Financial Revolution

Revolution?
Pull with every ounce and fiber --total war-- if monkey wrenches or bazookas worked, we'd have them...the criterion for our Revolution is Sustainability. All extractive industries, premised as they are on destruction, are dead ends. Limitless growth within limited resources is illogical and unsustainable.

“Two paths lie before us. One leads to death, the other to life. If we choose the first path… we in effect become allies of death, and in everything we do our attachment to life will weaken; our vision, blinded to the abyss that has opened at our feet, will dim and grow confused; our will discouraged by the thought of trying to build on such a precarious foundation anything that is meant to last, will slacken; and we will sink into stupefication, as though we were gradually weaning ourselves from life in preparation for the end.

"On the other hand, if we reject our doom, and bend our efforts toward survival...then the anesthetic fog will lift;our vision, no longer straining not to see the obvious, will sharpen; our will, finding secure ground to build on,will be restored; and we will take full and clear possession of life again. One day- and it is hard to believe that it will not be soon- we will make our choice.”
Jonathan Schell - The Fate of the Earth

Post-Industrial
Their economic arguments are no longer valid. "Those who make it an us-against-them problem insure that it is an insolvable problem." But, since they are invested in self-perpetuating self-interest, they will fight against us, the people. So we will fight back. But ours is NOT a negative vision: we are working toward a post-industrial world where sustainable industries can grow to replace the pirate corporations.

Citizens have a responsibility to steer capital to create wealth sustainably. Part of this is understanding the nature of wealth; wealth differently defined from the outdated GDP measures of the economists. It is not money. It is not more asthma, cancer, and high blood pressure. It is understanding; understanding that wilderness has more value than consumption, that local organic food is net-cheaper than processed...We are motivated by this vision that is more than logic. It is passion that keeps us awake at night.

Post-Capitalist?
Investing in mutual funds and stocks of large corporations is not Honorable or Responsible. Handing over your accumulated money, which is time and power, to the corporations so that they can spend it for you -- doesn't it smack of feudalism?? Venture capital is usually OK, because it is usually administered personally. Also, VC investment returns are based on actual dividends (i.e. profits) as opposed to stocks, which are only really a glorified casino whose expected payouts are a shell game of speculation not directly tied to any real dividend. Real Estate is also a good investment, for the same reasons of promoting, rather than abnegating, personal responsibility.

I'm not arguing for a return to the gold standard, or trying to repeal the law of comparative advantage, but do understand what is real and what isn't. Hold onto tangibles, especially property...or better yet, don't make any money to begin with. "All money, in whatever form, should be put into land conservation." To really invest in the future, invest in preservation of our vital natural heritage that provides the fresh air we breath and the clean water we drink. The ultimate revolution is understanding what is important.

We Are What We Eat

EF Schumacher on "Progress"

"He called his talk 'The Insufficiency of Liberalism' and it was an exposition of what he termed the “three stages of development”. The first great leap, he said, was made when man moved from stage one of primitive religion to stage two of scientific realism. This was the stage modern man tended to be at. A few move to the third stage in which one can find in the lapses and deficiencies in science and realism, and that there is something beyond fact and science. He called this stage three. The problem, he explained, was that stage one and stage three appear to be exactly the same to people stuck in stage two. Consequently, those in stage three are seen as having had some sort of a relapse into childish nonsense. Only those in stage three, can understand the differences between stage one and stage three."

Why Did You Do That?

Why do other people act the way they do? Actions that you can't explain through values or ideology, like good environmentalists watching TV instead of the sunset. I think everyone has a list of weird inexplicable actions that other people do. For what reason? Personally, and I realize this is a personal failing and I'm working on it, I've always chalked up inexplicable actions to stupidity. The reason the ex-hippies paved over our vegetable garden was because they didn't realize how important it was or how much they'd miss it, nor how easy an alternative solution might have been. They didn't realize because they didn't really want to think about it, or they couldn't.

