The crisis towards auto-determination
The media talk again about the forthcoming global recession as if it were a worrying novelty. It is not of course. The crisis has been postponed with the many capital injections into obsolete business and governmental systems. No that these try up and China has entered its own era of capital greed the old crisis simply continues where it was interrupted a few years ago. The years and months of delay have allowed the flees to parachute off the dying mastodonts in an attempt to find another, healthier body to lean on. This is difficult now that we realise how chained up the financial world has been. If one crumbles, they all fall apart. From an individual point of view we can ask ourselves why such crisis would affect us at all?
We are vulnerable to the effects of a crisis when we are dependent on one or more of such old fashioned institutes that fall apart. Believe it or not, we are more attached then we would like. Take away money from your pockets and what is left over of your auto-determination and self-sufficiency? Nothing. Without money you have no food, no gas for the car, no house, nothing at all. We suddenly find out that we are extremely dependent on the money based systems that surround us. The supermarket, the petrolstation, the mortgage or rent, our telephone ….even the taxes.
A good crisis cleans up. It kills instantly all those massive organisation in which we have centralised all our dependencies. Suddenly we stand their and find we have nothing. When our dependencies crash we become nicely independent and need to figure out how to use that freedom. We find that we are not only surrounded by nothing but also lack all the knowledge to become self-sufficient. A good crisis hence cleans up not only our old physical dependencies but also our psychological ones. We are challenged to think again about valuables related to our own direct efforts by asking ourselves where everything comes from, how it comes about and what we really need to survive. A crisis will help us with our auto-determination instead of being influenced and manipulated by the third parties that now disappear. This auto-determination is at first highly frustrating and fearful but after a while it creates openings for new creativity, social relationships and personal entrepreneurship. We suddenly realise that we are alive, with abilities to be self-sufficient, not robots of systems that parasited on us for a long time.
A new world will open up to us, full of new opportunities.
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.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 