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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?
2012 forecasts – the revolution of the concience
Here is the forecast for 2012 based on the model of the human complexities (“The Global Shift, a quantum leap in human evolution“, chapter 2, 2011) and related to the four quadrants that occupy our world in transformation the coming decade.
The revolution of the consciousness
1. The big splash
Most of our world economies are anchored in the unsustainable quadrant of greed. The credit crisis blew a big hole in the financial hot air balloon that was being filled up by governments, banks and business enterprises. The patchworks of capital injections don’t stop the system from collapsing simply because the collapse is part of a transformation and not a temporary recession. Many organizations and governments become aware of this but feel the burden of the old world still strongly present and are reluctant to take action, hoping for some miracle to happen still. Their professional mission is also to try to keep things going as it was against all odds.
The current world organization is historically fragmented into a network of geographic and business interests with money driven banks that are all linked up in a financial system. In such fragmented, money driven global society we see all the institutions take measures to save their own position, often at the expense of others. It seems all part of the game in which we see the worst of people dominate the scenes with tricks and manipulations to uphold old positions. Meanwhile the perspective of progress is lost out of sight. The consequences are that many institutions fail and crumble into sudden death due to lack of support, competitive strength, slow reaction time or total lack of sustainable basis.
Governments try to keep disaster away by injecting money they do not have, into old systems that do not solve anything anymore, just maybe increase the problem. And if no value is created there is nothing else to sustain the institutions than the injections that just delay their ending a bit more. More and more governments will go bankrupt or will try to slow down the inevitable by some measures (like economic reforms, raising taxes or whatever).
All banks have a large financial bubble that cannot be resolved so they only still remain in the picture because of the ties they have with in the form of debts that the public cannot and will not pay anymore forcing the banks into control of governments who placed trust in them with social security instruments. They fear loosing those too and with it the electoral support of their democratic backing. The outstanding loans of the banks have hardly any collateral anymore. They fall over further in 2012. More and more banks will not be able to comply with their obligations to the public that has its savings in it.
Businesses will try to go greener and greener, not just for marketing sake but also necessarily to compensate the competition for resources that outsizes the competition for sales. Products become more expensive in the markets of basic human needs. The green products do not stop the over- consumption that is still being stimulated by economies of growth, which eventually will create a further inflation due to a demand and growing shortages in deliveries. Prices rise and people cannot afford anymore their basic needs unless they get a higher personal debt which is unpayable already. The whole thing ends up in a big splash when all the global systems break their ties and focus on trying to do something about it locally.
2. Chaos
As the world’s large systems collapse along the line of organization complexities they enter the fragmented world of chaos where the local criminality and confrontations between people and systems grow, demanding local solutions around public safety, cohesion and integrity. The chaos in financial markets will be very large but isolated from the general public unless the systems place unjust dictatorial demands on the public (claiming taxes, mortgage funds, outstanding debts, etc) that will cause the rise of the masses against the systems. The public itself will also have plenty to demand that the old systems cannot give anymore s.a. pensions, social securities, insurance, etc. which will also get groups of people to the barricades.
The greatest problem in a situation of chaos is that groups of people try to take benefit of others through criminal activities and acts for survival. At the same time many will try to find others to blame for the entire situation. This entire process in a multicultural environment of migration is highly unstable and volatile. It will be highly dependent on the type of leadership that develops on extremely local basis to either escalate aggression or keep peace. All hopes are placed on the development of our consciousness, individually but also in the the institutions.
3. Awareness and consciousness
The positive thing is that this process is linear but affects people, countries and institutions in different phases. This means that many individuals already went through their personal chaos, process of letting go and enlightenment through the development of their consciousness. The growing amount of people with deep insight but also the cultural creatives that have views of the unsustainable situation of today, become representative of early experiments around creating a new type of society.
At this stage still it all depends on individuals, even people with a position in the established industries and governments who are standing up showing personal leadership in this complex situation. For quite some time new initiatives in the field of sustainable progress were crushed by the fearless and ruthless greedy systems of power in their attempt to keep their positions. This may still occur but more and more often we see the opposition grow using totally new instruments to organize the basics of a new society.
Most people and institutions do not want chaos, the threat of (civil) war or struggles around resources and gain insight rapidly. Businesses are repositioning themselves to serve a system by not producing products but sustainable results, involving many more people that strictly possible with the financial means they have. They start building on new value systems that are being developed together with the people who contribute to progress (instead of going to work. National governments loose control and need to allow local and regional governance to facilitate local for local recovery based on local self sufficiency and creation of local values.
What will happen with Europe? From an ideological point of view the concept of Europe was excellent but wrongly focused on financials and not on human progress. The financial Europe will necessarily collapse but the unity of Europe will eventually find some continuity in its own human consciousness of the need to develop global unity, not territorial fragmentation. This sustainable progress aspect of glocalization, local for local for global in a network of relations between self sufficient communities, can start in a new Europe.
The Euro will not be necessary in a world based on abundance of human talent and energy instead of the scarcity inherent to economics of growth. The development of content societies will create totally different needs and isolate the speculative systems that our now still powerfully in place. They are already under pressure living through their own shake out while respect and recognition for money itself and systems representing it, is rapidly deteriorating.
The revolution of the conscience will infect the entire global population as the pain of the old systems hits all people and the institutions. There will be large communities that may even not survive and the global human population will be reduced in the process. How much is difficult to say because it will also depend on the power of the grouping of the enlightened and the level of opposition or support received from the old establishments of remaining power and greed.
The revolution of the consciousness represents a new phase in human evolution and will go into our history as a decisive relatively short period of dramatic suffering, a collapse and recovery, but with a totally new elan of human continuity, respecting our species, its vulnerability, its relation with our natural environment and our evolutionary perspective.
In the end the revolution is the best thing that can happen to humankind but the suffering that will spread through the systems, societies and civilizations caused by the darkest side of human mentality, will be unprecedented in history too. There will hardly be any war but the conversion from total global financial dependencies to independence and self sufficiency is so intense that we will face important periods of structural shortages causing local panic, problems and signs of leadership and the lack thereof.
The long term peace that follows everything will not only be needed but will be secured by all involved to avoid new processes that have lead to the point of singularity and collapse. The global conscience will have made a giant leap that will not easily fall back in old human misbehavior. It will become the basis of a totally new phase in human progress.
And all this will happen in just a few decades and will be seen happening by most people that are alive today. The sooner one develops his or her own consciousness the sooner one can act accordingly.
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.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 