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.

Mantaining an energy-rich lifestyle is self-deception

George Monbiot.

The idea that we might maintain present lifestyles while mitigating climate change is simply self-deception.

Our present energy-intense ways of living is a fallacy and can even be extended to the frequent national and international gatherings of those who call and argue for societal changes.

All these gatherings are of themselves energy-intensive and their very existence contradicts the values they espouse.

Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, writes about this contradiction and apparent lack of action in his latest piece: “ApplaudingThemselves to Death”.

He writes: “If you visit the website of the UN body that oversees the world’s climate negotiations, you will find dozens of pictures, taken across 20 years, of people clapping. These photos should be of interest to anthropologists and psychologists. For they show hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives.”

Breaking all the rules of a '10-minute city'

City planning in a carbon-rich world is strikingly different from what will be needed, and essential, if we are to endure in a carbon-constrained world.

A new book released just this week by Melbourne’s Grattan Institute examines the planning that it claims is “broken”, particularly Melbourne and Sydney.

The book: “City Limits: Why Australia's Cities are Brokenand How We Can Fix Them” had been published by Melbourne University Press.

A story in today’s Melbourne Age headed: “Melbourne's planning disaster: jobs boom in CBD while affordable housing grows ever outwards in suburbs” discusses the disconnect between where the jobs are and where people can afford to live.

What wasn’t alluded to, but is a clear implication, is the wider cost to society in the carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the constant commuting forced upon people when jobs are in one place and their homes are in another, frequently an hour or more way.

Any reasonable response to climate change demands that we live with easy walking or cycling distance of where it is we work – some people have advocated that we live in a “10-minute world”, meaning that most everything needed for day-to-day survival is within 10 minutes of where we live.

Traditional commuting would fade away if we worked just four-hours each day

“Commuting”, as it is traditionally understood, would fade away if the Four-Hour Work Day became a reality.

With workers needing only to be at their respective workplaces for four hours each day, they would live quite close and so to get to and from their work in just minutes, either by foot or on a bicycle.

The idea of commuting is considered by The Book of Life in a piece entitled “On Commuting” in a section called The Sorrows of Work.

“Entering the carriage feels like interrupting a congregation. The cold air cuts into daydreams which must have begun far up the line.

“The settled passengers neither look up nor give any other overt sign of taking notice, but they betray their awareness of any new arrival by dextrously readjusting their limbs to allow them to struggle past them to one of the remaining unoccupied seats.

“The train moves off, resuming its rhythmical clicking along tracks laid down a century and a half ago, when the capital first began plucking workers from their beds in faraway villages,” the piece says in talking about commuting by train.

We are paying now for capitalism in a dramatic way

Capitalism deserves much praise and is responsible for many wonderful things, but those benefits have come at a price, among them, a seriously damaged atmosphere.

The quartet of Alexander Jung, Horand Knaup, Samiha Shafy and Bernhard Zand have discussed both the value and disadvantages of capitalism in an article on Spiegel Online International.

In their story headed: “The Warming World: Is Capitalism Destroying Our Planet?” they say humans are full of contradictions, including the urge to destroy things they love. Like our planet.

The Four-Hour Work Day would derail capitalism and play a significant role in rehabilitating earth and renewing communities.

Naomi Klein backs, by implication, the idea of a Four-Hour Work Day

The idea of a Four-Hour Work Day is justified by many things, among them a changing climate, the blatant inequality arising from the existing economic structure and, critically and importantly, the desire to survive.

Naomi Klein.

The need to survive our changing climate has prompted Canadian author, journalist and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of corporate capitalism, has made that point in an interview with Spiegal Online International.

A kicker headline on the story says: “Can we still stop global warming? Only if we radically change our capitalist system, argues author Naomi Klein. In an interview with SPIEGEL, she explains why the time has come to abandon small steps for a radical new approach.”

Embedded in Klein’s view is the urgent need to dethrone the capitalist system and work at creating a more egalitarian society and maybe one which would revolve around many of the ideas upon which the Four-Hour Work Day is built.

Read the interview here: “SPIEGEL Interview with Naomi Klein: 'The Economic System We Have Created Global Warming'”.

Adaptation is about understanding how we live with something different

Adaptation to the rigours of climate change that will settle upon society is often contemplated in terms of what exists.

Adaptation is about
learning to live
in a society as
different from what
we now have as a
blink is from a wink.

First, people need to understand that what exists today, and what has taken shape over the past two centuries will be strikingly different from what will exist as the climate change template is pressed upon communities.

Adaptation is not about the preservation of the status quo, it is about understanding that what exists today and what we will have tomorrow will be fundamentally different.

Adaptation is about learning to live in a society as different from what we now as a blink is from a wink.

Survival in tomorrow’s circumstances will force us to disengage to from now is normal and live a life significantly less energy intensive and one in which happiness and contentment is found in things other than material and consumer goods whose existence  depends almost entirely upon the world’s finite resources.

