Home |  Contact UsSitemap

FOCUS

Alternative Economies

Toward A Love-Based Economy

“We want to be free to love and let live.”

 

Joseph Edozien
Chibuike of Asaba; R.
Cape Town, South Africa

Love is the most effective and efficient foundation for any wellbeing economy and is thereby the right foundation for a new era of compassionate economics for compassionate economies.

Feel sensitively around you. You’ll be surprised how much hidden and suppressed Love you feel, in you and around you. Here! There! Everywhere! It’s just waiting to be freed.

Most ordinary people want to be free to love and let live and to enjoy freely the simple things which bring the greatest happinesses and pleasures in living. Most of us just want to walk into the future without financial chains and without economic parasites sucking up all our potentials and with the creature things which make life sweet: love, compassion, family, friendship, togetherness, spirituality, self-expressive self-creativity, real romance, healthy food, reasonable shelter, good chatter, and a few vanity things, etc. OK. And a few intoxicants now and then too. Smile . . .

 

Prefatory Note

Why LBE?

It would seem prudent for world denizenry to proactively begin to contemplate radically new financial-economic paradigms -- even if they’re just “ideas” right now. Why? The convergence of population explosion, financial implosion, resource uncertainty, and planetary “pushback” invites this prudence.

Also: our human world now needs different Peoples projecting its value systems; not those who got us into the predicament we find ourselves in today.

I offer the following next economy “sketch” to begin a conversation, to unfreeze imaginations, and to open possibilities in thought and practice. Please be aware that it may not all be easily understandable at first reading since the subject is inherently difficult and complicated, though necessary for everyone now to prepare for a probable future of great transition.

My intent is to provocatively challenge the way we think today to help prepare for a probable future of historic change ushering in different driving values. Feel free to struggle with the “sketch” if you’re interested in the matter, whether or not you agree with its directions. It’s OK just to get a sense of it and not understand every detail and nuance. What’s more important is that it gets you thinking and imagining . . .

 

I. Why I Write

The aim of this message is to present an abstract conceptual outline of a possible new compassionate economic organization of contemporary societies: tuned to post-modern challenges as a consciousness inviting seed for further open discussion.

The intent is to start a much needed broad public conversation to unfreeze the popular economic imagination from its present entrapment and fossilization in the current psychosociopathic economic paradigm.

This indigenous Mother Continent (“African’) economic vision proposed here -- which is really an inclusive world vision expressing, post-modernising, and globalising the long suppressed natural and cultural values of all aboriginal peoples everywhere -- is for a genuine spontaneously self-limiting nature-centric multiculture-enhancing commons-based bottom-up self-organising open-source do-it-ourselves free-enterprise people’s economy in which cooperative business enterprise is demand-guided ecosensitive cultural provision and public service is community enablement based on love for people, fellow creatures, and Nature.

The goal is a more gentle, more kind, more sharing, more empathic, more fun, and more personal-scale world with more Nature-Oriented materially self-limiting cultural values and which is founded more on Natural Love and Cultural Abundance and less on Fear, Greed, Possession, Artificial Scarcity, Resource Theft, and Induced Hatred as a “divide and conquer” deception to drive Kleptomaniac War and Exploitive Social Control.

We have all been in spiritual trauma for a long time and we need to heal our damaged psyches and our subverted values. We need each other.

 

II. We Can Free Our Economic Consciousness by Unchaining Our Economic Imagination

Economic systems are human creations capable of conscious design. Therefore, what our future will need, especially in light of what seems to be coming next, is a pervasive outflowing into activity of a genuine freedom of systemic economic expression.

And what seems to be coming next is a world-wide deflation of usury finance which will require artificially induced new markets of sufficient size, scope, and scale; or, to put it politely, the large-scale extinguishment of “excess capacity” to necessitate consequentially massive “reinvestment;” or; again to put it delicately, the deeper fusion of private finance with public governance in a new fascism of “Financial Feudalism.”

The first option, in the timeframe needed, would most likely be dependent on the political feasibility of reinvigorating astronomical derivatives towers on top of global carbon credits markets. But given the acceleration of “slow motion” global fiscal implosions already well underway in Europe and America, the last two options in some combination seem more likely.

Unfortunately, neither of the last two options would seem to be democratically or socially congenial. But this lack of “congeniality” has never seemed to be of sufficient braking power when the survival or limitation of the power structure of big transnational finance is at stake. We need econodiversity for survivability in the flourishing of our resilience.

In any case, a completely new economic paradigm, relative to the currently conventional “Western” economic paradigm, and stemming from dispossessed and aboriginal peoples at this moment in world history, would seem to be a reasonable and even welcome addition to the option set for world-wide public consideration and exploratory discussion.

The single most important proposal made here is that we end the global financial monopoly of Systemic Usury (systemic interest-bearing debt-based money creation) thus enabling multiple diverse currency frameworks to interoperate in complementary ways for many different co-existing economic cultures which evolve ecoregional economies by internetworking self-sufficiency oriented spontaneously self-limiting small-scale economies founded on the organic compassions and spannable intimacies of real and virtual self-organising communities necessary to survive the great challenges ahead.

Because power hoarding elites do not give up power willingly due to their deep driving insecurities, even when it will improve conditions for them, it will be necessary to devolve economic power through the system of economic organization itself. And this is what I propose; knowing full well that such is only possible in extraordinary circumstances during special historical moments such as this time will be.

