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Youth unemployment – no money = no value?
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?
How the Content Economy affects you
The very basic, key requirement in a content economy is that every individual human participant becomes self-aware, self-conscious of sustainable progress and self-sufficient through auto-determination, self-leadership and independence from centralized structures.
That is a lot of responsibility for a single person! How can you cope with self-sufficiency when the entire world seems to be attached to the strings of centralized controls? If you cut those strings where would you live? Get your food? Your water or energy supplies? Health care? Clothing? How would you get rid of your waste or move from A to B?
The transformation from a growth economy of centralized dependencies to a content economy of self-sufficiency in sustainable progress is not just a simple ideological decision, it is a personal commitment to turn your entire life upside down.
Even on the individual level such new type of society would require a structural renewal of the way you address your life on a daily basis. It would take various years of learning new skills and integrating them into your existence in such a way that you get again a feeling of abundance. The learning period will be tough because your self sufficiency would not produce enough yet for you to adequately survive. You are forced to work together with others who are in a similar process.
In essence we see the following happening on the individual level but also in business, local government and institutions. The whole thing boils down again into four phases:
1. Acceptance of the new paradigm: This element is key to understand and commit to the process you go through and find the motivation to endure the tough transition period.
2. Personal leadership: Someone only decides to depart from situation A towards a new situation B if the latter provides better perspectives than the first. For may it is a tough decision to make, requiring reassurance through a growing awareness and consciousness as the local, personal or global crises clarify the ideas. Once the decision has been taken you are ready to address to future with determination keeping that desired new situation in mind during the entire process.
3. New professional skills: gradually you will find what skills are required to address your new challenges. We all have many skills already and today, with the usage of internet we have access to a large diversity of knowledge without having to move from our chair. Applying new skills to produce abundance will totally depend on the environment in which you develop your independence. Nowadays technology is very much advanced to produce abundance in nearly any environment on the planet and beyond. It is up to our creativity and adaptability to implement it for our benefit. Some may argue that access to technology costs money and indeed this may be true in the transition phase. But when we look at the abundance of tools that have grown obsolete in the last few decades, or even now due to the crises, we have plenty to pick from at nearly no other costs than that what we need to get the materials to us. Creativity, wit and guts is much more valuable than the tooling that is lying around us unused.
4. Purpose driven cooperation: when we consider true abundance, with the use of modern technology and our own talents and energy we can and maybe need to work together with our neighbors. For certain requirements we need a certain productivity scale to be auto-sufficient. Combining these interests with those who face the same problem will add up 1+1 and make 3.
Such cooperation is even possible on a larger urban scale involving self aware institutions and governance. Dealing with result driven self sufficiency through applied technology one may find the need to involve such institutions even if they still operate in the old paradigm. Consider the challenge of people living in dense urban city environments. How would they be able to cope with content economy if the only way to access food production is by applying the most modern views on urban vertical and spatial agriculture. And even such fragmented self sufficiency would necessarily be combined with innovative usage of water, waste management cycles, energy production and usage.
Such techniques would become multi-disciplinary and multi-functional requiring the cooperative participation of people with a large diversity of skills. Over 50% of the global human population now concentrate their lives in dense urban environments due to the effects of hundreds of years of economic based paradigm. And this amount is only growing. Even if we wanted we could not turn this clock back fast. So a very intense local small scale urban cooperation will need to develop rapidly to create sufficient output to provide the participating people with a minimum amount of life support in the transition phase to avoid an exodus into the country side or total urban anarchy.
It is a totally new area of development that is still in its teens from an expertise point of view but key for the survival of massive amounts of people who have nothing else than their 26th floor, 80 m2 apartment to deal with when the old paradigm collapses further. The current centralized power positions around food, water, energy and other basic supplies have fragmented the local available productivity into single massive product production lines for global distribution. The diversity of products surrounding the cities is extremely limited and scarce, in such a way that it would never be able to help the starving city population in case of disaster. Sufficient local diversity for self sufficiency would take decades of focused transformation to develop. Eg. With the current footprint the nearly 17 million people counting population of Holland would need a territory of 20 stories to supplies its needs. This is of course impossible so we have two options: reduce drastically our consumptive life styles while trying to use space as well as possible or allow the unthinkable the reduction of the population to sustainable levels by allowing them to perish or move to other places….A reversed migration away from the cities would create such devastation in the encounter of the travelling masses that it would represent a human disaster of unknown precedence. The best option we truly have today, while the old paradigm is still holding up, is to do our best to implement the content economy where ever we can right now, taking individual responsibility while we can, having access to resources and knowledge without yet the stress of surrounding chaos.
Right now the STIR Foundation has already started to work with small scale local new cooperative initiatives to at least create sufficient experience in working with new result driven models based on equality and competences, rather than hierarchy and speculation. Many of the human interests cannot be addressed comfortably in this way because they are still trapped in the economized hierarchies. These old power positions will try to milk their cash cows as long as they can before they fall over, even if this finally means that the transformation will come too late or at the expense of huge sacrifice.
All that people like you and me can do today is to accept the fact that we need to take responsibility sooner or later. The sooner we take our first steps at picking up the right skills, establishing the network of contact for early experiments, the better it is. I personally did and know now how painfully difficult it is. By keeping our initiatives low key or outside the reigning systems we remain at a safe distance to experiment at will. When the openings come due to the recessions and massive crisis we can try to expand expertise fast like fractals. Via twitter, blogs, social media we can share experiences in an open way and stimulate more and more people to start developing their own initiatives and join the movement.
