The chart above lists the individuals and intellectual movements that inform a "conscious economics."

Conscious economics is about the seeming dichotomy/duality between mind and matter. This duality however is false, as even Kant -- in the 1700s -- recognized. It is a product of our cognitive apparatus when that apparatus is functioning within a consensus reality.

The chart underscores the simultaneity of four thinkers that crystallized the elements of a conscious economics. These four are: Adam Smith, Immanual Kant, Anton Mesmer and Emmanuel Swedenbourg. I find it curious that these four European men lived at the same time and, together, elaborated ideas that we today are still grappling with, and also today form the basis of a new kind of economics.

One of the episodes on 60 Minutes this week was by Scott Pelley who described a jobs program in Connecticut for the long-term unemployed. The whole focus of the program and Pelley’s reporting was about “getting jobs for these chronically unemployed people.” It was all about dressing them up and placing them in companies – even to the point where the company did not have to pay them a salary. The program itself, through its generous grants and donations, would pay the salary of the people.

The segment really disturbed me. It was all about making these people into standardized units of production for employers. It never once considered that the unemployed situation was an opportunity for the person to re-invent him or herself, and to find the passion for a work that makes them come alive. It was all about putting them back into the drudgery of working for somebody else. To me this is what distinguishes “a job” from “work.”  (“Job” is bad, “work” is good in my world.)

The program’s focus and Pelley's reporting all made the unexamined assumption that working is the same thing as “performing a job.” To me, having a job is drudgery. Doing your work, on the other hand, is wonderful because it is your life calling and destiny. At a job, you live for the weekend. At work, you are working and playing, making art and/or serving society, the planet or God – or all of the above – all at the same time in various proportions.  A “job” is a means to an end: money and social esteem. There is nothing inherent in a job that fulfills you. If there is any fulfillment, it’s the other things (money and esteem from others) that come after the job. Work, in contrast, is who you are, what you are committed to, what makes your soul sing.

The social consensus around employment, that Scott Pelley and this Connecticut jobs program puts forth, undermines the goal of attaining a fulfilling economy. For one, it is a consensus reality that serves employers but not employees. But even more, it limits human potential: economic, psychological, emotional, spiritual. Obviously, the “job taker” won’t find fulfillment, only a paycheck and relief from social scorn. But many other people besides the job taker, also won’t find fulfillment. These others include the employer, the person’s colleagues at work, the company’s suppliers, customers, community, and society that surrounds the person.

Not following your passion is a serious cost to society. Following the consensus, and not following your heart, leads to all kinds of bad outcomes.

The same blind adherence to a bad social consensus operates in the realm of entrepreneurship too.  Medical journalist Atul Gawande wrote a case study of two different towns and the business “code of conduct” of their respective medical establishments.

One town – McAllen, Texas – was marked by rampant profit-seeking and free-market individualism. The doctors, health professionals, clinics, hospitals and medical enterprises sought to make money on every transaction. The business models were all focused on the bottom line. Doctors made fees by referring clients to each other. Profit was the overriding objective in all enterprises. Each patient was considered a profit center.

Another town, Minneapolis, the healthcare professional community maintained a markedly social service and public good approach. Doctors and health professionals held to set salaries, and pooled their costs and revenue surpluses.

The healthcare costs of the Texas town were higher than the Minneapolis town. Yet, the healthcare outcomes – i.e. the actual level of health of the community – were much lower in the Texas town than the Minneapolis town.

In other words, the free market, individualist, for-profit approach to healthcare, according to this profile, created costlier and poorer health for the community than the “public good” approach. But the doctors of that “capitalistic” community got rich. (When seeking to make money – by any means – becomes the dominant factor of one’s work, this is a slippery slope, which I take up elsewhere.)

The point I make here is, beware of the consensus reality you adhere to in your economic actions. Be conscious of what you believe in. Belief determines experience. You get the economy that you believe to exist.

Moreover, your economic beliefs are not yours alone. They arise out of the communications with others in your social interactions. The community in which you live, will condition your beliefs. If you grow up and/or work in a highly competitive community, where others approach you to exploit you, then you yourself become competitive and exploitative. If you grow up or work in a community that holds healthcare as a social good, you take a more service oriented approach. Individual and collective mutually influence each other. The degree to which you act without consciousness – i.e. that you act unconsciously – is the degree to which you are under the influence of a consensus reality.

More than ever it is time to break free from old, worn-out beliefs and consensus-es as to what is our economic reality. Part of this breaking free is acting more from one’s unique soul calling and one’s non-ordinary experience. This is true liberation and not to be confused with “consensus libertarianism.” It is a radically individualistic vision of personal and communal life, because it advocates acting from true soul, not conformity to the consensus reality. Yet it is potentially radically communal because self realization simultaneously fulfills the species too. It requires steady practices of awareness such as meditation, self reflection and inner observation (among many others). It also requires courage – courage to be yourself, courage not to be concerned about keeping up with the Joneses, courage to be deep in your own unique way when the consensus is shallow and uniform.

 

Image above from Kent Guitar Classics.

Image sourced at: http://sat-chit-ananda.de/

I have been reviewing the Vedanta philosophy, especially Vivekananda (1863-1902) and Muktananda (1908-1982).