 

III. The Inevitable Collapse of Systemic Usury

By my rough calculations, the current global financial monopoly will become mathematically unsustainable and thus terminal in the next few years. This has to do with the relationship between exponentially expanding systemic interest obligations and the decreasingly “profitable” revenue opportunities inherent in the combination of taxation and sustainably stable commercial activities world-wide. We have plucked most of the readily available “low hanging” fruit. Plus: the hyper-expensive “shadow” superstructure of the global usury financial system is now just too big to sustain itself.

The global usury financial system is already well into its collapse gyrations. All that is going on now is geopolitical “theatre” to hide the fact that the global usury system will be undergoing a “covert” reset, or reboot, which keeps its current power structure largely intact. I say this because the global usury financial system is a power system: it is not a neutral background medium of transactions as it claims to be. Money is power; and if you control money you control power. Thus: those who control money will not give up that control just because it is better for most of humanity, and in fact the planet, that they do so. Systemic Usury is the subtlest trap for world enslavement ever made.

Our whole conventional economic world is already effectively bankrupt (bank-ruptured too) within the legal and transactional framework of our current global usury financial system since its systemic debt “sales” must grow faster than the economic growth it needs to self-sustain itself because interest-bearing debt is the fuel for its continuance. Therefore, transitions to new economic formations, whether organic or chaotic, are structurally inevitable and all counter-hopes are thus financial and political illusions. But we will never be told this by power.

 

IV. The Solution is Decentralisation and Deconcentration of Power

The solution to our current world problems lies structurally in the decentralisation and variation of financial-economic and financial-political power and not in the increased institutional centralization and plutocratic concentration of global-economic and global-political sovereignty in world-straddling financially-founded oligarchic formations managed by an unaccountable and remote, even if invisible, technocracy.

What many do not understand is that financial capital and free industrial capital do not share the same interests; and this is why industrial capital has become captured by financial capital. Industrial capital is now as much enslaved as its wage workers. Not all capital is the same and not all capital is exploitive. Some capitals are broadly beneficial.

Our world would be a far better and far saner and far more rational world if industrial capital were the power, rather than financial capital. But it would still require monetary transformation to a non-usury system to place financial capital in the service of industrial capital, as it should be, rather than industrial capital in the service of financial capital, as now. Usury financial capital, not industrial capital, is the central problem endangering humanity today. Financial capital is the power. And Systemic Usury is the devil in the economic details.

Ordinary productive businesspeople, no matter the size of their bank accounts, are now financial slaves too. They are just less aware than wage working people of the need for deep change and financial transformation because their circumstances are relatively more comfortable and secure since they occupy a “higher” place in the current system.

Every true business is in fact a personal or social service, which is the only reason it has any real value. This deep truth is well veiled by the profit motive which is underneath a usury driven motive. “Profit” for some, being uncreated value, is loss for all in aggregate.

 

V. Addressing The Subversion of Human Ecology

The underlying dynamic subverting human ecology in the modern era is the systemic dysfunction in the exponentially self-expanding “Reverse Robin Hood” usury-driven socio-economic paradigm we have today: which systematically robs the many poor to make the few rich and then dazzles and blinds us all with deceptive “justifications” in education, media, entertainment, and advertising systems, “owned” largely by that financial power, designed to cloak and mask the underlying systemic malady of usury.

The way forward is clear.

We cannot cede the foundations of our economic freedom to unaccountable centralized and concentrated global monopolies and oligarchies:

1. Our free food supply sovereignty.
2. Our free sustainable livelihood sovereignty.
3. Our free self-enterprise sovereignty.
4. Our free monetary sovereignty.
5. Our free systemic economic imaginations.
6. Our free systemic economic expressions.
7. Our diverse cultural and personal human potentials.
8. And we cannot eat our last blade of grass and turn our whole world into a desert of our own making as pushed there by the self-survival and exponential growth needs of the current global usury financial system.

 

If we cede any single one of these eight things we will in a systematic cascade systemically cede all the rest and lose our freedom and our long-term resilience as variegated human beings.

We are already much closer to this spiritual dystopia than many people suspect. Just think about how much of what you think you “want” is now subliminally programmed by advertising and implanted memes. Fewer and fewer of us are autonomous thinking and feeling beings. And it is telling how so easily willing we have become to trade our real freedoms for “protection” from mostly imagined “threats.” This is a sure though subtle sign that we are losing our self-will, our real self-respect, and our genuine self-love. And we mask this loss of personal, cultural, and social sovereignty by feeding our personal and social egos in increasingly unsound and grotesque ways in our increasingly decultured and denatured lives.

 

VI. Enough is Enough for Enough

For most people, enough is enough. They don’t need mansions and sleek private jets. And they don’t need tyrannical control over other people’s lives and resources.

It is definitely possible today to build an economy in which everyone has enough and in which the gentle can flourish along with the greedy.

But this will have to be an economy built literally from the ground up and not from the power hoarders down. The power hoarders are too locked into their selfish, narcissistic, and destructive paradigm which made them “rich” for them to have the clear-sighted courage to help us off it even when that “Great Escape” is now obviously better for humanity, themselves, all earthly creatures, and the whole planet itself.