Meanwhile remember the psychology of change that affects most people. For some time to come the largest part of the population will laugh at you while you are at it while the systems will try to do what they can to stop you, uphold themselves at the expense of everything or get you back into the old systems through tricks backed by the reigning laws. That’s the name of the game. At the end the content economy will of course affect you positively and provide you and the surroundings with sustainable progress. But before that it is the process of letting go and diving into the in depth transformation that produces all the pain and challenges. It is up to you if you want to take the leap or wait if the whole thing solves itself.
Content Economy explained
In my previous blog post I made a spontaneous call for the content economy to replace the economy of growth. I realize that the call had a high level of abstraction and needs to be made a little more concrete in its comparison with the current paradigm of economies of growth. This is what I do now.
The easiest way to picture the content economy is by looking at a family (your own?) with up-growing children. The family is continuously influenced by the phases of development of the children, the aging of the parents, the facilities needed or desired in the house or by the people, the physical health, self-sufficiency in providing life support, the interior, size and quality of the space, the warmth of the family interaction, decoration of the dwelling, as well as the things that happen in the neighborhood around the house (in terms of safety, parking, social interaction with neighbors, etc). The family uses those influences to continuously renovate, adapt and modify the interior, the facilities and human interaction as the situation changes continuously for them over time. One of the key bonding factors of a family is the love that unites them in a common family mission of human wellness and evolution.
When the children are babies the house and social interaction is totally different then when the children are teenagers or when the parents have become pensioners and the children started a family life on their own, with maybe the external support of the parents. The stability and progress of the family is determined by its willingness to modify its functional structure, decoration, interaction, etc as the situations change. This is conducted by all members of the family who express their desires and contribute to the adaptability through progressive reflection, interaction, experimentation with innovations and decision making. Changes from outside are absorbed in this adaptability while the family itself is also continuously evaluating change and progress with their views, desires and means. The family wealth is determined by its warmth, love, respect, equality, proactive interaction and capacity to progress using human values as guiding principles. When someone is ill family members change their agenda to assist the person in need. When a celebration is appropriate all join in to acknowledge the pleasure. Gratitude for each other and for the wellness all enjoy is celebrated together and all act to maintain it through labor, creative contributions and sharing the fruits of all actions for the better and worst. People support each other. When accidents happen that may affect the safety or health of the family members the causes are found and dealt with. So when the open fire place is dirty and fills the house with smoke, the pipes are cleaned or the fire place is not used anymore for a while. When the child gets hurt because of a hazard in the house, the hazard is taken away or the child is taught how to deal with the danger. Interaction between the practical wisdom of the elderly and the youthful adventurousness of the children is protective but also progressive.
All this and more is content economy, based on the reflective, continuous develop of what “we are”, not on what “we have”. None of the family discussions for progress turn around money but the way they invest time, talent and energy in the progress of the family. Money is a means, the goal is something totally different and related to investments required to achieve them. Technology is also a means, as an instrument to support activities in the home, for recreation of educational purposes, maybe to cover the transportation needs of the family, whatever. Technology is not a goal either, it’s what one can do with it that matters. A family is rich when it is warm, caring, loving and supportive towards progress through mutual adaptiveness at all times.
When we step out into the world outside the family we see that the national economies have grown to become based on totally different principles since the introduction of growth based economies. Money has become the ultimate goal for politics and business enterprises for different reasons, yet in both cases the means became the goal. In our city and country environment we do allow pollution, criminality and things that hurt our fellow people. One out of three people have cancer now, many have lung and heart deceases, others have psychological or behavioral disorder, not caused by the lifestyle at home but by the way we organised society through economies of growth. Why do we allow things to happen in our society that we would not allow at home? Why do people who work in politics or business institutions accept participating in destruction while at home we work on health, safety and vitality? It has to do with choice, with paradigms that justify our actions, no questions asked. But maybe we should now ask ourselves those question and start looking at society and entrepreneurship from a different perspective, not an intellectual or scientific novelty but simply the way we would want it and organize things at home. The solution to all current crisis is not far away, it can be found very nearby…….at home.
If a content economy is possible at home within a family, it is also possible in our society. A family is the basic and most ancient format of human organisation and can be extended integrally to our surroundings. This does not allow for any growth criteria but addresses the content and meaning of our existence through social interaction and a culture around true sustainable progress. Let us place the differences next to each other to clarify our choices when we need to deal with it:
Growth Economy: speculation, based on “having”, external, material, shortages, competition, growth, conservatism, culture around greed, individualism, money is a goal, social and environmental issues secondary to financial growth, has no other “meaning” than statistical progress through growth, destructive, short term, etc.
Content Economy: care, based on “being”, internal, wellness, abundance, supportive, change, applied innovation, progression, culture around well-being, collective, interactive, social and environmental issues primary to progress, money is a means, meaningful, higher levels of awareness, constructive, evolutionary, etc.
The transformation from an economy of growth into one based on contents starts by elimination the word “growth” from the vocabulary and replace it for “meaningful change”. This has a tremendous effect on the way government addresses its responsibilities and how business transform too. We tend to blame our lifestyle for all the social and ecological mishaps around the world but most families in the world know perfectly well how to behave and live a decent and responsible life. If you care for your offspring at home you learn to appreciate health, safety, vitality and the need to keep them in place for the well-being of your loved ones. It are the systems that are being forced upon us through the cultural mentality of economic growth that lead to the problems. It is high time that the media, political parties, business and the individual citizens become aware and start the transformation themselves, closing off the speculative world from destroying further any of our wellness. And interestingly we have no need to wait for anyone to do this for us, no need for a politician to tell us to or any scientific research to figure out the truth. No, we can find the solution very nearby, looking at our own selves and the warmth of what most of us call home.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 