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Content Economics replaces Economy of Growth
Using the word “economics” in the sense of valuing the progress of a human society (business, politics, global) we see that economics of growth prove unsustainable, potentially risky and certainly due for a total make-over. From a stability point of view we do not want economic growth as this leads to speculation which in turn leads inevitably into situations of crisis. We need to concentrate on the true values that make up an economy and keep growth to zero. An economy of 100 needs to be an economy of 100 next year and in a hundred years too. The real change should not be occurring in the size of the economy but in its content.
Content economy
In a content economy is valued by sustainable progress not by growth. It should stay at 100 on the pre-established scale of social and environmental wellness. In such economy any long term savings in pensions and securities are stable as the valuables do not change over time. There is no need for speculation as no growth or inflation needs to be compensated. The key value of a content economy is its capacity to change continuously, providing lasting value in progress triggered by the natural ever changing circumstances of a progressive community that experiments with its evolution. The true and only growth that can be seen in a content economy is in know-how, human awareness, scientific knowledge and social interaction focused on maintaining and enhancing quality of life through constantly applied innovation along the lines of sustainable progress. The economic thermometer stays at 1oo if the society is capable of balancing genuine quality of life with the any changes in life expectancy, human health, our natural environment, population growth, usage of natural resources, footprint, etc. The true attention goes into co-creative ongoing adaptiveness of the community by being inventive, progressive and truly aware. Such content economics produces wellness by connecting personal talent and co-creative productivity to personal enjoyment of life and insight about human complexities. People in such content economics do no work but contribute, feeding the upcoming generations with the reflections of the generations that fade out.
In business we have see the talent of the late Steve Jobs and Apple to excel in content economics by being inventive, adaptive and focused on technological progress. The recent article of Adam Hartung in Forbes is an excellent reflection about the difference between conservative speculation of unsustainable economies of growth (Kodak, Microsoft, etc) and the sustainable content economy of change (The Apple of Steven Jobs. What will happen now that Jobs is gone?) in the paradigm of technological excellence. The same kind of leadership can be applied to societies and politics.
From a selfish human perspective the milking of the cash cow until the cow dies is perfectly natural human behavior. Why change anything that produces wealth? From a sustainable progress point of view it of course shortsighted to assume that the chicken with the golden eggs will live forever even if you kill all new born chickens for a while out of fear of competition. One cannot beat progress, only delay it at the expense of severe crises. During times of war people are more creative than in periods of economic growth. Crazy. In content economies people have an incentive to be inventive: sustainable progress. In economies of growth they don’t.
Rapid attention
That is what we see occurring around the world today asking for immediate attention in the field of content economic in politics and business. The problem is of course that Steve Jobs is gone and among the world population of 7 billion only very few are strong, visionary and capable enough to provide the leadership that is needed to address the necessary changes. But they remain unseen for now. It is much easier for those in power to bully with force, conservative power and injections of fake masses of money over the back of our future without any collateral, just to maintain old power positions than to open up for a true mentality of change. Yet there is no other way for them then to let go or history will accuse them and every day we make history now. The current stress in the economies of growth is so large that they break up anyway. Instead of being stubborn and focusing on growth the global political forces would do good to inject the billions into applied innovation and an economy of content rather than the current actions of throwing speculative means into a black hole of nothingness that leads to disaster, depreciation of money and inflation right up to a crisis.
Instead of worrying about exchange rates, inflation, debts and stock values, let us get exited about change and use our incredible level of knowledge to provide excellence in wellness around the world. There is plenty of work for all in the content economy, now and always. If you really ask yourself what content economy is just remember family prime time and the way you generally interact at home for progress. Most families, especially those with children, reason at home with content economics in their minds while in their jobs or on the street with the economy of growth, just like the politicians and business executives, because that is the culture we live in.