Vivekananda delineates the four main kinds of yoga, all the while emphasizing that they are not precisely separate, but merely reflect the disposition of the yogi/yogini. That is, some prefer love versus philosophy versus mind control/psychology versus work.  But any one of the four kinds mix and match the others and places the others in a way that suits its style. Ultimately, all lead to the same place.

My theme is about how I am philosophical by nature (which would be jnana yoga), but that I am finding that I come to redefine love (bhakti yoga) in the process. So, my jnana path ultimately delivers me to a bhakti.

Le Loup, the commentator on the Mary Magdalene gospel, makes out her gospel, which is almost entirely based on her last conversation with Jesus, as he left the tomb and his body and his soul merged back into the eternal universal soul (“the resurrection”), he makes it to be that Jesus told and revealed to Mary M. that where your gnosis goes, so does your love and vice versa. You become what you love, you become what you know.

This point is underscored by Vivekananda when he says:

The grandest idea in the religion of the Vedanta is that we may reach the same goal by different paths; and these paths I have generalized into four – namely, those of work, love, psychology and knowledge. But you must, at the same time, remember that these divisions are not very marked and quite exclusive of each other. Each blends into the other. But according to the type which prevails, we name the divisions. It is not that you can find men who have no other faculty than that of work, nor that you can find men who are no more than devoted worshippers only, nor that there are men who have no more than mere knowledge. These divisions are made in accordance with the type or the tendency that may be seen to prevail in a man. We have found that, in the end, all these four paths converge and beome one. All religions and all methods or work and worship lead us to one and the same goal.  …That goal is…freedom.
p. 28, Swami Vivekananda. Selections from the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.

Vivekananda goes onto explain that this liberation (freedom) has a unique connection to knowledge, particularly self knowledge. Expressed as a formula, it is summed up as follows:

the knowledge of being produces bliss. In Sanskrit this is said as sat-chit-ananda. Being knowledge is pure happiness.
p. 89, Swami Vivekananda. Selections from the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.

[The goal of all the kinds of yoga, but of particular focus of the Jnana (philosophical) yoga is answering the question,] “What is that knowing which we know everything in the universe.” We realize that it is Being, the Sat, which has become converted into all this – the universe, man, soul and everything that exists. P. 86, Swami Vivekananda. Selections from the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.

The Advaitists [the believers in non-duality] have no place for the individual soul. They say individual souls are created by Maya. In reality they cannot exist. If there were only existence throughout, how could it be that I am one, and you are one, and so forth? We are all one, and the cause of evil is the perception of duality. As soon as I begin to feel that I am separate from this universe, then first comes fear, and then comes misery. “Where one hears another, one sees another, that is small. Where one does not see another, where one does not hear another, that is the greatest, that is God. In that greatest is perfect happiness. In small things there is no happiness.”  P. 87, Swami Vivekananda. Selections from the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.

Behind everything the same divinity is existing, and out of this comes the basis of morality. P. 88, Swami Vivekananda. Selections from the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.

Swami Muktananda describes further the link between non-dual awareness and morality. He describes his realization of the non-dual oneness state and how he identified other people as one with him as his “dawn of knowledge.”  He describes it this way:

Through my reflections after meditation, I came to understand the goal of the Vedantins. In my meditation, the knowledge came by itself of that supreme Truth that is realized by the Vedantins through the witness-consciousness, when the mind is in absolute stillness. I understood that Truth in which the most subtle intellect loses itself while probing it[self]. The merging of the intellect into that Truth is the attainment of Vedanta. While man is awake, That which perceives the whole external world as idam, “this,” as object, and yet remains aloof from and transcends the waking state; That which, when man is asleep and dreaming, does not sleep but remains awake, and with neither the mind nor the senses perceives the whole dream universe as “this”; and when man is in the black depths of dreamless sleep where nothing is seen, That which remains as the illuminator and perceives this state of nothingness – I began to understand That as the unchanging Self, the supreme goal of meditation. The knowledge that the witnessing Self, which sits in the eyes and makes us see forms, which lives in the ears and conveys the import of words to the other senses, which activates the movement of breathing in and out, and yet remains steady and unchanging in the midst of this movement, is the goal of Vedanta, arose spontaneously from within. Under the dominion of ignorance man says, “I ate, I drank, I took, I gave,” but the One who experiences all these things is the unmoving Witness, the inner Self – and that is God. Having realized this, I would wonder, when different types of people came to me crying and complaining, whether they were speaking the truth or telling lies. And the feeling would arise in me that the inner Self within me was also in them. … I came to see, in other words, that in all differences there is identity.
p. 202, Swami Muktananda, The Play of Consciousness.

Vivekananda talks about how there really is not a division between interior and exterior, subject and object. That really, all is one. But as yogis, particularly those of us who are particularly drawn to psychology (Raja) and/or philosophy (jnana), we must deal with this duality of inner and outer, knower and known. We use our mind to probe our mind. Mind becomes the object of investigation, but alas, it is also the investigator, that is, the subject. So we have the subject investigating itself as object.