Human productive capacities, technologies, and accumulated knowledge and skills have developed to a sufficient degree that we can reliably produce enough for all to live well, even if not all opulently. And living well importantly includes how one feels about oneself and others. It is very much about the quality of compassionate connectedness.

 

VII. Economic Systems shape Human Feelings

How the provision of social resources and livelihood activities is organised deeply affects how people feel about themselves and about each other and thus how healthily they relate to each other and to themselves.

But this system connecting emotions, available resources, and livelihood activity is precisely the economic system.

Economic systems shape spiritual, ethical, and experiential relations between people, within a person, and between people and nature. Humans are not greedy commercial automatons living independently of nature and out of community with each other.

As people, we need each other greatly. We are all vulnerable.

People are love-seeking beings living in community with other people and all other creatures and in ultimate dependence on Nature. We are not separate, nor separate from each other; and we are not superior to anything from the perspective of Nature.

Economics is thus a psychical and ecological community science dealing deeply in human values, human ends, human emotions, and our holistic relations with each other and also other creatures in our enveloping Nature from which we derive life’s nurture.

Current orthodox mainstream economics, in contrast, is a political science divorced from natural social reality which misconstrues itself as an empirical science (in a sad envy of physics) wrapped in statistics and mathematics to hide its lack of genuine human insight. It thus misdirects and mismanages the human journey on Earth in its service to anti-social finance and its usurpations of ordinary people power and humane living culture.

 

VIII. Economics is Ethics in Extension

The single most important aspect of economics is how the organisation of resources and activity affects how people feel about themselves and about each other, and thus how they treat themselves and treat each other and their enveloping natural world. How people organise themselves economically affects all areas of culture and society and spirituality, especially mental health, for good or for ill.

It is the separation of economics from ethics which is deliberately facilitative of the pathological, and increasingly psychotic, financialised exploitation of people, cultures, and nature characteristic of the currently dominant global economic paradigm.

True economics is an ethics for living a good life in concert and connectedness.

One cannot ever separate the ethical from the economic. One can only pretend to do so.

The view that economics is ethics in extension is genuinely orthodox in the long tradition of theoretical economic thought. It is consistent with Aristotle, who formally founded the subject in the formal Western intellectual tradition. It is consistent with St. Thomas Aquinas, who shaped economic thinking in Europe for almost 1 000 years. It is consistent with Adam Smith, who is considered the founder of modern Western economics. It is consistent with early modern European economists. And it is consistent with Karl Marx. More importantly, it is consistent with the economic thought of aboriginal peoples. Even more importantly, it is rooted in traditional Mother Continent cultural thinking.

This idea that economics is an ethics for living a good life in concert and connectedness has sustained humanity through the ages of its sojourn on earth and has only recently, in historical timescales, broken down.

It is the currently dominant “Western” paradigm of "dispassionate" economics, with its separation of economics from ethics, which is actually quite heterodox in the long tradition of human economic thinking.

In this sense, and in light of the long tradition of great economic thinkers, compassionate love-based economics is actually more orthodox than today's "orthodoxy." It is in fact not just “new,” it is both very old and very new at the same time.

 

IX. All Economics is Intentional Economics

Embedded in Love-Based Economics is the concept of an "intentional economy." Intentional economies realise the idea that economic systems are artefacts. Therefore, economic systems largely work as they are intended to do even when they seem to be “malfunctioning.”

What may appear to be malfunctions are often social outcomes of deliberate design, and can therefore be changed by changing the design through redesign interventions and civil action, or simply by general cooperative agreement on the design and construction of a new intentional economy.

Intentional Economics may be used to throw light on the persistence and pervasiveness of poverty. Is the poverty of the masses the result of a system malfunction, something which we today call “market failure,” which can be corrected within the current causal framework by simply “fixing” the current system? Or is it, to the contrary, a covertly intended social outcome because it weakens the political power of people and reduces the employment cost of labour? Are there really such things as “externalities,” or is that notion simply a way of masking the fact that the current system is actually not profitable when all social and ecological costs are genuinely accounted for within the financial accounting framework of the current system?

 

X. The Commons is The Shared Space of Common Wealth

"Love-Based Economics" articulates "a sharing economy" which is genuinely “a people’s economy,” sharing fairly and sharing kindly The “Commons-Wealth” of communities which is produced freely by nature and also by culture interacting with nature.

The idea of "The Commons" is central in Love-Based Economics.

The Commons is not a place. It is the abundance of free living resources which a good society stewards for its people as a birthright, if only because they are truly the ones who produce the sharable social wealth through the cooperation in their organised activity.

A sound and true economic system is equitable and just, while living within the means of nature, in order to be sustainable in the long run. This means it is sharing, caring, and kind in its inner and outer relations. And nothing is more practical than this.

It is deceptive to dismiss sharing, caring, and kindness as economically “unworkable” because people are essentially evil. That is said only to justify power hoarding. People are potentially evil, just as they are potentially good. It mostly depends on what parts of us our economic systems emphasize and are founded on and thus incentivise and encourage.

Any economy has to work well for vastly most of its people, even if not all of them, and not destroy its natural womb -- otherwise it will eventually collapse in a desert of its own making or be overthrown eventually by the desperate anger of its dispossessed.