We need to turn our attention from profit and growth, the mantra of our capitalistic world, to the enhancement and enrichment of peoples’ lives where they live.

Our modern world has brought many positive things and improved the lives of millions, but the cost has been alarming with an inequality that denies the egalitarianism boast of many.

Adaptation to the strictures settling upon us will force us to at least consider a Four-Hour Work Day, that is excepting public services, genuine farmers and privately owned businesses employing four or less people, will be inevitable.

The Four-Hour Work Day will make all of us fundamentally poorer and so less able to consume energy and resource intensive goods; force a dynamic that will see us all to live within walking or cycling distance of where we work; create more jobs as business eager to operate longer than four hours will need a whole new shift of workers; as second jobs will be frowned on (taxed at about 95%); and people will have much more free time which they can us to contribute to their communities, grow vegetables, repair household goods, share their resources (skills and tools) with their neighbours and work with their neighbourhood to build resilience into their communities.

The Four-Hour Work Day is an inticate part of adaptation and mitigation

Adaptation and mitigation are rarely considered together when people discuss a response to climate change.

This book to be launched next
 month at the University of
Melbourne helps us
 understand the different,
unfolding world humans
will have to live with.

However, they are in fact complementary, one and the same thing for if you apply mitigation processes correctly adaptation will follow.

Human-induced climate change has arisen, primarily, because humanity discovered fossil fuels and worked out a way to employ them for humanity’s benefit, but failed to recognize that in the burning they would be dumping inordinate amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Initially all was well for there were relatively few people on the earth (about one billion in 1800) and aided by the fossil fuels that brought the agricultural and industrial revolutions, along with marked increases in public health, we began to live longer and healthier lives.

Being better fed and educated, along with becoming much smarter, we learned how to exploit those fossil fuels and in making life far more comfortable, our numbers began to expand and in the past 40 years our population has more than tripled to an alarming seven billion plus.

However, those who study such things argue population growth is slowing and although there are more people living on the earth now than in the whole of human history, we will see fewer than 10 billion people on earth by the end of this century.

Of course, the numbers are in a sense irrelevant to how we adapt to a mitigate climate change.

The die, it is important to note, is already cast.

The amount of carbon dioxide dumped into out atmosphere as an unaccounted for externality is such that what is now a nearly one degree increase in the earth’s surface temperatures above pre-industrial times will soon become two degrees.

Writing in the 2013 book, “Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a Hot World”, there was consensus among the many authors, the Australians would need to learn to adapt to living all the shortcomings and difficulties associated with a four degree increase in temperature.

The two degree increase is unavoidable and roaring down the pipe toward us is a four degree increase and so we need not just adaptation, but mitigation if we are to have any serious likelihood of surviving these quite different circumstances.

People need to educate themselves, read the literature and learn about what is ahead.

What we are facing is so different from what has existed that it escapes the comprehension of most and the outcome is of such complexity, that to attempt an explanation here would do a disservice to all, short to say that the world of tomorrow will be different, damnably difficult and effectively a step into the unknown.

Let’s talk about adaptation and mitigation – first we must throw off the human created economic shackles and create a new life that is people focussed rather than one the emphasises that human-created construct of money.

 The world's population has grown
 exponentially since we found and
understood fossil fuels.
 

Work, a process that enslaves many and benefits just a few, needs to be relegated to a position of lesser importance and so rather than be “working for the man”, we need to be in a position of working for the greater wellbeing of all.

Subsequently a four-hour work day would still see us produce more than enough to ensure our comfortable survival and yet allow each of us sufficient time in which to work with and for our respective communities.

An inherent part of such an approach would see us all poorer, in brutal economic terms, and so less able to consume “stuff” and so society’s use of and consumption of fossil fuel-powered energy would drop dramatically.

Freed from the “need” to work most of our waking hours, each of us would be in a position to use that time, energy and skill to help make our neighbourhoods, communities, towns and cities better places in which to live.

Places that because of the work/life balance would be less energy intensive, more resilient in a changing world and a way of life that would be more adaptive to the emerging difficulties associated with climate change and actually mitigate the cause of our declining atmospheric conditions.

Complex equations made startlingly simple

Equations leading to climate change are complex and yet, in fact startlingly simple.

 Daly's book,
explains 'Steady
State Economics'.

The capitalist system to which the developed world adheres is energy intensive with most of its dynamism being derived from the combustion of fossil fuels.

To avoid the complexities and confusion of climate change, or at least begin to mitigate the contributing dynamics, we need to reduce, constrain and seriously limit our use of fossil fuels and that means slowing trade at all levels within the capitalist system.

An interim step to enable the world community to embrace a new lifestyle, one changing the emphasis from one of profit to a focus on people, would be the introduction of a four-hour trading day.