Currently the social, political and entrepreneurial content economy, if we introduced a system to measure it is way below 100 and potentially volatile. A lot needs to be done to get it onto track, on individual level but especially in the way we run our human organisations.
Call for Leadership
When the human world is in crisis entrepreneurship and society call for true and transformative leadership. Why is that? And what kind of leadership?
The very first thing we have to acknowledge when the human world is in crisis is that the way we organised our world has become obsolete, else it would not be in crisis. Trying to restore old securities is therefor no sign of leadership at all, it is called management. Management will never get anyone out of a crisis simply because the paradigm (the total set of values on which human interaction is based) has cracked up. It served its purpose in the past but now cannot be revised and needs to be replaced with a new paradigm. And that introduces two leadership issues: Definition of the new paradigm and the intense en risky transformation exercise from one paradigm to the other. Let us deal with each separately.
Definition of the new paradigm: We can distinguish five different paradigms that humankind can apply. In times of crisis we have seen four that have been regularly been called upon in history: The State, The Church, Money and Technology. The one that has not been seriously used is the one that places the individual human being at the center of all our strategies. While we placed artificial human invented systems in place to conduct our progress we noticed that they invariably ended up in crisis. For the very first time in modern history the individual human being has sufficient access to information to become aware of its own evolutionary responsibilities and create a culture of progress through cooperation. This paradigm means that we leave all artificial structures behind and get ourselves into a purpose driven culture of individual responsibilities shared through our common progressive, evolutionary objectives. The shift between paradigms is intense because it places responsibilities at the individual level through self-leadership and at community level through result drive sustainable progress. Political leadership is asked or forced to let go and facilitate the process of self-leadership of the people. We are seeing this happening around the world while corporate leadership is asked to take purpose driven humanistic initiatives to drive progress with the power of result driven united talent and energy, demanding a totally new business culture and structure.
Transformation between paradigms: The transformation between paradigms demands from leadership strong professionalism that goes way beyond technical or financial leadership. It requires strong understanding of human fears and hopes, the psychology of change and charisma to conduct the long term change by producing short term securities for all the people involved. It is a very humanistic type of leadership, a servant kind but also strongly demanding from the people on the verge of dictatorship. Sustainable progress is not a political discussion or democratic choice. This type of leadership that has nothing to do with the drive for power over people but the drive to provide comfort through change by getting people to provide comfort to themselves by taking responsibility. It requires strong insight, will power, anthropological/anthroposophical understandings and perseverance giving people their own share in the fruits they achieve through their own productivity.
Does that mean that the other paradigms are obsolete? From an operational leadership point of view: yes, because they cannot be placed at the kernel of human progress anymore. But the learning that we have reflectively embedded in our collective awareness is important to use those paradigms to feed the new one in development. Moral awareness that was claimed by religions is needed to provide ethical guidance to the humanistic drive of purpose driven communities, the state is needed to provide territorial cohesion and interaction between groups while technological innovation is required to provide the necessary tooling for humankind to produce abundance for all. The speculative money system needs to transform into a true value system that does not measure and speculate on shortages but values abundance through result driven investment of individual and collective talent and energy. This part of the transformation of values is probably the most complicated one since most of the old paradigm has glued all current human systems around monetary dependencies. To break through that the crises need to do their work because human interaction will only encounter dangerous opposition from the old power positions. This impasse will slow down the processes of the paradigm shift at the expense of human suffering. The introduction of new value system based on different criteria can slowly make way for large human structures that can break through the protective walls of the old money driven paradigm. That’s why I see a huge chance for technology driven corporate business organisations to make the shift first and become creative in valuing their people while creating a movement of change through visionary, multidisciplinary cooperation with other actors in this holistic approach.