Money, markets and prices are actually aspects of one and the same phenomena. They are inter-related aspects of a single, unitary thing. The "thing" is a mechanism, a social institution, devised by humans in order to coordinate reciprocal exchange, the assignment of credit, and the accounting of interpersonal promising. It is better to speak of them as a single unit, the "money-market-price mechanism" instead of focusing on each element separately. Yes, by considering each element (money, or market, or price), we can distinguish certain dynamics among the elements. But the first order of consideration, is to see the whole mechanism for itself and the role it plays in civilization. Only then can we consciously design it and observe the systemic effects of our designs.

Much of my professional work, especially from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, was devoted to the project of building the money-market-price mechanism into the global noosphere (the global info-telecom network aka "Internet"). As with all systems design, ontology was a central focus.

This page is a directory to resources about the money-market-price mechanism. Still under construction, the page touches only the very basic points.

Money-market-price as an instance of a social institution

• John Searle

Like all social institutions, the money-market-price mechanism has a peculiar phenomonological feature. It is epistemologically objective yet ontologically subjective. That is, money, markets and prices are real, but they only exist in our minds.

• Friedrich Hayek

Markets are how society utilizes dispersed and fragmentary knowledge about resource availability.

• Money-market-price mechanism is a kind of speech-action apparatus of humans
• Karl Polanyi and the money-market-price mechanism in modern times.

[more to come]

Origins

• Money was adopted in the Eastern Mediterranean as an improved way of intercourse, a substitute for warfare and pillaging, between the settled cultures of the Mediterranean and the nomadic cultures of Central Asia.
• Part of this cultural development was that money enabled kingdoms to maintain standing armies.
• For the development of the money-market-price mechanism in Asian civilizations, I look to K.N. Chaudhuri's work.

Cultural mythos and history

• See Gyges and money's integral role in tyranny and surveillance.
• See Lietaer's work on archetypes, namely Great Mother, Apollo and Dionysis.
• See Stephen Zarlenga's The Lost Science of Money.
• The emergence of central banking and the nation-state.

[more to come]

Two basic functions of money

• Medium of exchange ("synchronic")
• Store of value ("diachronic")
• Contradictions between these two functions.
• Like language is mistaken to be a mirror of nature, money is mistaken as a mirror of value.

Dynamics

• Stocks versus flows; income versus wealth
• Chrematistics, use versus exchange value, and the "monetary production economy"
• Taxonomy of money architectures

Fiat vs. backed, scarce vs. sufficient. Resilience and the role of multiple and complementary currencies

• The construction of derivatives
• Credit and debt deleveraging
  • Keynes, Minsky, Keen, Bezemer, credit currencies.
• Positive and negative interest rates, the "carry trade" and Islamic finance
• Allocation, efficiency and market failure
• Regionalism, multiple-currency regimes and right economic scale.
  • Robert Mundell, Sheila Dow, Bernard Lietaer, Robert Ulanowicz

[more to come]

The hazards, blindspots, and biases of earning money by selling expertise on money

• Steve Keen. Most economists don't know what money is.
• The movie, Inside Job.
• Never biting the hand that feeds you. Obsequiousness, "bright shadow," "masters of the universe,"   Apollo and Dionysis...
• James Hillman

To be more objective, we have to be more subjectively alert...something always has you in mind.

[more to come]

Note: This page is "under construction."

In the meantime, visit my Diigo library of Web links on the topic of MONEY.

Copyright (c) Torrey Byles, All Rights Reserved.

Dream groups are the royal road to the community unconscious. By gathering in groups of three to nine people, twice or four times per month, and sharing night-time dreams with each other, you will get real with what's up in your community very quickly. Dream groups not only build "social capital," but they are a process of social intelligence. And the intelligence that "comes through" the group, is often very practical. "Be extra careful about health and get rest." "Are we working too hard?" "Inter-gender conflict in the workplace is happening and it now takes such-and-such specific form."

Common themes such as these and many others often arise in several persons' dreams simultaneously. It is as if there is an archetypal pattern acting on the social field. Only by sharing in a group will these themes and patterns be discovered. Bringing them to our attention gives us choice and foresight in our action.

Indigenous peoples the world over have shared dreams from time immemorial as a practical matter of community economy. "Is today good for hunting, or should we stay home and repair our buildings?" And so on.

I propose that "neighborhood" dream groups today can serve a similar function.

I am certified as a dream group facilitator by Dr. Jeremy Taylor and his Marin Institute of Projective Dreamwork. I have been leading dream groups in Ashland, Oregon since moving here in 2004.

This page is a list of resources for further information, books, writings and links on the group dream-work process.

The Group Process for Dreamwork

• A short outline of six guidelines and seven effects of the group dream-work process.
• A blog post that points to the bigger possibilities for democracy, local economy and ecological sensitivity that group dreamwork provides.
• Political scientist Dr. Jack Wikse's wonderful essay on 'community psychiatry:' the dynamics of discussion groups, including dream groups, David Bohm groups and Patrick de Mare groups, and the connections between authority, projection and truth.

Books

Three of my favorite books on dreams are:

• Ariadne's Clue by Anthony Stevens
• Dreaming While Awake by Arnold Mindell
• The Living Labyrinth by Jeremy Taylor

Each author gives quite a different perspective on dreams, but all perspectives are complementary. Stevens provides a scientific and evolutionary approach to dream symbolism (along with a great symbol thesaurus). Mindell provides practical exercises in a cosmology of Dreamtime that is mystical and shamanic. And Taylor provides a concrete framework to dream interpretation that draws on Jungian, mythological and universal themes from the world's wisdom traditions.

