Contradicting the Patterns of the Rigid Economy
Our early distresses can be like wallpaper or the air we breathe. It’s hard to imagine there could be any other reality. It’s just “normal,” the way things are, the way things will always be. We tend to experience our economic system the same way. It surrounds us like the air and seems equally normal and unchangeable.
INDIVIDUAL SOLUTIONS
Because we were hurt and didn’t get attention to heal when we were young, many of us isolated ourselves, turned inward, and focused on making the decisions that seemed necessary for our own survival. Seeing nobody we could trust to think about us, there seemed no choice but to fortify our own little castles and try to survive inside them. Our current economic system is based on similar isolation and dependence on individual decisions for survival. Think of the messages we get: Look out for yourself. Make the choices that will maximize your self-advantage. Build up your own security, because nobody else will do it for you.
These messages do not lead to well-being, either in individuals or in society. In RC we see how separation distorts our relationships with each other and diminishes us all. In our economic system we see how the pursuit of individual gain is leading to an ever-increasing wealth gap and the drive for continuous growth is threatening the ability of the planet to support life.
As members of the RC Community we are encouraged to hold directions against patterned behavior, to hold out confidence that both we and our beloved clients can reclaim our flexible intelligence, and then work in that direction. We have a similar opportunity with regard to our patterned and rigid economic system. We can hold a vision for an economy that functions in a way that meets everybody’s needs, and we can look toward ways of moving in that direction.
THINKING ABOUT THE ECONOMY
Many of us have difficulty believing that we can think about the economy. This is based in old feelings. When we were little, we knew that many things around us were wrong, but we lacked the information and power to make them right. Many of us got messages that we didn’t know enough or weren’t smart enough. When adults who self-define as experts, such as parents or economists, hold out the position that they have all the answers, we can easily believe that we have no place in the conversation.
But, in reality, most of the people who claim to be experts aren’t thinking well about the whole picture. Economists may assert that their field is based in hard science and complex mathematical formulas, but at root the issues we are dealing with are moral ones. The experts may have one piece of the puzzle, but what we know is badly needed.
“THE COMMONS”
We know that it makes sense to find each other and work together for the common good. One powerful way we can start thinking about the economy from this perspective is to focus on what we share, what we hold in common. How can we bring more of our economy, which has been increasingly privatized, into the “commons”?
Public libraries and parks are commons. The air, the water, and the entire planet are held in common. We share a commons of accumulated culture and knowledge. There is the potential for more: The idea of the commons can help us form a vision. About health. About security in old age. And about wealth and ownership, including a money supply that is held and regulated in common.
To get from vision to practice is harder, but we can start with what we know. We are learning to challenge the patterns in our own lives that keep us isolated and feeling that we, alone, are responsible for our well-being. We can expand to our communities, building up the resources that support others to do the same. We can join together to build alternatives in which we are working together for the common good. On a larger scale, we can challenge the laws and structures that have accumulated around patterns of individualism and greed in our economic institutions. We can look for wedges in public policy that challenge the dominant assumption that protecting the pursuit of private gain leads to greater public well-being.
If we can remember that we are thinking about the economy the way we would think about a beloved Co-Counselor caught in distress, we will see more and more opportunities to shift toward more human behavior. Here are some questions people are working on:
- With people increasingly separated by a growing wealth gap, what about policies that tax corporations whose CEOs make more than a hundred times the salary of their average worker? What about a tax on every computerized transaction in the financial markets?
- With the money supply increasingly controlled by private banks (that essentially create it by making loans, then profit from the interest), what about the idea of banks that hold public money in the public interest?
- With elections increasingly bought by the highest bidder, what about public election funding?
- With fossil fuel companies profiting off of climate change, what about eliminating their public subsidies?
- With more and more working people unable to make ends meet, what about a guaranteed minimum income and health care for all?
- With our economy biased toward private finance and capital, what about policies that support shared wealth in co-ops and land trusts?
While these efforts may not stave off collapse, they can offer some protections and some building blocks for a new system.
We may be tempted to use the idea of the “collapsing society” as a justification for passivity in the face of old feelings of despair—big bad things are happening and there’s nothing we can do about it. Within this frame, it’s easy to numb ourselves, give up trying to play a role, and cling to the survival patterns we learned when we were little.
Let’s reach for a response that’s consistent with the reality of our power. The current system is laboring under built-in contradictions that will cause ever-increasing hardship for ordinary people until the contradictions get addressed. Just as we can think about helping our clients with their distresses and working with them toward re-emergence, we can think about the contradictions in our society and look for levers that will shift them. Assuming that we are not capable of this is settling for old distress.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
(Present Time 199, April 2020)