The call for leadership is hence a significant one. Extremely few people today unite the conditions that profile the transformative leader. They cannot necessarily be found in the current leadership positions because those are jobs for high level managers guided or puppeetered by the self-interest of powerful shareholders. The true leaders that will stand up are currently without a job but with a personal mission. They may have lead significant ventures in the past which have provided them with the network and experience of old paradigm people management. Their personal enlightenment, together with a renewed energetic impulse to become the true instrument of change (they have no leadership ambitions but strong desires to see the paradigm shift). Others stand up and start anywhere in society or in a corporate organisation with sufficient skills and freedom to make the difference already today. On them the speed of the paradigm shift will depend and with them the sustainable progress of humankind that needs to be addressed.
Feminising masculine cultures in crisis
For many decades emancipation has claimed equal rights for women but meanwhile the global cultures have totally defeminised. Even the most emancipated countries have hardly any feminity left in them despite equality among the sexes. This may sound like a contradiction but it is not. Women and men are equal but not at all the same. Cultures that center around money and the material independence of individuals show a systemised masculine culture based on external securities, excessive tooling, competition, hierarchies of power and a lot of individualism. The cultures grow cold, materialistic, authoritive and bureaucratic. Such masculine culture has nothing to do with any discimination of women. Even the women learn to behave with an independent masculine nature in an emancipated way. This excessive masculinity has been caused by our growing dependence on money based structures that have taken all feminine sensitivity out of our human organisation. These masculine cultures, resident in large corporate multinationals, money based democracies and social communism are all in severe crisis. The only solution here is to feminise the cultures again.
What then is a feminine culture?
Connected to the unique ability of women to give birth a feminine culture is based on identity, family warmth and evolutionary long term reasoning around survival, protection, safety, health, stability and quality of life. A femine culture is more holistic, spiritual and emotional than purely rational. In a feminine culture our relationship with our environment makes sense, our self-sufficiency and self-preservation within the mistique of eternal life itself. The morality of our choices become an important measure for our actions, just like equality, respect and trust.
Such feminine culture is not just exercised by women of course, also by men, just like the masculine cultures. It is a way of life, an acceptance of certain values above others that have to do with inner feelings instead of external wealth. The current world is in crisis due to the excessive masculine structures that have gradually eliminated emotions, warms and community feeling. There is no relationship anymore between what we contribute to life and what we get. We have endebted ourselves for values that we have not yet contributed in with our creativity or supportive energy. It is going to be increadibly difficult to get our lifes back to a true reality in which we enjoy prosperity from our personal initiatives. A purely feminine culture will not do the trick either….
Pure masculine societies will always enter a crisis while pure femine societies will never progress. Both mentalities always require to interact to produce sustainable progress as shown in the drawing below. Together they form a Whole….
Feminising the masculine culture in crisis
There is nothing wrong with a masculine organisation as long as it is lined up with a feminine equivalent too. The key of wellness can be found in the warmth and depth of emotions feeding and guiding the rational awareness and organisation. The femininity makes us aware of our relationship with our environment, the need for human interaction and true equality among all people. The masculinity will get us to understand, learn how to organise ourselves and get scientific insight. Together the feminine and masculine nature will interact to apply knowledge with true meaning to human progress in a complex creative manner (not destructive as we suffer now). The feminine culture will avoid the masculinity to grow above sustainable proportion while the masculine drives pull the feminine morality into progressive action and permanent change for new balans.
To achieve this we need to feminise our masculine cultures. The current huge masculine outsized complexities (banks, multinationals, political organisations) will crumble into chaos as the crises do their work, creating room for feminine awareness to develop and take a position in our minds. This process shapes a new future for humanity based on smaller, purpose driven communities that use high level knowledge and technology to progress in a constructive, evolutionary way. The day that this has happened humankind can look back at a brief period in our evolution when we were about to distroy everything and thank our wit and consciousness to have reacted on time, voluntarily or not, to get back to sustainable wellness and progress for all. Men and Women meet again in the garden of Eden called planet Earth with the knowledge and understanding that beauty, abundance, love, eternity and wealth is not found in the apple we take but the tree that we sit under.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 