Recent articles refer to the graph of youth unemployment in Europe as “scary”. Indeed it is alarming to see that in Southern Europe around 50% of all youngsters between 16 and 24 have no perspective of making a living through any form of employment.

The key problem we face is that there is absolutely no relationship anymore between the basic human needs, values, employment and money. Industrial centralization of manufacturing and productivity to areas of high concentration of cheap labor or facilitating policies for volume related, highly automated activities have taken all basic responsibilities away from the general public. If we go back a few hundred years the main concern of every individual was to produce enough for self sufficiency. Most of our time was dedicated to food production. If we sum up today our basic needs: food, clothing, energy, water, shelter, mobility how much of our time is devoted to achieving it? Nothing! All these activities have been taken away from our daily concern from a labor perspective. We only have access to our basic needs through money, not through our energy or talent.

So where should the energy and talent of our populations go to if the basic needs have been taken away from us in centralized money processes of which we see nothing ourselves? There is nothing except the “care for each other”. Care is something that cannot be centralized as it affects us all directly. You cannot go to a shop and buy a pound of health care produced in China or India. The care taking needs to be done on a personal level. Even though care is needed it is not directly seen as a primary value. In many countries it is financially organized through means that come from primary production processes, i.e. a secondary economy that depends on the primary economy of productivity (the making industry), speculation (housing) and consumption. So if the primary economy fails no care can be financed either and unemployment rises.

Unemployment rises due to disconnected values

But does that mean that people do not have any basic needs anymore nor the need for care? No, of course not. It simply means that we have learned to connect the wrong values to the money system. Europe opened up the borders to liberate the distribution of goods as a primary foundation of our economic progression. But these goods hardly contain European labor which means that there is no reciprocity between what we consume and what we personally contribute to our wealth. If there is no direct relation between our consumption and our labor where do the means come from to obtain them? Either by creating a primary economy of care that covers the expenses of the economy of goods and if this does not exist we create a debt for ourselves. From this point of view our debt evolution makes China grow in wealth because that is where the productivity takes place.

Our debt evolution has been camouflaged by keeping up speculation in the housing market and a booming business in real estate but this only covered a part of the economy while producing an economic bubble through speculative forces of banks and politics.

The solution is to be found in transforming our economies back into a direct connection between our individual needs and our productivity with our talents and available energy. This can start by accepting care, human health, vitality and education, not goods, as main value of society expressed in money. All the unemployed youngsters can find things to do in helping their own community into health, social cohesion and support receiving means back for it to sustain themselves. The second step is to become self-sufficient again in producing the basic needs, using modern technologies to provide abundance without centralization of productivity around the world. Food, water management and energy production become than again issues that keep us individually busy and disconnected from the large global dependencies. All people become then again aware of their own productivity related to the wealth we perceive and produce ourselves.

This transformation of the local economies is easily done if we allow ourselves to change our perspective of wealth from the “having” to the “being”. The opposition of course comes from the centralized power positions around goods and financial controls. To break through these impositions local governments have to step out of the economic grip of these systems and introduce new systems of human values that motivate their populations to invest their talents and energy in each other. This will cause a lot of old systems to go broke and stress will be high when the entire world based on old industrial process is forced to reallocate the resources and their own value systems. In between monetary systems will become obsolete and go broke. Large amounts of debt will be cancelled along the way by mere obsolescence of their existence. Since most of these debts are only related to a few in the old hierarchies of power they can be blamed of speculation over the back of humanity and punished by new laws that the new humankind will develop through this new paradigm.

When we look again at the graphics of youth unemployment in Europe time has come to make the transition. Local leaders would be wise to take the first step to show their commitment to their own people instead of luring still with the old hierarchies that are obsolete and already in the historic area of payback demands of humankind asking them to personally take responsibility for their leadership now and over the last few decades. Politicians and business executives would show signs of wisdom if they now choose side of humankind instead of money. That is probably why articles refer to the graphs as “scary” even though they indicate also the build up of frustration that will explode to make way of renewal. Those who let that happen knowing that peaceful alternatives are at hand already as described above, are also to be blamed when judgement day arrives.  When we look back at ourselves today in ten years time, what will we see?