Reading these books will give you a broad, diverse and stimulating perspective on dreaming. You will be able to feel into what directions are most stimulating for you to pursue in greater detail.

Dreams and Metaphysics

Dreams are the “Everyperson’s Gateway” to knowing that there’s something more going on in the universe than meets the eye. This is why anthropologists and ethnologists consider them the “first religion” of our species.

Appreciating dreams allows the philosopher to transcend and see through the “myth of empiricism” (also known as positivism, materialism, objectivism, “the paradigm of Enlightenment science,” etc.). The nearest other phenomena that serves such a function, in my opinion, is meditation and the transcendent states of being that meditation routinely engenders.

Dreams have phenomenological characteristics that make them unsuitable for study from the empirical perspective of science. That they occur and have some connection to the person’s psychology makes them undeniably objective. But their manifest content – the images and psychic world that compose them – are entirely subjective. Objective yet subjective: how to deal with this? Scientific method won’t do!

For greater understanding of the metaphysical “place” of dreams, I recommend the following books:

• The Dream and the Underworld by James Hillman
• The Play of Consciousness by Swami Muktananda
• Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda
• Seth Series by Jane Roberts
• The Spectrum of Consciousness by Ken Wilber

Of the books listed, only Hillman’s is a sustained articulation of what dreams are in relationship to one’s psychology and directly confronts empiricism. Hillman is a difficult but deeply erudite read. He shows how modern Western psychology points directly back to ancient Greek mythology. In doing so, he covers the waterfront: from Heraclitus (father of depth psychology), Democritus (father of empirical science), Protagoras (father of humanism and the professional occupation of philosopher) and the multitude of characters in Greek mythology; through Egyptian, Tibetan, and indigenous-shamanic views of dreams; to a highly nuanced critique of modern-day psychologists from Mesmer, Schilling and Fechner, to Freud, Jung and Bachelard.

Warning: the degree to which you don’t understand Hillman is equal to the degree to which you are in the grip of the empirical myth. Thus, reading this book, while working your own and others’ dreams (very crucial!), is a yogic practice unto itself.

The other books above, mention dreams only in their relation to different levels of awareness. These authors are particularly good for understanding the relationship between dreams, meditation and psychic/paranormal phenomena (aka “psi”).  Here, I could add the writings of Montagu Ullman and Stanley Krippner, but the ones listed were the most powerful for me.

Also, I ought to mention the Islamic literature on dreams, but I do not have direct experience here. James Hillman, of course, utilizes the framework of soul as developed by theologians of Islamic Spain, particularly that of Avicenna and Ibn Arabi, and more recently interpreted by Henry Corbin. As historian Albert Hourani says, “Muslim writers took over the science of dream-interpretation from the Greeks, but added something of their own; it has been said that the Islamic literature of dreams is the richest of all.”

Finally, on the issue of the metaphysics of dreams and an alternative method for their study (besides the scientific, empirical method) is the interpretive, group method (aka “hermeneutics”). See my paper here and mentioned in the next section.

Papers I've Authored

Two papers that I have written explore how groups can create a collective, multi-dimensional understanding of a dream.

• The Philosophical Foundations for Group Dream Work
• Psychological Projection in Mindell's Psychology

Web Links

Dr. Jeremy Taylor's website -- much more content, resources and links than here!

Dr. Marcia Emery's great Web radio show, The Partnership of Intuition and Dreams, is wonderful. She interviews leading psychologists, scientists, and growth workers of the dreams and dreaming field.

A good interview of Jeremy by Marcia.

Montagu Ullman on dreams, species connectedness and the paranormal.

The International Association for the Study of Dreams.

Website of Stephen Leberge, one of the foremost experts on lucid dreaming.

More links at my Diigo library.

 

 

My vision for appropriate human habitation of the planet takes the form of distributed regional clusters, rather than a hierarchy. I advocate the structure on the lower right side of the graphic, not the lower left.

The "distributed cluster" model optimizes self autonomy, "social capital" and right physical scale of economy. The hierarchical model, on the lower left, corresponds to the industrial, nation-state age that is devolving as we speak. It is the authoritarian model and the model that has arisen since Roman times, and accelerated in the past 500 years with science and industry. Today, the hierarchial model has 400 families owning 60-80% of the world's wealth and receiving a similar proportion of the world's annual income.

To realize the distributed model will certainly require a re-invention of government. But the genuine reform won't come without reforming and revisioning economic institutions and beliefs. See my post on Michael Sandel for the broad outlines of institutional economic reform. Also see my proposals regarding Occupy Wall Street and credit reforms.

The distributed regionalized earth economy is metaphorically similar to, as well as enabled by, the Internet. Architecture is crucial: tight clusters of local groups that are redundantly interlinked globally. Here, family-households, small- to medium-sized enterprises (public and private), cooperatives and other organizations (as represented by the circles in the graphic) form small communities in specific regions. They are linked via communication channels, to other communities throughout the world. Such groups, generally defined here, are the basis of the local, regional economy. Because the people constituting these households and organizations own these very same enterprises and regional economic assets, such as land, political and economic self determination are coupled and grounded in these community-based, local, regional economies. (See here for the five structural ingredients of local economy).