Complex and impossible many would argue, but no more so, however, than the development of the profit motivated capitalist system that has arisen over about three centuries.

There is one strikingly important difference for what exists took many generations to assemble and in doing so consumed most of the world’s finite resources, upon which the modern world desperately depends, and left many people emotionally and physically disabled, and resulted frequently in divided and disrupted communities.

Critically, we don’t have three centuries to resolve this dilemma for by 2050 life on earth will become rather rickety when we will be hard pressed to trade for even four hours a day, let alone eight or even longer, as is the desire of many.

How this will evolve is beyond my comprehension, but until we can we can understand how to live fulfilling lives without living in the shadow of a monetary mantra, then a rather grimy conclusion is likely.

The four-hour work day is simply an interim step, but it takes us closer to what Herman Daly discusses in his 1977 book “Steady State Economics”, that discusses simply having what we need, and not what we want.

“Sustainability is a slippery word with meanings as different as those who use the term and for some it is about sustaining profit, whatever the cost, while for others it is about moderating the cost, ignoring our wants and ensuring our needs are sustained.

Sustainability, at least for the moment, seems to be about deconstructing the present greed and profit driven creed of an unbalanced capitalist system and replacing it with a more people-centric process that sensitively combines the best of what has lifted humanity from the morass of the distant past and the strengths of what is a softer, gentler and a more socialist-like way of governance for our society.

Work should be about answering needs and not the accumulation of wants – a dynamic that is much less energy dependent.

Clip adds to our understanding of the Four-Hour Work Day

Four-Hour work day enthusiast, Eric Fortune, alerted us to this YouTube clip explaining the dynamic.

In arguing that such an eventuality with the life of all, the attached promotional material says:

To end with this demented state of things once and for all, we must reduce working shifts in proportion to increases of productivity, establishing, to start, a worldwide work shift of four hours. This will end the world economic crisis, and give us full employment, a stable economy and a better quality of life for all human beings.

 

The YouTube clip is simply entitled: “The four-hour workday”.

Writing about population, but solving another issue

Professor Danny Dorling doesn’t specifically endorse the Four-Hour Work Day, but the implications of his 2013 book, “Population 10 Billion” suggest he would support the idea.

Danny Dorling's
 book - "Population
10 Billion".

The Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield sees the future welfare of the world as intimately implicated in humanity’s broad consumption habits and discussing how we could live in a vastly fairer and essentially better world he wrote: “But first we need to control growth, not population growth – that is being controlled – but economic growth, which is still uncontrolled.”

The near uncontrolled hours allowed for work (work in its traditional and understood sense) is the driver of economic growth and that, along with insistent advertising ensuring we always remain materialistically aspirational in an our ambitions.

That near daily grind with its unrelenting hours of work brings a range of individual and communal difficulties from personal dissatisfaction to neighbourhood dystopia.

Chief, however, among the ailments arising from seemingly unlimited work hours and the unbridled consumption that arises from our personal wealth is the dissonance humans have brought upon the world’s climate.

There appears to be a simple equation: if we worked fewer hours; we would have fewer funds at our disposal; we would consume less; our subsequent carbon footprint would be smaller; we would have vastly more time to invest in the welfare of our neighbourhoods; our social lives would become richer through cooperation and working together, rather than spending most of our time, and our thinking, living in the combative and frequently de-humanizing world or business; we would also be in a position to expand and enrich the natural human social capacity that allows for collaboration that until now has been poached for profit by the world of work that is largely insensitive to the environmental needs of the planet – those needs being considered “externalities”, which are never represented in business balance sheets.

Climatologists who understand how we (humans) are disrupting the world’s climate system and grasp the seriousness of our behaviours, along with our insistence on burning fossil fuels, can only see successful mitigation through the immediate cessation of our embedded consumptive ways of life.

The Four-Hour Work Day is an immensely simple concept, but its implication is both intricate and complex in that it is seen confusingly through an ideological prism and its successful implementation demands an honest reappraisal of what it is the humans deem as “success”.

The idea of success for many is inextricably linked to the traditional mechanistic world of work, where a world in which work is simply realigned with answering needs is fundamentally kinder to earth, or at least the environment that allows humans to flourish.

Traditional work with which most of us are familiar, is, unequivocally, climate-disrupting and the energy consuming targets of the commercial world that are about massaging the toxic demands of our wants.

It is a risk of extreme proportions to abandon work without first understanding what we do to replace it for work as we experience it today answers out natural human need for the sociability that injects steadfastness into our lives.

Revolution is fine, but what happens after such a social upheaval is equally, if not more important.

A change to our lifestyle that bring changes that more than doubles our free time, demands that we reimagine how we live and within that create a paradigm that ensures that we are actually busy living fulfilled lives that bring many bring many positive psychological traits and allow us to flourish, both as individuals and as a group.

