My Alternate Path
I have spent the last five years trying to understand the complex problems we’re facing. This involved exposing myself to as much information and as many perspectives as possible, and using them to challenge my own understanding.
This path involved a lot of internal perspective shift, while still taking into account my own personal experience. There is always more information available. There are always new perspectives to consider.
From the start, I knew I saw things different than most people, but I could never get across my understanding. Since then I’ve found a number of brilliant thinkers that do a far better job expressing complex issues than I have been.
Daniel Schmachtenberger, for example, describes a metacrisis, where our attempts to tackle narrowly defined problems results in unintended consequences. It is impossible to achieve eternal economic growth in a world with global limits, which explains many of our economic, social and ecological problems.
I have been operating with the idea that our economic problems were core. As time went on, I learned to see the core issue being power, with money being one of many types of power. The common factor with each of the types of power are the humans, who are each biased and have incomplete understandings.
Since Trump was elected, I’ve seen a significant amount of time, effort and money being dumped into election activity. From my perspective, this seemed to be a losing strategy. Creating an arms race for donations makes many of our problems worse, and additional money does not guarantee a victory. More importantly, winning an elections does not mean your policy goals will achieve the result that you want.
The country is polarized on a number of complex issues. Getting enough power to implement one sided policies results in alienation of the people. If this behavior becomes the norm, people will lose rights. People *have* lost rights. While some people will accept the loss as outside of their power, you can be certain that not everyone will. Policies that fail due to sabotage were never going to succeed in the first place.
There is a human tendency to dig in when there is conflict. A push to self-defense. A desire to win. A reinforcement of our own perspective, rather than trying to understand the perspective of another. While this can be understandable, it prevents the creation of a common understanding. Tribalism prevents community.
“Where common memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no real community. Where community is to be formed, common memory must be created.”
— George Erasmus
The better idea, from my perspective, was to focus on the problems rather than power. Working on the problems can improve the ideas that can lead to solutions. Discussing the problems can help build consensus. It is difficult to come to a common understanding of complex issues if we don’t dig deeper than “Who do I trust to fix this?”.
So, while the world spent billions on elections, I looked for solutions that do not require winning a rigged popularity contest first. After listening to some on the right, I learned that their preferred approach for changing the world was the “Free Market”.
This seemed somewhat reasonable to me. Many of our problems had economic components to them. In my opinion, the focus on using technology to improve efficiency in industry has significantly increased poverty through nth order effects.
For example, automation enables layoffs when a job no longer needs to be done by a human. It allows for growth without paying additional people to do work. If the goal of the economy is to improve profitability for those who own the businesses, then it’s a positive. If the goal of the economy is to allow everyone the ability to make money to live by doing work, then it is a negative.
The tools developed for efficiency increases are general purpose, and can be used by people for other purposes as well. Some people choose to disrupt industries (other people’s jobs) in ways that are more impactful than layoffs. Much like the big box stores did to small retailers, the internet allowed for national or even global consolidation of retail sales.
I can see a different type of disruption that could be a positive. I can see how we could create local commerce platforms that would allow communities to operate more self-sufficiently, but in a collaborative manner.
Rather than creating global supply chains so that we can all be interdependent on each other, we could use Open Source technology to enable local commerce, and then share those tools with each other. Local economies can scale horizontally while global economies incentivize consuming more natural resources in order to leverage cheaper foreign labor.
By allowing us to buy from each other or hire each other for work that needs to be completed, we can reject the need for over production and over consumption as a way to create a big enough economy for everyone to make money.
The market solution is to stop the flow of money out of the community.
The wealthy often live off of debt, secured with assets that have values propped up by our continuing to behave in an economically useful way. As Elon Musk is beginning to discover, assets can quickly become liabilities when you lose your revenue.
Is it in our best interest to continue to enable this way of doing business? Or would we be better off finding new ways to work together in order to build something new that helps us instead?
After all, the world we experience is the result of our choices. It only aligns with top down power when that is how we behave.
Where the man at the station, he told me, “Work hard, son
Work hard all your life and you’re bound to be a real man”
He was broken, his eyes were dead, he could hardly stand
It’s funny that his master never seem to lift his own handMy father said I’m paranoid ‘cos it’s a conspiracy
“Don’t think like that boy, you’re bound to go crazy”
He got so many chains wrapped round his eyes that he cannot see
And he’d rather be blind than to realize he’s never been free— Will Varley “Concept of Freedom”