The benefit of this organization is that you get global intelligence enacted within the contours and capacities of specific regions and places. The physical throughput of economic activity (material-energetic extractions and movements) are largely confined within regions. Global physical movement is avoided. Only information-communication flows globally. Such a structure is highly resilient to shocks to the system (physical, financial, natural). Like internet architecture, if one part fails, the overall system is largely unaffected.

Besides minimizing the physical burden on the biosphere, this organization (in the lower right side) also potentially maximizes democratic control at the local level -- and thus globally. The smallness of regional economies affords greater participation by all the population in the region. Smaller groups tend to exhibit greater trust, cooperation and personal authenticity (see for example Robert Putnam, Wolfram Elsner).

Furthermore, given the greater trust that smaller communities cultivate, the individual human may potentially attain a higher psycho-emoto-spiritual development, than he or she would in anonymous, competitive, mass societies.

The particular organization in the chart has been referred to as the "connected caveman" small-world chart (see Duncan Watts. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness)

The other three forms shown are various social organizations throughout history.

 

Michael Sandel interviewed by Charlie Rose

Michael Sandle’s book, Democracy’s Discontents, is the history of the USA republic and how the notions of “republican virtue” changed and disappeared. “Republican virtue” according to Sandel is where part of the conception of a person and his or her freedom is that he or she participates in self governance and is involved in the civic affairs of the community. This virtue, which was very clearly the intent of the founding fathers, has evolved and in various twists and turns become more associated with a “liberal” notion that each person is individual, unto him or herself so that freedom means being free from any one community or another and holding the right to live as he or she pleases. The liberal notion is what has now defined freedom, and it is a freedom from restraint and a freedom defined “procedurally” (i.e. having the right governmental and legal structures of governance) that is not contingent on final goals, objectives or notions of the “good society.”

Sandel argues that the republican notion of self government can only be restored by restricting economic power and putting a control on economic centralization. You can’t simply dismantle government while leaving huge, globally concentrated corporations running things. Communities have no power to determine their destinies in such an unequal situation.

Dismantling governmental power without dismantling economic power will end up a failure, he says. This was Reagan’s failure, according to Sandel. Reagan dismantled government and courts at the Federal level, but did nothing to counter the national and global power of corporations and money capital. Thus, we are even less in control of our destinies, have even less freedom, less self government than ever before.

At the beginning of the 1900s, Sandel writes, the Progressives, especially under the direction of Theodore Roosevelt, amped up government power to meet the newly risen economic powers of concentration and large scale industry. This reached its apex in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and had a further echo in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Keynes added to the mix in a way that allowed people to abandon the original republican virtue of cultivating self government with the idea that by creating and stewarding appropriate economic structures at the national, macroeconomic level (e.g. price level, aggregate income, money supply – using fiscal and monetary policies), then endless economic growth by consumerism and corporate expansion will satisfy all. In this seeming boundless prosperity, the populace didn’t have to specify one social good or another. The “social good” no longer even needed public discussion. As long as there would be guaranteed judicial, legal and electoral procedures of conflict resolution, an expanding economy will fulfill any one person’s notions of the good, it was believed. In this way, Keynesian economics, according to Sandel, further eroded the need for citizens to get involved in self governance.

In Sandel’s book, Public Philosophy, he has some great short essays that capture the essence of his assessments and recommendations. He recommends that we have to counter the bigness of corporations, their unaccountability and governance structures, and the mobility of capital in an institutionalized global market.

Here is Sandel:

From the New Deal to the Great Society, the individualistic ethic of rights and entitlements offered an energizing, progressive force. But by the 1970s it had lost it capacity to inspire. Lacking a communal sensibility, liberals missed the mood of the discontent. They did not understand how people could be more entitled but less empowered at the same time. P. 41, Sandel. Public Philosophy.

The anxieties of the age concern the erosion of those communities intermediate between the individual and the nation, from families and neighborhoods to cities and towns to communities defined by religious or ethnic or cultural traditions. American democracy has long relied on communities like these to cultivate a public spirit that the nation alone cannot command. Self-government requires community, for people aspire to control their destiny not only as individuals, but as participants in a common life with which they can identify. P. 41. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

But the public philosophy of rights and tntielements left Democrats suspicious of intermediate communities. From the New Deal to the civil rights movement to the Great Society, the liberal project was to use the federal government to vindicate individual rights that local communities had failed to protect. Unable to fulfill the longing for self-government and community, Democrats allowed Ronald Reagan and the religious right to capture these aspirations and bend them to conservative purposes. P. 42. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

This abdication was politically costly, for as Reagan has shown, the communal dimension of politics is too potent to ignore. But it was also philosophically unnecessary, for there is nothing intrinsically conservative about family or neighborhood or community or religion. To the contrary, under modern conditions, traditional values cannot be vindicated by conservative policies. This can be seen in Reagan’s failure to govern by the vision he evoked. P. 42. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