And one or both of these two things is already slowly beginning to happen on a global scale today. We will either take our profligate desertification of Earth to its final suicidal conclusion or the madness will be overthrown in a paroxysm of desperate violence. The only impossibility is for the current way to continue beyond the next generation or two.

Societies, especially intelligently technological ones, are quite capable of producing material abundance in concert with nature. This is obvious. So, why is there this current thirst in the middle of the current flood of unnatural overproduction? The answer lies in the political nature of the system of monetary distribution. It is not that the goods and services are not there, unnatural though they may be. It is that they are not distributed fairly or well since access to goods and services are determined by access to money in a corruptly tilted system.

The political nature of monetary distribution is both the primary cause of systemic poverty and the source of its solution. Therefore, it is necessary to democratise and demystify economic knowledge in order to free the public imagination to promote social and personal wellbeing on the foundation of economic justice.

 

XI. Our Great Escape is Free Money

There must be at least three legs to the over-arching stool of a compassionate love-based new economy built on modern paradigms as the basis for organic transitions to genuinely post-modern paradigms:

1. a debt free and non-interest bearing spontaneously interoperable multi-level and multi-currency social service monetary framework,
2. a universally unconditional self-sustenance guarantee which anchors comprehensive social security provision,
3. “downward” economic empowerment in a decentralizing internetworking of self-sufficiency oriented economies which are circularly embedded in natural systems on an ecoregional basis.

 

Monetary transformation is central and fundamental to creating a just society because today’s economies are monetary economies.

Currently, money is created as public debt for private profit at interest.

Our current dominant monetary system is what was traditionally called Usury. This is wrong because it introduces anti-social motives right at the root of money creation and we all need money to survive in today’s world. The Traditionals, Ancients, Aboriginal Peoples, and all Great Faiths were and are right to consider Usury a sin and a usurper.

Systemic Usury and Deep Democracy are structurally mutually incompatible systems: the one by its nature centralizes and concentrates accumulative private wealth generation, the other by its nature decentralizes and deconcentrates distributive social wealth generation.

Today, money is created as a for-profit private business enterprise for commercial purposes which flows into public service through the systems of circumventable redistributive taxation and uncircumventable public debt. This is why commercial values overwhelm all other social values in modern societies and why modern governments are in the end beholden to big private finance and big private business: in other words, to private and socially unaccountable oligarchies. This is the real root of the ineradicable systemic corruption of politics and public service today: “who pays the piper calls the tune.” This is why there are no real democracies today, only plutocracies hiding in the disguise of democracies.

Currency will have to become a genuine public utility in a transition phase from the current model. Social Currency is created as a social service by social agencies transparently accountable to the whole society they serve and granted into the social economy debt free and without interest for social service purposes. In other words, money would flow from public service into private enterprise and not the other way around since private activity is built on public infrastructure.

In such a monetary system, taxes would be unnecessary since currency creation would itself finance social services in the public interest and thus public goods and public services would be self-financed. In such a system, “central banking” would not be a private business enterprise but a transparent public social service operated by public agencies dependent on social accountability and fully transparent to public inspection. Such a social service public monetary system would be designed as a transition phase to an even more devolved system in due course of social development.

In short, Currency Creation belongs in The Commons because it is everybody’s business.

For capitalist apologists who will say that granting livelihood money to the public is economically impossible or unsound or inflationary or unproductive, please remember that money is being granted freely to super-capitalists (big banks) today at effectively zero-interest in lots of trillions at a time for unsaleable and thus worthless securities by the USA and EU central banks. If it is good enough for the super-capitalists why is not good enough for ordinary people who will at least use it productively for basic goods and services? They say this because they need unwitting slaves; free money unslaves people.

We already have a “Basic Income Grant” for The Big Banks today. It frees them.

A Self-Support Living Grant for everybody is very possible in today’s world. It is Fair.
It solves Systemic Poverty. Free Money frees People and dignifies Human Life.

 

XII. The Automatically Self-Limiting System of “Liberated Livelihood”

Love-Based Economics is an Organically Self-Limiting System of Liberated Livelihood. And this is its defining characteristic generating its foundation in Love.

Any affluent modern technological society can provide a self-sustenance to all of its people simply as a right of their birth and in recognition of their intrinsic human dignity and as a practical social expression of their right to live. In other words, there can be, and there would be if money were genuinely a public utility created for and as a social service, a universally unconditional self-support guarantee since the money would be granted to the public as a basic social provision to animate the first stage in the creation of public purchasing power for primary effective demand.

Since it is axiomatic that effective demand generates feasible supply, it is thereby axiomatic that people would eventually produce even if they were freely granted the initial means of purchase for basic goods and services.

In this manner, livelihood is liberated from wages, profit, and usury – also as the development of technology and automation makes most routine jobs obsolete -- while at the same time becoming people oriented and ecologically, culturally, socially, community, and real-value driven .

For this reason, Technology and Automation would be placed in The Commons, or public domain, along with all Knowledge (since knowledge is a commons-wealth cultural amenity accumulatively produced through social collaboration) as “open source” hardware, software, and thoughtware resources freely accessible to all at will.

In this way, ordinary people in the ordinary life-process of thriving and flourishing would be effectively free and practically empowered to direct with their granted purchasing power the imperatives and trajectory of economic development based on their genuine needs and living values.