Since realizing my own explanation I've stopped believing it as much and have become more interested in other people's explanations. There is usually a dominant one, a recurring cognitive theme. For example, R, either through projection or the basic goodness of his nature, thinks that the reason people do bad things like cut you off in traffic is because although they know better, they just don't care. This lack of care is, for him, the ultimate indicator of all wrong actions. R has always been of the Old School of medieval honor and loyalty. For him, Good and Evil are daily battles.

I was recently rereading Catcher in the Rye, and over and over again Holden Caulfield, the dropout kid, explains people's behavior by calling them "phonies". I like that. In their hearts they know better and maybe actually are good people, but they end up doing the exact opposite because of society or because of something mysterious called "growing up". Getting used to being phony. Hunter S. Thompson famously described the Problem with Americans as "Fear and Loathing". Ever the wordsmith, he chose one of the most evocative and perspicacious phrases to describe other's failings. People live in suburbia because they're afraid of the city, afraid of others. And how much of that behavior transitions from fear to a kind of sublimating hatred; no better word exists than "loathing". In contrast, Steinbeck writes about "ignorance of the self" being the root of all evil.

I think he might be on to something with the whole Socrates "self-knowledge" angle, but why stop there? I'm an ecosystem Buddhist, a way of thinking I learned from the Zen/Beat poet Gary Snyder. According to him, we shouldn't judge others because everyone has a part to play in the drama-dream of life. We shouldn't judge warmongers for warmongering anymore than we should judge the hawk for killing rabbits. That is their (ecological) role in this life, a role we can vehemently fight, but not one that we should stoop to judging personally. I'll do my thing, tend to my business, and you do yours. Can any one explanation be more than a crutch? I and those around me deserve better.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

Our lab's colony of moths is dying...horrible mutations where we all work...there are so many possible sources its impossible to test for. Maybe our society is doomed, everything wrong with it, the chortling moans of ever-increasing numbers of mentally retarded, the true voice of our generation. Nothing is right.

We've only managed to show that we can satisfy artificially manufactured desires, replacing traditional sustainable natural solutions with inferior glitzy saccharine placebos. TV for sunsets, Chain restaurant fast food for raw local slow produce. Our values are wrong: slow and quiet and uneducated are not bad...perhaps even scientific progress, the ratchet that keeps us one step ahead of crowding-induced pestilence and destitution, is misguided: Progress destroys as much knowledge as it creates. Even as we fill up the libraries of the world with new facts, the old ways of knowing become increasingly remote, fragmentary, incoherent. Just as all the movies on VHS are now lost to those of us with only DVD players, the myths and legends that made us more than animals cannot be seen in the blue flickering light of the TV screen.

I question everything, now. Astigmatism, near sightedness, orthodontic braces, "vestigial organs"...we are changing our biology and the end will not be cataclysmic but gradual decline; lowered fertility, increased birth defects, centralized stagnant control. Our schools are factories and our factories and offices and living-places are nothing but slave labor camps that strip us, divide us, leave us homeless.

It is easy to imagine the past as primitive and dirty: the myth of linear evolution (rather than cyclic). It is easy to imagine that we can "help" the oppressed and the poor in the third world. But I look around me and see that the worst are full of passionate 24-7 intensity , believing if not in Heaven than in some consumerist ultimate utopia where entitlement and legitimacy are measured in cars and real estate. Meanwhile the best lack all conviction, while away their hours "looking for answers" in books or in masochistic exercise, walk with slumped shoulders and twisted mouths, wanting to believe in something but to honest to give up that final allegiance to our sadistic broken society. Who are our heroes now?

Stressed? The constant fight or flight response to this horrible mess: to run away (to the hills?) or stand our ground even as the gastric juices of this horrible Leviathan swirl around us? If intelligence is the ability to adapt, isn't the only smart choice to pop antidepressants and social anxiety pills until we make ourselves fit, like Charlie Chaplin, into the gears and cogs of "productive society"? If the only things I can do that are of value to society (i.e. will earn me money) also dehumanize me, is the cost vs benefit worth it? Are commitment and loyalty and honesty good if they serve a sick end? Is it smart to volunteer to be the canary in the gold mine?