Shifting our allegiance away from the God of Money

Worshipping the Wrong God

 “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

― Dorothy Parker

 

 Humans worship many gods and their legitimacy is relative entirely to personal views and values, but the most damaging deity of all is our adulation of the economy, a devotion which frequently displaces and so replaces critical human tenets upon which decency between fellows is grounded.

With the world facing a collision of calamities that has arisen from this perverse addiction, we need to mature beyond our child-like fascination with what is nothing more than a manufactured human construct and grow to a point at which we put people first and so relegate the profit and growth mantra, which has evolved from our market-driven society, to a position much lower on the hierarchy of importance.

Neil Postman wrote about the juxtaposition of news articles in his revelatory 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in which he discussed our inability to delineate a difference between stories included on our news coverage that jumped from death and destruction to cuddly animals without any understandable segue.

The news, national, international and local, has been given a sense of importance that few other daily conversations enjoy, but most news services invariably focus on matters financial and almost without fail end with reference to our socially legitimized international gambling casino, the stock market.

With our news services rushing to tell us about matters financial we are overwhelmed by this sense of importance attributed to an issue that when examined in isolation has nothing to do with the betterment of people, although the financial affairs of human existence are now so ingrained that it is beyond most to imagine a life in which human happiness and their broader wellbeing is placed atop those things in life that truly matter.

In fact, no research is needed to find that people, certainly those in the developed world that a person’s worth, in pretty much every sense, is measured by how much he or she has in the bank or what their potential is in terms of earning money. Rarely is a person celebrated for simply what they are; what they bring intellectually and emotionally to the discussion.

The collision of calamities the world is now confronting is a direct legacy of our addiction to economic matters – the drive to always put the economy first and before broader human wellbeing, has damaged earth’s climate; seriously depleted our finite resources; taken us past many planetary limits in that we are quickly exhausting our fresh water supplies; seriously overfished most of our oceans, which for centuries have been the larders of many nations; more people has meant more profits and so population numbers have never been seriously discussed; and the militarization of both language and behaviour has long been a cornerstone of profit and growth and so that has never been thoughtfully relegated in importance.

Naomi Klein in Sydney.

Writing in her 2014 book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate” Naomi Klein turns to one of Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, who has “built the forceful case” that our growth-based economic logic is now in conflict with atmospheric limits.

Climate change has emerged as the most critical dilemma to ever confront humanity and there now appears to be at least broad rhetorical agreement that the world must contain temperature rise to just two degrees above pre-industrial levels if we are to avoid sliding into catastrophic climate change.

Considering present behaviour and our unrelenting fascination with profit and growth, we have to now, according Yvo de Boer, who until 209 has been the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, shut down the whole global economy if we are to have any chance of achieving the 2-degree goal.

Radical, yes, possible, no?

Yes, it is correct we need to de-throne the economic god, but the removal of its robes needs to be done with care, but of course we don’t have time on our side for the world’s climate system is quickly deteriorating and any changes we institute need to made in just years, most certainly not decades, but such a dramatic change will ricochet through world communities leaving many destitute as the rich huddle together, leaving the poor to scramble for the scraps in a world in which a disrupted climate system will bring weather that humans will find alien to their needs, meaning that starvation and thirst will desecrate communities.

The so-called “pointy end” of profit and growth is not going to be the nirvana so many imagine and to understand the mathematics explaining that is strikingly simple, contrasting sharply with the equations that will drive our ultimate demise they are not complicated and to understand them requires little more than primary school mathematics and nothing of the arcane, convoluted and bizarre intellectual trickery presented to us most every day by the ringmasters of the financial circus.

Representative of those countries that make up the G20 gathered in Brisbane in November, but it appears these obviously highly-intelligent people are locked into fantasy-fuelled belief that technology will rescue humanity from this collision of economic chaos, resource depletion, over-population, governance disorder and seemingly endless military confrontation. It won’t, we need social solutions.

Trapped by the language used to explain what we are doing

(Part Two of the Four-Hour Work Day)

Trapped by language

 

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

-      Alfred North Whitehead

 

The challenges in piecing together these thoughts have been significant, but among the biggest of those tasks was to avoid the “misty profundity” described by Whitehead as “nonsense”.

Alfred North Whitehead -
'misty profundity'
is talking nonsense.

Language, according to David Christian of the Big History Project, was the most important of what he describes as “thresholds” for man in its 200 000 year history. With language came a whole host of other attributes, or at least the ability to express them, and within those came forethought and tolerance, things that enabled us to predict the future, or at least have some understanding of what was the likely outcome of our actions and behaviour, and it was tolerance that ensured the avoidance of confrontation, but at the same time gave room for the rise of despotism.

Language has allowed us to communicate ideas and through writing record those same ideas to ensure that the changes and advances of one generation did not die with those who initiated them and the subsequent documentation of those ideas has replaced, rather sadly in many respects, the need to orally pass on what had been learned and assured human survival.