Since such a love-based economy is systemically directed by the finite creature needs of real people living authentic natural lives it will put an organic end to the top-down overt and covert directives of self-seeking power hoarding elites and create a genuine bottom-up do-it-ourselves organically self-organising and spontaneously self-limiting free-enterprise people’s economy.

In such a genuinely Free-Enterprise People Power Economy of “Liberated Livelihood,” basic production would be demand-guided by a provisioning motive rather than supply-driven by a profit motive; and since adequately provisioned people are spontaneously expressive and creative creatures, and naturally very energetic and active too, there would be a self-organising outbursting of interpersonal collaborative innovations energized by free gifting spirits in an efflorescence and effervescence of exuberant expression.

Left to be free while sufficiently provisioned with the basics, and without artificial scarcity, people will always create and they will always express themselves in words, deeds, and things.

Life would be a lot more enjoyable and a lot more human-scale. And it would be simpler too.

In this sense, depressions are monetary illusions of usury systems since production of basic goods and services are stilled by artificially induced monetary scarcities facilitative of unjust acquisition. The productive facilities are still there; the resources are still there; all that has happened is that the profit motive for transactions has been suffocated.

Our world today has enough technological productive overcapacity to care for everyone, even our now too huge human population, if the financial system is fundamentally transformed and systemically democratized, and distribution is politically and monetarily re-organised and thus made broad and fair.

Too few have too much money and too many have too little. But there is enough there for everyone on the basic principles that “enough is enough for me,” and “your wellbeing is my wellbeing too.” We no longer need a scarcity mentality; we have enough now for an abundance mentality so “your loss is no longer my gain.” What is required to liberate this capacity is monetary transformation to unchain the now required values.

 

XIII. The Autonomously Self-Expanding Virtual Commons

The Open-Source Public-Domain Freely and Informally Collaborative Development of Knowledge, Technology, and Automation automatically generates an autonomously Self-Expanding “Do-It Ourselves” Virtual Commons which becomes a free cultural and developmental resource for all people: personally and cooperatively.

This is a critical foundation for Love-Based Economics.

And this is the evolution engine for Love-Based Economies in directions consistent with their values.

In this manner, systemically liberated human innovation becomes people-directed and people-serving in a bottom-up and ecosensitive way expressive of compassionate values.

It is in the free evolution of The Self-Expanding Virtual Commons that The Evolution of “Liberated Livelihood” is expressed and reinforced in the development of new forms of an ecosensitive “affluence” of inner and outer wellbeing on a “do-it-ourselves” basis.

 

XIV. A Post-Modern Transition

In a post-modern transition, groundrooted production for its surrounding ecoregional consumption is necessary to empower well-rooted communities to be reasonably self-sufficient in order to provide personal-scale systems over which people have an acceptable measure of control. Such a community-centric economy of real and virtual community economies becomes decentralizing as it devolves economic power automatically to small-scale units.

This will thus not be an economy which super-concentrates most of humanity in ultra-scale super-cities and other vast conurbations. It will distribute social populations more evenly over natural regions.

The super-exploitive economies of super-cities are not sustainable even though super-urbanisation is a current macro-trend of humanity. They denude the rural areas of its living potential because they cannibalise rural resources thus proletarianising the peasantry by systemic force even as there are insufficient jobs for the newly proletarianised and once largely self-sufficient peasantry thereby creating large pools of unemployed migrants. This is good only if you want to force down the price of labour and suppress the bargaining power of wage workers due to oversupply and desperation for work.

It would be far healthier for society and culture to have a thriving self-sufficient peasantry and fewer urban job-seekers who will tend to be those who love city life and have an appetite for the flashy life.

Cities there will always be. But not everyone wants a city life. Given the choice, most will not. Self-sufficient community peasant “country” cultural life with good systemic monetary supports (not large commercial farmworker life) and with extended families near to each other as a compassionate love-based comprehensive social security network is itself a very good and very happy and very fulfilling life. It is very healthy too.

We don’t all want complexity and “fastness” in an artificial life full of neon lights and congested roadways as surrounded everywhere by concrete and tar formations and lots of noise and packaged genetically modified foods.

Many, of course, genuinely enjoy and rightfully seek the amenities, conveniences, excitements, spectacles, splendours, opportunities, cosmopolitanisms, polyglot high cultures, mixed urban communities, lively dense neighbourhoods, and other great benefits only city life can provide.

For sound economies, we need a healthy balance of flourishing rural areas and thriving city spaces. Not all one or the other. And, very importantly, flourishing systemically supported rural areas (with real economic bargaining and financial purchasing power) due to their relative self-sufficiency and pleasant peasant life will tend to organically limit the environmentally and economically destructive “ecoshadow” of cities. It is no accident that cities act to break the financial backbone of peasant economies. An economy such as is proposed here will reverse this globally maladaptive dynamic.

Included in this compassionate new economic architecture will be the systemic proliferation of non-monetary trading mechanisms such as self-organizing multi-lateral barter systems which can also be used to self-organize self-sustaining organic food self-sufficiency networks and localized craft and art production cultures based on interacting real and virtual community networks.

While a decentralizing economy of real and virtual community economies is in some sense less efficient than a large-scale centralizing monolithic super-urban economy when significant social and ecological costs are unaccounted for, or “externalised,” it is no less scalable when well internetworked and it yields better social outcomes since people are communal creatures and is more sustainable since it is intrinsically more self-limiting.