Work has become probably the most important tribal experience in our lives and we need to re-think that to make our neighbourhoods the source of the richness we draw from those tribal encounters.

Followed faithfully and through adherence to its principals, the Four-Hour Work Day will play a critical role in refreshing equality throughout civilization.

A degree is inequality has societal value in that it drives innovation and ambition, but too much of what today is a class-driven imbalance is massively de-motivating, which will ultimately lead to the very confrontations that those in charge fear the most.

A few guidelines for the Four-Hour Work Day:

People are only to work four-hours a day, no double shifts, no overtime;

Public services, such as hospitals, transport, postage, law enforcement and various essential facilities are not restricted; and

Any business that is privately owned and operated that employs four or fewer people does not face the four-hour limitations.

Four-Hour Work Day not only critical, but inevitable

Evolving circumstance humans have never experienced make our embrace of the Four-Hour Work Day not only critical, but inevitable.

Nicholas Stern.

Former chief economist with the World Bank, Nicholas Stern, said, only a few days ago, that a global temperature of five degrees above pre-industrial levels was increasingly likely.

Stern, who wrote a 2006 study on climate change, said on Tuesday, April 2, that the world could be headed toward warming even more catastrophic than expected but he voiced hope for political action.

He said that without changes to emission trends, the planet had roughly a 50 percent chance that temperatures would soar to five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages this century.

"We haven't been above five degrees Centigrade on this planet for about 30 million years. So you can see that this is radical change way outside human experience," Stern said in an address at the International Monetary Fund.

The economist was quoted in an international news story headed: “Economist warns of 'radical' climate change, millions at risk”.

Mitigation of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions can only be slowed through humans living a far less energy-intensive life style.

Any move to that demands a wholesale change to a way of living – we need to live close to where we work; we need to re-orient our wants and needs (our “wants” need to be supplanted almost totally by our “needs”); we need to spend more time in our community, in our street, with our neighbours; and by working just Four-Hours a Day, we would all be fundamentally poorer and so the fripperies of life would be less affordable.

In concert with that change, of course, would be the essential redistribution of wealth, ensuring that all people, regardless of whom and what they might be, would have access to a reasonable quality of life – something that doesn’t exist at the moment.

The need of ideas grows exponentially more urgent

 We need ideas now more
urgently than ever.

Ideas that will generate some sort of abatement of climate change implications are needed now more urgently than ever.

Reports from disparate points around the world illustrate that the realities of climate change predicted by climatologists were too conservative and the much discussed “tipping points” are in some places already upon us.

Prolific suggestions about response might have been appropriate if this was still 1980, but being 2012, some 32 years later and with the situation inevitably much worse, the time for talk and grandiose solutions is gone.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss possible means to avoid earth’s unfolding dilemma without sounding pessimistic and overly dramatic, but the situation humanity faces brings on a certain pessimism and can only be resolved through decidedly dramatic action.

What has worked for the past 200 years has enriched humanity, but came at a misunderstood cost to the health of the planet; an account which is now due and which humanity, if it persists with its “business as usual” ways, will not be able to settle.

Had we acted in 1980, we would now have been cruising toward a workable solution, but it is not 30 years ago, it is 2012, well the eve of 2013, and the world is close to having 400ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and with the world’s permafrost beginning to melt, who know where that carbon dioxide content will stop.

The world is presently at less than one degree Celsius in global temperatures, historic emission of Co2 make an increase to a two degree increase certain and now some respected groups and scientists are predicting three and four degree increases and should that eventuate, five and six degrees seems inevitable.

Many, including Australian Professor Ross Garnaut who has considered the costs of climate change, are reluctant to say how well humanity would endure post Industrial Revolution increases in global temperatures of five or six degrees.

Few in our society how pull the strings of power and who could show the way in helping the world abate climate change and find a way to work through it seem unwilling to make tough decisions; decisions that will be decidedly unpopular and yet, are probably the most obvious way to address the present dilemma.

An example of why it would it work already exists.

The much considered World Financial Crisis of 2008 slowed growth, slowed consumption and slowed our use of the world finite resources and during that period humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions fell away dramatically.

The lesson, it appeared, should have been obvious – if we learned to live a more restrained life, understood how to find contentment with less, equally understood that we should not envy or covet our neighbour’s goods or way of life and lived in concert with nature rather in competition with it, then it would be possible to slow our global carbon dioxide emissions.

It is an inadequate idea, but in working just four-hours a day the traditional business world would, in some essence, be sustained, we would have less to spend on the present frivolities of life and it would be a wonderful introduction how we must live in a world governed by quite different from those of the past two centuries.

The legitimacy of The Four-Hour Work Day can be argued endlessly, but our changing climate and the ever depleting finite natural resources will eventually, within a decade or so, make to adoption of such inevitable.