Entropy rules that over time, things will devolve until they reach equilibrium and so it is only through the ever escalating use of energy that we are able to continually increase the complexity of something and it is exampled in language. In fact, language has become so complex that frequently even the authors are hard pressed to explain the essence of the fundamental meaning of what it is they have read and written. Examples of this failure of language, in this case written, abound in the corporate world and the siloing of language has become so intense and so littered by and injected with so many acronyms that the uninitiated find the thicket of words surrounding most topics impenetrable.

The language ails not just in its written form, but in the spoken sense with it being loaded with metaphor and is impenetrable to anyone who is not a part of “the tribe” and both the written or spoken language is so imbued with an almost secretive knowledge that those without access of the “code” are most left wallowing in ignorance as the whole process proceeds without them being aware of what is really happening.

The emotional implications of language is particularly difficult as it frequently frustrates the active use of a phases or particular words for other they become maligned with meanings or an emphasis with which they originally did not have – a contemporary example being gay, which in it early form simply referred to being happy, but in contemporary understandings, it reflects upon an individual’s sexuality. The word is sadly being forced to carry baggage that was not originally assigned to it and so it is effectively removed from a whole segment of our conversation and our language becomes much poorer for the change.

It was Rousseau who said: “If men needed speech to learn to think, they had even greater need of knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speech”. Further, Rousseau argued that civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by the rich to guarantee their plunder. And it is here that man is entrapped by language for no one can give a precise explanation of what a civil society really is and so if the behaviour or a person, or group, does not please the responsible men – those who see society’s salvation in profit and growth, although it is essentially their own – then it is argued that you or your group is not working in alignment with a civil society. There is an analogy with terms such as “national interest” or “ordinary man”, which are frequently employed by people in power, politicians and others who are eager to appeal to the emotional pull of such phases that in reality mean nothing, but are remarkably effective at ensnaring people and carting them into situations from which they draw little personal value, but which contributes much to the coffers of the rich.

So the modern Western society is trapped by language and in fact all societies are cornered by the words they use. Language is powerful, persuasive and perfectible and in fact it is a combination of all those things that become a tool to allow people to sway entire segments of society and lead it down paths that are socially destructive and in terms of the broader wellbeing of society is negative, favouring only a few and leaving the bulk of people languishing in and teetering on financial destitution, along with being emotionally and physically disabled. That, despite the beliefs of many is a recipe for revolution.

Although it is the combination of various words into various sentences that really cause relationship difficulties between individuals, communities and neighbouring countries and those from other parts of the world, distinct difficulties can arise from the misuse, misunderstanding, a different emphasis and interpretation of a single word – even a relatively simple and commonly used word such as decency brings with it emotional baggage that makes it almost impossible to extricate from beliefs, feelings, emotions and culture.

The technical meaning of almost any word can be spelt-out in just a couple of sentences, but when we try to free it from the belligerent quartet in which all humans are implicated, it crumples under the weight of those efforts to become little more than a blur and so does little to clarify why decency is one of the key human values.

Lessons from Leningrad - the preface

(The beginning of a series on why we should be working fewer hours)

 

The siege of Leningrad, or more particularly at least one aspect of that four-year German assault on the Russian city about 70 years ago, was the genesis of these thoughts.

Oddly, it bears no direct relationship to the subject of what follows except that it is evidence of a passion and intent to achieve an end; passion and intent similar of what will be required if humanity is to emerge from its presently different, but equally dire circumstances.

The passion and intent as
illustrated by those at the
Vavilov Institute is what
is needed today.

The Germans had decided early in the 1940s that the capture of Leningrad was crucial to its plan to control the massive geographical space that is Russia. It laid siege to Leningrad in the summer of 1941 and in assuming its military might would quickly overcome the Russian city, overlooked the resilience and tenacity of the city’s residents, particularly the scientists and others responsible for the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry. The men and women in charge of what was then one of the world’s largest genetic plant resources protected the seed-bank from the vicissitudes and violence of war. So intent on saving the seed-bank from the hungry people of Leningrad, and the broader impact of the war, many from the institute staff died of starvation at their desks, although surrounded by sufficient food to easily keep them alive.

That altruism and the belief in something bigger than themselves, a belief that ultimately cost them their lives, illustrates a behaviour presently largely missing from humanity. We stumble about locked in a deadly embrace with individualism, dancing to a tune played by the orchestra of economics so loud and so obtrusive that the idea of societal health and community wellbeing is not heard, or seen, and so ignored that it is in urgent need of help; help that only you and I can provide.

It is about now we need to consider the values, morals and beliefs of those from the Vavilov Institute and determine how we can apply human instincts to what is emerging as the greatest difficulty to ever confront humanity. Those from the institute had, it seemed, and innate sense that this nucleus of life in their care, a rare at the time and unmatched and irreplaceable store of seeds, was something of value vastly different and yet equally more important than the collapse of good sense and the subsequent violence and destruction in which they had become embroiled. Preservation drove their intent and from that arises a lesson from which we can learn.

Most any achievement in history made by man that was of any lasting and sweeping good arose when an individual, or group of people, who were transfixed by something bigger than themselves, something beyond what and who they were; something that had not emerged from a personal agenda, but something that was about enhancing the condition of mankind - it is not about the individualism that pervaded the 20^th century and has entrenched itself in the opening decades of the 21^st century.