Most production need not be large-scale in any case. And large-scale multilaterally organised cooperative production can be focused on the most complex infrastructural goods and services which serve to internetwork the tapestry of “groundrooted economies.”

 

XV. The Evolvement of The Natural Economics of Love

Parallel, yet interacting, financial systems (non-usury alongside usury) in any evolutionary transitional period will be necessary in order to avoid the emergence of frustration-driven chaotic directionless nihilistic revolutions and other massive public disorders as the current usury driven social system breaks down which it will eventually and inevitably for technical reasons due to exponential debt deflationary implosions.

The current economic paradigm is not profitable or even self-sustainable when all social and ecological costs are genuinely accounted for within the financial accounting framework of the current paradigm.

When all true costs are truthfully “internalized,” rather than misleadingly “externalized,” we will find that the current global “mainstream” economy is a massive and catastrophic loss-generator for humanity rather than even a paltry profit-generator in the net when its impact on all people (not just the rich), other creatures, and the planet is considered.

We are all dependent on other people, on other creatures, and on the planet itself. And we all need Love in order to live life happily and fully.

Therefore: to sustain our life on Earth in happiness and fullness, we will need to evolve compassionate groundrooted love-based economies.

It is already apparent to most that current economies do not deliver Wellbeing. Many are thus beginning to realise that we need a compassionate new love-based economics for compassionate groundrooted love-based economies.

What we need for our self-sustainable futures are largely “do it ourselves” scaleably internetworking small-scale free-enterprise groundrooted economies in asymptotic furtherance of pervasive local-centric self-sufficiency goals.

“Impersonal Practically Unaccountable Bigness” is past tense. “Human-Scale, Naturised, and Personalised” is future tense. “Groundroots Upwards Gentle Transformation” is present tense.

In this way, our world can evolve spontaneously in the now much needed direction of a genuinely freedom-enhancing internetworking of self-limiting self-organising stateless societies held together in and by personalised trust-based real and virtual communities.

And thus begins the evolvement of The Natural Economies of Love . . .

 

Flowing The Streams Of Dreams

Be not afear'd.
Be not alarmed.
Feel unbound and off the rut,
For these are times which feed the seeds with new springs.

Now is the time for wishes and vast dreams.
Now are the times which seed the fields of wishes.
Now are the times which blow the winds which flow the streams of dreams ...

 

Joseph Edozien
Chibuike of Asaba
Cape Town, South Africa

 

Lovenomics!
is Next . . .
Love and Let Live!

 

* Edozien is Chairman of the South African New Economics Network. He writes in his personal capacity. A version of this message was published in The Enviropaedia.

 

APPENDIX I

On Wellbeing Economics

Have you ever wondered what our next economy might be like if it aimed for wellbeing rather than wealth as the means, even the guiding end, of economic life?

Wellbeing is about living: beingness, aliveness. It is about being well, thus, living well, as the means to life's fulfillments. And "well," or "wellness," has more to do with inner health and soul-nutrition and thus with inner "wholeness" than with superfluities of material wealth.

Material wealth is about inertness, thinginess, the material naturifacts and artifacts of living. It is not that much about inner life when well beyond sufficiency and often then contributes to a sort of inward death because we live not much in our super-sufficient things, which too often distract us from our larger selves and amities.

We live mostly in our feelings and imaginings and in our thoughts about those feelings and imaginings -- which bring us our most quietly long-lasting joy when softened and watered by our largest streams of sympathies and empathies. And those are the daily earthly wellsprings of our moral sensitivities and of our most truly kind-hearted compassions.

When wealth becomes an end unmoored from feelings and soul-nourishings, it seems, we become emptier in our innernesses and thus need more things to fill our discomforting vacuum in a self-amplifying growth of the economics of possession.

We are not at all inert, and are only so on earth, in some senses, in the stillness of our passing.

Thoughts to wonder on as one ponders the necessity for a novel economics of wellbeing in an upcoming materially plundered world of ecosystem support breakdowns, which, of course, is really the very ancient economics of wisdom: something once well-known to Old, Old, Africans . . .

What do you think?

Joseph Edozien.
from SANE Sustainability News 1.3

PS:
Love and Let Live!
JCE.II.R

 

APPENDIX II

Earthened Economy

 

The Perspective of Earthened Economy is Founded on:
The Economics of Love and Abundance in Concert with Nature.

 

Joseph Edozien.

 

Throughout most of our sojourn on Earth, people have believed that “All is Alive!”

Given the longevity and frequency of this belief, perhaps it is a natural spiritual and philosophical framework for humanity.

If this is so, what could it mean for how we organize an economy for the longevity of our sojourn into our future commensurate with the longevity of our sojourn out of our past? Wisdom is often expressed in metaphorical language, so it may help us in exploring this question to think and speak deliberately in metaphors.

If All is Alive! . . . then Earth is Alive.

If Earth is Alive, then it may help us in organizing our relations with our Earth, our most local cosmic home, to experience Nature as Mother and Humanity as Child.

Perhaps the truest Image Relation of Humanity to Earth is to experience ourselves as Baby Humanity feeding and learning from Mother Nature who has evolved the wisdom and efficiency of her natural processes over billions of years before people came to exist.

The Image Relation is Baby Humanity Suckling at The Breast of Mother Nature.