Reagan’s proposed solution to the erosion of self-government was to shift power from the federal government to states and localities – to cut federal domestic spending, to decentralize and deregulate. A revitalized federal system would restore people’s control over their lives by locating power closer to home. Meanwhile, a less activist federal judiciary would strengthen traditional values by allowing communities to legislate morality in the areas of abortion, pornography, homosexuality,a nd school prayer. P. 42. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

But this approach was bound to fail, because it ignored the conditions that led to the growth of federal power in the first place, including the growth of corporate power on a national, and now international, scale. P. 42. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

In its origins, federalism was designed to promote self-government by dispersing political power. But this arrangement presupposed the decentralized economy prevailing at the time. As national markets and large-scale enterprise grew, the political forms of the early republic became inadequate to self-government. Since the turn of the century, the concentration of political power has been a response to the concentration of economic power, an attempt to preserve democratic control. Pp. 42, 43. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

Decentralizing government without decentralizing the economy, as Reagan proposed, is only half a federalism. And from the standpoint of self-government, half a federalism is worse than none. Leaving local communities to the mercy of corporate decisions made in distant places does not empower them; if anything it diminishes their ability to shape their destiny. P. 43. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

For similar reasons, conservative policies cannot answer the aspiration for community. The greatest corrosive of traditional values are not liberal judges but features of the modern economy that conservatives ignore. These include the unrestrained mobility of capital, with its disruptive effects on neighborhoods, cities, and towns; the concentration of power in large corporations unaccountable to the communities they serve; and an inflexible workplace that forces working men and women to choose between advancing their careers and caring for their children. P. 43. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

Sandel's Recommendations

In the end, Reagan’s presidency was an evocative success and a practical failure. In both respects, it offers insights that can inform a public philosophy for American liberalism. P. 43. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

First, liberalism must learn the language of self-government and community. It needs a vision of self-government that goes beyond voting rights, important though they are. And it needs a vision of community that embraces the rich array of civic resources intermediate between the individual and the nation. p. 43. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

Second, no amount of exhortation can rejuvenate communities unless people identify with them and have reason to participate in them. So Democrats need a revitalized federalism of their own, and should begin to debate the political responsibilities best suited to local control. A Democratic theory of federalism might begin by defining the basic rights of national citizenship, and seek ways, consistent with those rights, of giving local communities a greater role in the decisions that govern their lives. It might ask, for example, how to enhance local control of schools consistent with nationally assured rights to racial equality and a decent education for all citizens. P. 44. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

Third, Democrats must acknowledge, as Republicans do not, that any meaningful devolution of political power requires reform in the structure of the modern economy. They need policies to deal with the unprecedented mobility of capital, the unaccountable power of large corporations, and the adversarial relations of labor and management. A public philosophy that put self-government first would focus less on macroeconomic issues such as budget deficits and tax rates and more on questions of economic structure. And it would address these questions not only from the standpoint of maximizing GNP, but also from that of building communities capable of self-government on a manageable scale. P. 44. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

In this respect, it would recall an older debate in the progressive tradition, a debate about the economic arrangements most amenable to democratic government.  Some New Dealers favored national economic planning as a way of preserving democracy in the face of economic power, others anti-trust policy and economic decentralization. Earlier in the century, the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt opposed the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson. Despite their differences, the participants in those debates understood that economic policy was not only about consumption but also about self-government. Democrats today would do well to recover that insight of their progressive forebears.  P. 44. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

Finally, Democrats should overcome the impulse to banish moral and religious discourse from public life. They should reject ehe idea that government can be neutral. A public life empty of moral meanings and shared ideals does not secure freedom but offers an open invitation to intolerance. AS the Moral Majority has shown, a politics whose moral resources are diminished with disuse lies vulnerable to those who would impose narrow moralisms. Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread. The answer for liberals is not to flee moral arguments but to engage them. In any case, liberals have long been making moreal arguments, often explicity so. The civil rights movement “legislated morality” and drew without apology on religious themes.  P. 44. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

In recent years liberalism has faltered because of its failure to argue for a vision of the common good. This has conceded to conservatives the most potent resources of American politics. A public philosophy of self-government and community would reclaim those resources for liberal purposes, and enable Democrats to resume their career as the party of moral and political progress.  P. 45. Sandel, Michael. Public Philosophy.

The Challenges of Global Democracy

From his other book, Democracy’s Discontents:

Since the days of Aristotle’s polis, the republican tradition has viewed self-government as an activity rooted in a particular place, carried out by citizens loyal to that place and the way of life it embodies. Self-government today, however, requires a politics that plays itself out in a multiplicity of settings, from neighborhoods to nations to the world as a whole. Such a politics requires citizens who can think and act as multiply-situated selves. The civic virtue distinctive to our time is the capacity to negotiate our way among the sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting obligations that claim us, and to live with the tension to which multiple loyalties give rise. This capacity is difficult to sustain, for it is easier to live with the plurality between persons than within them.
Sandel, M. p. 350. Democracy’s Discontents.

Right here is a perfect point to segue to James Hillman and his metaphysics of the soul as being peopled by numerous gods and goddesses. But this is another blog post and chapter. ...to be continued!

