Time to Grow Up Into a Living Earth Economy

The current political chaos in the United States is a product of the failure of our economic system to fulfill the promise of the American dream: That each new generation will enjoy abundance beyond that of their parents. What most people experience instead is increasing insecurity and declining opportunity.

People know something is badly wrong. Uncertain as to what or why, they are desperate for answers. Who is responsible? What can we do?

Our current situation is ripe for the blame game. Blame immigrants. Blame Obama. Or blame scofflaw bankers.


Years ago when I was a business school student, our professors taught us that a recurring problem is a symptom of a system failure. Don’t focus on treating the symptom, they told us, step back and look upstream to identify the source. A lack of jobs, desperate immigrants, and even scofflaw bankers are symptoms of a much deeper problem.

We depend for our living on an economic system that is on a path to producing the sixth mass extinction, reducing billions of humans to a desperate struggle for survival, and driving the collapse of any semblance of a civilized social order. The very survival of the human species may be in question.

Those who are privileged to have a voice in the current system are reluctant to face the reality because the implications are terrifying. One of those implications is the necessity of relinquishing our privilege in favor of greater equality and true democracy.


SNIP


The current failed system is a collective human creation based on human choices made over thousands of years in response to the unfolding circumstances of history. In the big picture, these choices reflect three foundational assumptions:

1. It is our human right to dominate nature.

2. Money is wealth and therefore a suitable object of sacred veneration.

3. Social order depends on institutions that centralize power in the hands of the few to rule over the rest of us so long as these institutions are subject to the discipline of the market and/or a system of popular elections.


If we step back and examine these assumptions, most of us immediately recognize profound fallacies:

1. Our human existence depends on the health of nature and the systems by which Earth’s community of life self-organizes to maintain the conditions essential to the existence of all life.

2. Real wealth is living wealth—those things with real intrinsic value, beginning with the land we depend on to grow our food and the water we depend on to quench our thirst. Money is useful in facilitating the exchange of things of real value but has no intrinsic value in itself

3. Life exists only in living communities that self-organize in response to diverse and ever-changing local conditions to create and maintain the conditions essential to their own existence. There is no equivalent in nature of the centralized command-and-control structures we humans currently favor. That is because they block the community’s ability to self-organize in response to the ever-changing local needs and circumstances characteristic of any living system.

In the midst of daily life, we rarely step back to confront these contradictions.................. more


http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/time-to-grow-up-into-a-living-earth-economy-20160419