Tuesday, June 5, 2018

David Korten: If There Is To Be a Human Future


Our defining gift as humans is our power to choose, including our power to choose our collective future. It is a gift that comes with a corresponding moral responsibility to use that power in ways that work to the benefit of all people and the whole of life.
 
To create a world in which life can flourish and prosper we must replace the values and institutions of capitalism with values and institutions that honor life, serve life's needs, and restore money to its proper role as servant. I believe we are in fact being called to take a step to a new level of species consciousness and function.
There was a time in the United States when most of our financial institutions were local. Which essentially meant that local communities were able to create their own credit, or their own money, in response to their own needs. We still depended on banks, but it was a much more democratic process.
In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.
An economic system can remain viable only so long as society has mechanisms to counter abuses of either state or market power and the erosion of the natural, social, and moral capital that such abuses commonly exacerbate.
As long as you have a system that is based on the rational that if you are making money you are thereby making a contribution to society, these financial rogue practices will continue.
Living capital, which has the special capacity to continuously regenerate itself, is ultimately the source of all real wealth. To destroy it for money, a simple number with no intrinsic value, is an act of collective insanity - which makes capitalism a mental, as well as physical pathology.
Moreover, statistics can be deceiving: the growth of jobs in the US in the 90s was due to many part-time jobs, with no benefits and generally low pay.
An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.
Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.
Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.
The professional study of economics has become ideological brainwashing. It is a defense of the excesses of the capitalist system.
Wall Street sees a social fabric or social contract as inefficiencies, which need to be removed.
Capitalism has defeated communism. It is now well on its way to defeating democracy.
When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity.
As corporations gain in autonomous institutional power and become more detached from people and place, the human interest and the corporate interest increasingly diverge. It is almost as though we were being invaded by alien beings intent on coloniz­ing our planet, reducing us to serfs, and then excluding as many of us as possible.
It is interesting to note that the 200 richest people have more assets than the 2 billion poorest.
There are actually very few US politicians who have integrity and vision.
There is no visible sign that the current politicians in the US are willing to see the need for change.
It will take some time before a politician will capture the imagination of the American people and have the vision and understanding to do what is necessary for a better future for the people of America and the world.
But we can also take the radical view that the test of an economy has to do with the extent to which it is providing everybody with a decent means of living.
If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth.
To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce our "garbage index" - that which we permanently throw away into the environment that will not be naturally recycled for reuse - to near zero. Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that they are absorbed back into the natural production system.
The proper goal of an economic democracy agenda is to replace the global suicide economy ruled by rapacious and unaccountable global corporations with a planetary system of local living economies comprised of human-scale enterprise rooted in the communities they serve and locally owned by the people whose wellbeing depends on them.
We can have democracy and a prosperous, just, and sustainable human future. Or we can have corporate rule. We cannot have both.
We will prosper in the pursuit of life, or we will perish in the pursuit of money. The choice is ours.
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With David Korten

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