This work found its feet in something that happened in Leningrad more than six decades ago and received impetus from a statement some 20 years ago by the Union of Concerned Scientists entitled “World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity”. That statement from 1,700 senior scientists, including 104 Nobel Prize winners, suggests we are living through something like a slow motion train wreck. The opening words say:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

This is about those urgently needed fundamental changes that in reality are too late, but it is important we act and act quickly to reimagine the world economy and understand why and how it has become an integral part of humanity  displacing those things that matter, such as collaboration, friendship and the deep and broader understanding that we are making this journey together and that each of us has an ethical and moral responsibility to those who went before and especially to those who follow, particularly those we will never meet.

What follows is not misanthropy (a dislike for humanity) or the mistrust of modernity, rather it is about embracing and celebrating the beauty and wonder of our civilization and at the same time suggests we revel in and exploit, as best we can, the wonders of man’s achievements.

Sweden opts for six-hour days, better than our 'death sentence-like' behaviour

L

et’s just admit it. Most of us hate our jobs. Only about 31% of Americans feel “enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace”. Even for people who do get to work doing something they enjoy, the idea of doing it for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for the rest of our lives can feel like an early death sentence.

One country has decided to do something about it. Sweden, in keeping with their history of progressive social policy, has begun the shift to a 6 hour work day, with many of their largest employers already implementing the stress-reducing policy — and loving the results.

Read the Wisdom Pills story - “Sweden Introduces the 6hr Work Day. Here’s Why The Rest of Us Should Consider it Too.”

Sweden sees it differently, Sweden wants just six-hour work a day

M

ost of the Western World, including Australia, wants to see workers with their shoulders to the wheel for longer hours, but Sweden sees things dramatically differently, it wants people to work six-hours a day.

This wonderful advance was discussed in a story published today in the Melbourne Age - “Sweden is moving towards a six hour working day as Australia's hours increase”.

“As work-life balance worsens in Australia, Sweden continues with its renowned family friendly policies by shifting to a six hour working day.

“Businesses across the Scandinavian country are implementing the change so workers can spend more time at home or doing the activities they enjoy”.

We need a Four-Hour Work Day, not a laissez-faire approach to hours

A

ny understanding of what troubles the world appears to escape Australia’s neo-liberal Federal Government.

Ian Harper - An economist who obviously
 doesn't understand, or is not allowed to
 address the troubles the world really faces.
 

Rather than be the solution to all our social problems, our prevailing market system is actually the cause.

The Harper Competition Review, driven by the Abbott Government, orchestrated by economists and obviously oblivious to what is really happening in the world, or has chosen to ignore them, and yet makes recommendations that takes us deeper into the difficulties that actually threaten humanity.

A story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Harper review: Plan to lift market restrictions to put consumer interests first” – tells of a plan to put consumers’ interests first, but actually ignores them completely.

The story says, “The plan is to put consumers' interests ahead of commercial interests, firing new market opportunities.”

Contraction rather than expansion is what needed and essential, if the world is, and by implication Australia, is to avoid a conflation of circumstances, ranging from resource depletion and catastrophic climate disruption.

Consumers actually need an outbreak of sanity combined with an equally generous helping of good sense to help them understand that in a world facing energy, resource and climate constraints, they need to be building a world in which they live with less rather than more.

The implication there of course, is that rather than extending retail trading hours, we should be structuring our communities so lifestyles can be similar, although different, and trading hours significantly shorter.

The ills of the world can be attributed to many things, but it is difficult to argue that the market system, so lionized by so many, is not the root cause.

Our developed nations are simply too wealthy and our consumption of energy and resource-rich goods and services is extreme already pushing the world into serious ecological debt.

Rather than adopting the Harper Review plan of extending trading hours and effectively allowing a laissez-faire approach, we should be discussing and moving toward reducing and limiting times for traditional business.

Instead of a 24/7 arrangement for retail businesses, our communities should be looking to move in exactly the opposite direction, that is a four-hour trading day, no overtime and no double shifts, but not including public services and primary producers.

Such a change would shift the emphasis away from simply making money and gathering “stuff” and allow people time in their communities to bond with those around them and build resilience in their neighbourhoods.

With just four hours on the job, people would live closer to their work and so would be able to walk or cycle, eliminating the need for road transport, making a significant difference to personal costs and easing the worsening of human damage to earth’s ecological systems, along with being far more resource efficient.

Our hunger for growth has human and ecological costs

The Grangemouth oil refinery -
belching gas by day
and 'Bladerunner' at night.

Capitalism and its inherent hunger for endless growth and the embedded dangers it has for earth’s atmosphere is epitomized in this 10-miniute video.

“The shutdown” by Adam Stafford tells us about the Grangemouth oil refinery where two men were killed in an explosion.

He says Grangemouth belches gas by day and is Bladerunner by night.

The urgency of the need for profit comes at huge human and ecological cost.

Such a refinery would not be possible if we were to adopt a Four-Hour Work Day as our lifestyle would be dramatically different: it would be kinder to people and, of course, kinder to the environment upon which we all depend.