What would it mean if we were to build our economies intentionally with this Image Relation?

In the first place, it seems, we would have to be respectful and gentle on Earth and consciously build low power and genuinely organic economies.

Such economies would seem to imply an ambition to be humble in our relations with Mother Nature.

Such humility would then seem to imply, in a metaphor of gender-polarity, that The Masculine Aspect of Being is held to be supplemental to The Feminine Aspect of Being.

When The Feminine Aspect of Being is held to be primary, “Nurturance” would become emergent as our paramount guiding value so we nurture Mother as Mother nurtures us. This guiding value would be the consequence of holding the feminine pole to be the primary pole of culture.

The Felt-Relation between Community-Humanity and Nature-Earth would thereby be a two-way Love relation. Nature, through Earth, loves us because she births us, feeds us, shelters us, and nurtures us even as it’s true that life indeed eats life and talons drip in blood so pains in parts are in that Love.

We ought then to return Earth’s Love with The Human Love that is The Love in Nature nourishing us. Therefore, it is “Wellbeing,” and by that I mean being truly well, that we seek our flourishing and our fullness in flowing concert with Our Mother Nature.

A Foundational Principle in Natural Economics is Nature-Mimesis.

If we were to imitate Nature in our novel intentional economies, we would live them slow, live them small, and live them simple; yet live them scalable in our aligned flow with Nature by internetworking them in systems of diverse organic economies rather than as a system of one uniform mechanical economy.

We would accept that Nature knows better than we do. Nature, after all, has been doing this for very much longer than we have.

There must be Truth in what has lasted beyond aeons.

More likely than not, then, we know far less than we think we know and do not know well the ultimate consequences of our current actions.

Nature is circular and recyclic; so our economies should not be linear since we intuit that our sink is our source and our source is our sink.

In other words, if we are indeed a part of a Nature-Alive, then our economies live inside nature and there really is no outside in which to dump wastes since we then dump our alienated wastes on ourselves and thus poison our own womb. So we ought to design our new economies to resource wastes: out of one and into another.

Nature is resilient and fertile. She seems always to provide many different answers to any single question of being, so we should enable diversity in our economic cultures. We should aim for manypoly rather than for monopoly.

Let’s try “live and let live” in economic cultures and their consequent economic systems.

Each viable economic model must embody some aspect of the truth that is in longevity in order to survive; so, it is The Concert of Diversity which embodies the whole truth of longevity.

Since we are communal beings, our economic organizations should be centered on easily spanable communities which internetwork together for diversity and scale.

We should produce for provision and not for profit, and organically produce only what we need, so that production is pulled by demand rather than pushed by supply. This implies a provision-motive rather than a profit-motive for economic action.

Our economic end in natural economies is interior wellbeing as supported in part by the means of sufficient, but not super-sufficient, exterior wealth.

Above all, does it not seem evident that Wisdom should be held to be the primary economic input in nurturing provision-based natural economies: economic systems which value in chief the implications of Our Parent-Child Image Relation with Our Mother Nature?

Natural Economics is clearly inconsistent with the outlook and values of the currently dominant model of The Economics of Modernity.

What is the outlook of our currently dominant model of the economics of modernity, and what are its values?

 

Separatist Economy

The Perspective of Separatist Economy is Founded on:
The Economics of Fear and Scarcity in Antagonism with Nature.


The dominant modern economy is intrinsically violent, separative, and dishonest in its deep inner nature. So: it is “uncomfortable” and “disturbing” when laid out “raw.” It is not pleasant and it cannot be made pleasant when described in its inner truth. Just to prepare you.

Joseph Edozien

Modernity believes that “Most is Dead” and “Man is Supreme!”

Even its “God” is created in the image of “Man.”

Because Man is “given” Dominion by God, Earth is to be raped for the “benefit” of Man.

The Image Relation of Modernity in relation to Nature is exemplified by Mines, Extraction, and The Hyper-Industrial Machine in the service of Debt Finance.

This image is cold, metallic, hard, harsh, usurious, and exploitive. It is not gentle. And it is manic. Actually, it is mad.

The primary relation in this system is the master/slave relation.

Nature is The Slave of Man. The Purpose of Earth is Servitude to Man. Workers are Wage-Slaves and Profiteers are Debt-Slaves. All are Money-Slaves, organised by The Master who is Compound Interest, as driven under The Spellbinding of Usury.

Modernity separates everything, it seems, and Separatist Economies breed separations.

Each of us is seen in Separatist Economics as a little separated atom of selfishness.

And our fate is thus eternal scarcity, inner and outer struggle, and mastery over all by the most brutal and aggressive and cunning of us.

Moreover, Separatist Economics is “A Reverse Robin Hood Economics” because the whole system in total robs the relatively many poor to luxuriate the relatively few rich.

It is observationally true that wealth “soaks up” in the aggregate from the many poor to the few rich much faster than it “trickles down” from the few rich to the many poor.

We thus have ineffectual States erected to mimic a paltry redistribution through a circumventable system of taxation most of which is actually spent in the long-run to service revolving State debt: a debt burden which grows ever and systematically larger each time it “revolves” anew thus capturing each new generation with greater tenacity.

Simply put, the poor get relatively poorer and the rich get relatively richer in each new cycle of growth. And this is factually undeniable in our modern world system.