Horace Taylor's 1899 cartoon of John D. Rockefeller holding the White House and US Treasury in the palm of his hand. Thanks to Eric  

 

My friend Susan Horowitz suggested that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) suffers from a lack of positive proposals -- unlike the Tea Party, whose basic program is (1) reduced taxes and (2) reduced government regulation, which are simple and concrete, easy to identify with. My proposals for an OWS program are:

 

1. Redesign the USA's central bank. Eliminate debt money as much as possible. Decentralize banking in general, including creating State banks, strengthening community banks, and establishing various currencies in specific sectors. Details here.
2. Shift taxes to capital gains and away from "earned income." And I mean cap gains in all asset categories especially securities trading and real estate. This direction includes Tobin securities-trading and Georgian land tax frameworks.
3. Strongly enforce and extend anti-trust and anti-concentration regulation. After a certain scale of operations and market concentration, a corporation's ownership structure should shift out of "private" owners, to employees and customers as owners -- i.e. make large corporations into cooperatives and/or decentralized franchise businesses that serve regions and regional markets.
4. Rebalance "labor" "management" and "owner" rights, privileges and powers in corporations. This would include such things as requiring equal representation on corporate boards for labor and management, like is done in Germany; and the use of the many multiple-bottom line accounting frameworks including Robert Kaplan Balanced Scorecard, Marjorie Kelly redesigned financial statements, and B-Corporations among others.

 

The common thread to all of these is that the power of money and large-scale enterprise has over-run the capacity for citizens to practice democracy and self-determination. The average American has no material self-autonomy as long as the majority of his/her expenditures (i.e. monthly bills), and wages and employment conditions (i.e. work income & conditions) are set by powers beyond his/her control.

 

With the above four reforms in place, and the power of large corporations countered, then a real political power is able to devolve and/or decentralize to regions and communities. And a local self governance can arise out of a more-equal local economy of business enterprise.

 

Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, in my opinion, is the best writer about the relationship between democratic government and economic power and the needed reforms to redress the imbalances therein. See his books: Public Philosophy, Democracy's Discontents, Liberalism and its Critics, and his upcoming What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.

 

The solution to our global economic crisis involves breaking the trance of economic beliefs that we hold collectively and unconsciously.

Below is a list of my favorite thinkers on this subject.

The idea that our cognition is social in origin has been long eclipsed by libertarian thinking.

How we think we think is so completely ego-based and self-centered, that we cannot even conceive of collective action.

One item on the agenda of economic reform is to understand that our understanding itself is based on our relations, conversations and interactions with other people.  Here are thinkers that have contributed to a sociological understanding of what we consider to be “indisputable economic truths.”

Mary Douglas, anthropologist. Her book, How Institutions Think (1986), is a great recap of the field and its economic implications, especially around institutions. She starts from Durkheim’s point that cognition is socially conditioned and that knowledge is a collective good being constructed by the community. It is not that beliefs make society cohere, it is that society makes beliefs cohere. This stands the individualistic, rational-choice model of mainstream economics on its head. The economics model a priori closes off the possibility of collective action.

John Searle, philosopher. His recent paper, Social Ontology (2006), is a concise read on how humans create social reality – institutional reality – all through their collective intentions and linguistic powers. He makes the astounding distinction that social objects (such as money, private property, the USA, the Forty-Niners Football Team, the Squaw Valley Property Owners Association, etc.) are “epistemologically objective but ontologically subjective.” This means that they are real but that they only exist in our heads. Social objects – social reality, including institutions – are created only through the human capacity for language. In his most recent book, Making the Social World, Searle takes forward his groundbreaking work on the “performative” dimension of speaking (also called “speech-action”), and builds a theory of social reality that comes into existence only through language.

Elinor Ostrom, economist who won the Nobel prize in 2009. She has pioneered how collectively owned assets, such as irrigation systems, pasturelands, fisheries, forests and other “common-pool resources” can be effectively, jointly managed for the betterment of all – without the need to “privatize.” She takes a very pragmatic approach. Even before incorporating Searle’s performative ideas of language, she developed a “grammar and syntax of institutions” which consists of five kinds of statements. Taken together, these statement types define the players, conditions, aims, rules and punishments when rules are broken regarding commonly used assets.

James Hillman, archetypal psychologist. His 1995 book, Kinds of Power, was panned by psychologists and management consultants alike. While vague on Hillman’s larger philosophy of archetypal psychology, this book shows how cultural ideas and archetypal complexes govern individual thinking and behavior. “An idea always has you in mind,” he says. Not only regarding “power,” this book looks closely at four ideas of economics that are in great need of cultural revisioning: efficiency, growth, maintenance and service.

Erich Fromm, psychologist and social philosopher. His writings from the 1950s, such as The Sane Society and The Art of Loving are appropriate today as they were then. He presents the existential psychology and shows that there can be a universal criteria for human psycho-emotional health. This is in contrast to, especially, Freudian psychology that implicitly claims that health means conforming to the norms of contemporary society. Society itself can be sick, says Fromm, and therefore attempting to be a “normal” member of that society will not lead to health. Individual psychology in the context of society is a direction of thought that atrophied in the past 40 years, especially with the rise of Reagan-Thatcherism and the false, monetary wealth of the global economic bubble.

Karl Mannheim, considered the “father” of sociology of knowledge. His 1930s book, Ideology and Utopia is a classic with wonderful insights: since the time of Descartes knowledge verification went from being an epistemological to a psychological to now a sociological process; that genuine knowledge must be based on the individual’s subjective-emotional situation, that an attempt at objectivity minimizes the depth of knowing, and that those in power assert a knowledge of the world framed as ideology while those out of power frame their knowledge as utopian.

