Better Accounting: Ending the Cycles of Abuse
Politics and Finance fuel destructive cycles using Outrage, Greed, Inappropriate Privilege, and Domination.
In society, power is established in relationships by telling stories. Those who embrace cycles of abuse, are anxiously and aggressively peddling specific stories.
In the confusion of political rhetoric and market advertising, we often find ourselves re-enacting timeless cycles of self-abuse and societal destruction. These cycles can become so consistent that they will take the form of ritual. It is not hard to find such rituals. Addicts that can’t find purpose for their actions will develop self-destructive habits. Societies that embrace ideology over understanding will feud endlessly through the political process, to the point it is harmful and not productive for their original goals.
Unwittingly, I have found myself fueling such cycles, by participating in political advocacy inappropriately, or by not understanding my personal purpose and goals. I am trying to learn to change. This is not to say that we should abandon all political rhetoric and market advertising, merely on the grounds it can inadvertently fuel these cycles. Without understanding what is going on, we may end up contributing either way!
We need accurate understanding of our condition and our relationships. We can avoid these cycles only by exercising care and conscientiousness that matches our level of influence, responsibility, and knowledge.
This essay is not the final word on these issues. It’s important to explore political rhetoric, market advertising, spiritual discovery, and knowledge mastery together. They are inherently connected! These are just my ideas at this time.
What an abusive story looks like
A recurring feature of abusive stories, is not the characters, or the setting,
or even ideological or religious perspective. What often betrays an abusive story, is when the teller or main character is more important than the message.
This can happen in any arena. In politics, we misdirect patriotism. Instead of respecting traditions and valuing heritage, it is used to assert superiority and promote unquestioning compliance. In science, we use our skills and knowledge to claim moral superiority, assuming that better mastery of physics, measurement, or technology places us above the moral knowledge and ethical traditions that previous generations relied on. Science is thus used to promote the idolization of modern man, instead of sharing deep, rich, and exciting revelations about the endless mysteries of the natural world.
First person perspective is a great storytelling tool, it can make a story come to life. But there is a difference between a relatable narrative, and ideas that target ego to establish domination and inappropriate control.
Problematic Stories in Finance and Accounting
The National Debt
We often hear stories about the “National Debt”. This is usually a political tool, designed to make you feel guilty. The story goes thus: “We as a nation, are morally deficient and politically corrupt.” This is a false exaggeration, but it is easy to find specific supportive examples. The most problematic part, though, is the implied solution to this moral panic.
Somehow, cutting social security, or some other “immoral entitlement”, or on the flip-side, increasing taxes on “evil rich people”, is supposed to fix these moral and social problems. You should be skeptical of policy suggestions marketed as punitive, whether against the rich or the poor. You should question rhetoric, branding whole groups as evil, without presenting specific abuses that can be investigated and addressed. (Anti-poor conservatives, and anti-rich liberals are both guilty of these rhetorical crimes)
Accounting imbalances can be a sign of moral or social problems. Accounting is a social process, and it is always subject to evolving social rules and norms. We should not be scared of the numbers themselves, but what they tell us about our relationships.
The growing national debt is, in reality, about two distinct trends. First, it is about growing wealth inequality reflecting distorted levels of influence in society, particularly in politics and commerce. But secondly, the growing national debt also reflects an overall expansion of wealth and savings. Public “debts”, of political institutions, are wealth assets used for saving money just like a corporate stock or your account at the bank.
Double Entry Accounting
There is a particular calculus promoted, that misrepresents how social norms are established, and lies about how resources and products are created and destroyed. This contrived calculus is responsible for a great deal of pain and misery in society. Under the regime of double entry accounting, some people are subject to strict legal rules for supposed moral reasons, while others can create and destroy money liberally based on their financial interests in commercial process (see Chapter 1, “On the experience of moral confusion”, in Debt, The First 5000 Years). Double entry accounting has become a double standard of law on those who can dance to the music or those who can’t. This is not a class specific problem. Financial rules can be abused by the rich or the poor, by the privileged or by paupers, by real estate mongers or impoverished identity thieves and fraudsters.
The purpose of accounting is defining privileges relative to obligations. This involves perpetual political and social negotiation, and requires constant vigilance. The way money is currently designed, it is used to recognize honor and grant privilege in roughly comparable proportion. But in reality, honor and privilege are two different things. We can make privilege conditional on honor without pretending they have a 1 to 1 relationship. This requires us to reject the notion of money as limited finite thing, and recognize it as an informational tool used to prioritize resource use and negotiate influence in decision making. People can act for the sake of their honor, without requiring specific monetary grants for every action. And people can claim privileges, without specific deductions to an “account” that describes their honor.
We can renegotiate the process of monetary governance, removing control from the hands of public and private bankers who focus commerce and consumption. Money should be used first to serve essential public and social priorities. Commercial development works best when it is done from a position of abundance after basic needs are prioritized and safeguarded through political channels.
Privilege is not something physical, subject to conservation of matter.
Privilege is not inherently quantifiable. Even to the extent that privilege can
be granted or revoked, it is not inherently finite either. Finally, conservation of matter doesn’t mean that the resources we rely on, and products we create, will last forever. Our things are subject to the ongoing whim of nature, and our privileges are subject to changing norms of society.
This makes double entry accounting problematic. Money alone is a terribly misleading and inappropriate metaphor for the complex realities of expressing social priorities through accounting and administrating resource rules politically. Until everyone can take part equally in the process of accounting, with an accurate conceptual representation of what accounting is, and how it regulates resource use and social choices, we are not going to be a free or fair society.
Money can be used for specific accounting processes, like engaging in commerce and paying workers, without accepting it as a grand metaphor for actions and their consequences, and collective wealth or well being.
What we can do to change
Those invested in cycles of abuse, want us outraged and politically active, but about the wrong things. This is how they grow their bank accounts, or rather, how people with compromised values, frequently bankers, financiers or corporate leadership, can grow their influence in society, when the rest of us buy into their accounts.
This is why you hear some people talk about all wars being bankers wars. In my opinion, it’s not the work of a single cartel or cabal, or even a particular segment of society. It’s just otherwise unimportant and boring people who have invested in abusive cycles, in all arenas of social influence. They end up doing things that are morally wrong, because they have placed themselves in an inappropriate position based on the stories they tell and the stories they accept.
Be aware of these implicit stories around you, and think carefully about what we can do to make things better and fulfill the parameters of our relationships appropriately.
There is a lot at stake
The good news is, the large scale destruction of earth, and small scale destruction of individuals and groups can be avoided. The bad news is that these things are actually at risk if accept and tell the wrong stories.
