (STIR = Sustainability, Transformation, Indexation and Research) together with a friend from Belgium. It became an ordeal to find our way into developing awareness and enlightenment into true value based concepts and organizations. Belgium and Holland were totally different and soon my partner decided to refocus.
Only after two years and a lot of experimentation, tough decisions, differences in insight between people, struggles etc we got to the very first true results. We realised that true progress could only be made if we created environments where all disciplines for change would commit together. Having said that we also recognized the gigantic burden we had to deal with. How to get people with different agendas en priorities to work together on a specific higher purpose?
I realized that we were not to invent a system for global change but unite a diversity of people who would voluntarily offer their expertise and scope of professional responsibility to sit together and develop a joint purpose. It became clear that this could only be done by adding an independent, purpose driven environment where the encounters could take place. We created the basis for local STIR cooperations, first nearby in my home town.
My girls have grown up in the meantime, my freedom has grown to travel more but also my expertise on how to get things done in an extremely complex transformative environment. It cannot be done anywhere. It requires the lucky situation of people with a particular mentality and desire to make a difference. It requires the unique situation of finding such people in eachother’s vicinity and with enough authority and diversity to make it happen.
The world has become conscious also now that things need to change. But how to I reach those people who have the right attitude, network and insight to join forces in their comfort zone? It became clear to me that time was ready to make my book, practical methods, models, views etc available to the rest of the world. It is my sincere desire that the contribution to humanity would help to accelerate processes around the world and avoid that many people would have to “re-invent the wheel”.
So it happened that I decided that my own adventurous life to discover how to proceed did not just belong to me but to everyone. My writing I make available to the world totally free of charge. Not because I do not need the money, on the contrary, but because I feel that the process of the Global Shift and our chances together are much more important than trying to promote an article. I hope with this that the transformation gains momentum and in this movement I can fullfil my role of co-responsible for permanent change.
If one day I can look at my daughters and see that they have a sustainable future then I am satisfied and happy that I have been able to contribute just that little bit that made it happen, just like they and so many others hopefully do to make it last for ever.
Free book: The Global Shift, a quantum leap in human evolution
Today (13.06.2011) I made available the very first chapter. Every sunday a new chapter will be released for about 20 sundays in a row. The only thing I ask you is to send me an email. For me it is important to develop a network of people who are worried, curious or interested. Among you we will find surely enough people to take co-responsibility too for the global shift in your own direct environment.