Karl Polanyi, economic journalist, historian and anthropologist. Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation is the classic, “mother of all narratives” showing the rise of laissez-faire market liberalism since the times of Adam Smith. He points out that bringing “the market” and a common money standard into every facet of human affairs has caused more social and environmental destruction than societies will tolerate. There’s always a reaction, and then the class that has advocated for the market claims that their program has never been fully realized.

Michael Sandel, political philosopher and professor at Harvard. His undergraduate class on “Justice” is world famous since it began broadcasting via TV. I include Sandel because he extends the work of Charles Taylor and John Dewey (and is against the libertarian thinker John Rawls, his former Harvard colleague). Sandel makes the point that liberal society exists not merely to protect “individual rights” but involves a public, philosophical dialogue about the final ends and objectives of “the good life” that the community believes in. As such, politics and public affairs is predicated on belonging to a community. More detail here.

Montagu Ullman, psychiatrist who pioneered group dream analysis in the 1960s, highlights the social dimensions of individual dreams, not merely the personal, and that they reveal the good and bad influences of our institutions and cultural norms on our health. His work is important and outlines the group process and “conversational protocol” for discussing the stereotypes, archetypes and collective institutions by which we live as a community.

Arnold Mindell, psychologist, physicist and ‘modern-day shaman.’ Mindell’s World Work is a community process where the individual’s non-ordinary reality is shared with the group to resolve the wounds of persons and whole groups. It is very important to evolving our collective practices in a healing way.

Jack Wikse, political scientist and formerly head of Lifwynn Institute. His recent short essay, Practical Anthropology: Studying Our Social Neurosis, is a concise overview of the sociology of knowledge and how conversation in groups – dream groups or David Bohm style groups – can lead to awareness of our collectively held cultural beliefs. Highly recommended.

Obviously, this is an incomplete list. If you have any of your favorites, or have any thoughts about these, I’d love to hear of them.

The idea that our consciousness and cognition is fundamentally social was recognized by such philosophers as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Wilhelm Dilthey 100 years ago. Its implications were spelled out more fully during the 1930s during the collapse of market capitalism by such people as Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm and the “Frankfurt School” of social philosophers and psychologists. But with the advent, first of the Cold War and then with the Reagan-Thatcher highwater of “individualistic libertarianism,” the latter being coupled with a global economic bubble lasting 30 years, this idea was eclipsed and forgotten.

It is time to re-visit this understanding. Our consciousness and cognition is social.

 

 

Here is a good, short article on why working shorter hours is good for the environment. Christian Williams is an economist from Sweden who just posted this at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (co-founded by ecological economist Herman Daly)

Some of the benefits: 

• Energy consumption would decrease, especially energy spent on getting to and from work;

• Resource consumption would decrease as people trade some of their wages for more time;

• With extra time, people could make more sustainable lifestyle choices (e.g., bike, walk, exercise, eat well, garden etc);

• People would have more time for family and friends, less stress and better health;

• Fewer people would be unemployed, and they could make an easier transition to retirement;

• There would be more time for democratic participation, education, and exploration of other avenues to personal and community enrichment;

• A better-rested workforce is likely to be more productive;

• Both employers and employees could take advantage of more flexible employment circumstances.

Williams points out that at the beginning of the industrial revolution, it was good to work hard. Now, it is different. We are in a crowded world. We've also developed our material technology to a powerful level. In effect, we can afford to "back off" the material side of producing, producing, producing.

He goes onto say how we've created a false scarcity on available work. Available work and employment has become a common pool resource that people covet and treat poorly. The effect is that we hurt each other to the extent that we "hoard work."

As the amount of work becomes increasingly scarce, it is natural that people try to maintain and enhance their share — a “tragedy of the commons” scenario as described by Garrett Hardin. We can’t deal with this tragedy using outdated, empty-world tactics. In the empty world, we responded to technological improvements by increasing consumption. Moving forward, we must either learn to work less and be content with an excess of leisure, or reject the technological innovations that replace human labor — that is, reject the focus on efficiency and labor productivity.

To ensure that we do not contribute to the impending tragedy, we must all aim to work less. This also requires a social overhaul of the work ethic, and a new respect for idleness and leisure. Keynes, writing some eighty years ago, saw that adjusting to a life of leisure was the primary challenge for coming generations (us), as opposed to meeting basic needs as had been the challenge for all of human history. “To those who sweat for their daily bread, leisure is a longed-for sweet — until they get it”. Personally, a shorter work week sounds fine to me.

Complete article here. 

I remember as a child, perhaps it was from reading science fiction, that I looked forward to working less in the future as all the "labor-saving" devices did the drudge work for me. This is not what has happened. There is today that famous chart showing the disconnect between worker productivity and real income.  (go here for this)

As workers (and this includes middle class and professionals) we are creating value, but we're not being paid for it completely. It is due to the "bias" towards financial capital and the owners thereof that has caused this fleecing of the average worker.

If we were paid what we contributed, and we also worked less, we'd be happier, more creative and the environment would be improved.