At the foundation of this system are violence, theft, dispossession, and deception rationalized as the natural evil of human nature and in which the survival game is domination for interest-driven profit: a profit which then coagulates at the top of the financial-economic pyramid and is hoarded in financial markets and “investment” banks rather than shared for the benefit of all.

All of this is justified as the natural and fair reward of the crafty and “superior.”

“Man” is superior, it is said in this system; thus he can rape his Mother Nature with impunity. And thereby some “men” are naturally superior so they can rape other men by fiat.

The end-result is social pathology, social madness, and collective insanity.

But we should be happy in our madness, it is said in this system, because we are stuffed fat with made-stuff and materially comfortable in our “cocooned” insanity even though the growing inner angst of humanity is herald to a different truth.

Can Natural Economies of Organic Love and The Separatist Economy of Induced Hatreds be reconciled on one planet?

If not, then Separatist Economy will kill off Natural Economies because Natural Economies see more value in Love and Scalable Harmonies than in guns and kleptomaniac schemes.

In the material social world of recent chronicles, it’s true, the rough and tough bullies with schemes in their minds do often overwhelm the simple-living and slow-flowing gentle peoples who share resources as a Commons for all. History tells us so.

The bullies then say: “we are obviously superior because we won; we destroyed the imbecilic gentle and their ‘primitive’ way of life so they are most definitely inferior.”

How can “live and let live” live in gentle harmony with this attitude?

Can Natural Earth Economies, which are The Economies of Love and Wellbeing Abundance, ever be reconciled on one planet with Separatist Economics, which is Nihilistic Economics, and which is The Economics of Fear and Scarcity in Antagonism with Nature?

 

Reconciliation of Wellbeing Economy with Wealth Economy

Joseph Edozien

The fundamental barrier to Reconciliation between Natural Economies of Love and Wellbeing Abundance and The Global Separatist Economy of Fear-Based Wealth and Artificial Scarcity is the totalizing and ever-expanding nature of The Global Separatist Economy bedazzlingly justified by the glorification of its insanity.

By its nature, and impelled by its debt-driven interest-bearing financial system and the profit-motive that engenders, it must grow or die. Growth is its life-blood. And it must grow till it consumes all of our resources and then collapses in a great crash. It cannot not grow. It must eat every last blade of grass.

This is the central existential dilemma facing modern humanity.

Moreover, mass consciousness is often shaped, even determined, by the practical realities of daily living in the envelope of social messages such as ubiquitous advertising which condition human images of the possible, the probable, the doable, and the desirable.

Clearly, there will have to be a change in human mass consciousness, but this will likely succeed rather than precede a change in the practicalities of daily living.

However, there is just cause for some cautious optimism about Reconciliation.

Most of humanity, at least two-thirds of us, currently live sustainably on Earth. These are the world’s so-called poor people in “under-developed” regions of Earth.

Most of the problem of Separatism is epicentered in the unsustainable living of most of the denizenry in Europe and America and other parts of the so called “over-developed” world, as well as the current material elites in all regions who together live as one system virtually delinked from local conditions.

Yet: it is the unsustainable who wish to depopulate the sustainable.

The unsustainable, in their insane conceit, are not intelligent enough to see that they will simply recreate the dilemma they have created for themselves.

The Hope for Humanity, and with it The Hope for Reconciliation with Our Natural World, lies in the world’s “poor” in the “poor” regions of Economic Earth. That is where the true wisdom of humanity lies and so the “weight” of the consciousness of the wise-livers is ultimately greater than the “weight” of the consciousness of the foolish-livers because there are so many more wise-livers than foolish-livers today: even if many wise-livers now aspire to be foolish-livers.

It is not likely that the few can overwhelm and mind-bend the many forever; and there is not the resource-base for the many to live like the few, even if many of the many now think they would like to live like the few because their mental images are now powerfully conditioned by television, cinema, media, mass “education,” and marketing prowess.

The paradox of the few is that they need the many in order to be the few but the many do not need the few in order to be the many.

This is the paradox that unravels The Riddle of Reconciliation.

The greater need of the few for the many is the starting dialogue of negotiation when both begin to appreciate in the nakedness of crisis the real direction of dependence . . .

* Joseph Edozien, H.R.H. Prince Chibuike of Asaba, writes this in his personal capacity.

 

Love – Based Economics

 

Office of the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Cecil Makgoba DD(hc) PhD(UCT)

 

Global peace is what we all need across the world.
As we strive to achieve this goal, we as Christians are called to reflect on our role within the bigger picture of financial economics.

This interesting proposal for a new financial–economic paradigm called “Love-Based Economics” might be the answer many people are waiting for.
The moral dimension of economics must support the dignity of all persons, including our fellow creatures and nature.

The bonds of community and the genuine support for each other can only enhance powerful human relations globally, especially within a compassionate economic context.
Our vision statement in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa affirms our commitment to transformational change through the Holy Spirit.

In whatever we do as children of God, our economic journey should be anchored in the love of Christ and embrace with dignity and respect all God’s creation.
In so doing, we become committed to engage God’s mission, where all humanity are able to journey together.

 

Office of the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Cecil Makgoba DD(hc) PhD(UCT), Archbishop
Rev Godfrey Taft Walton BA (UFH), H.E.D.(UFH) , Dip.Th (COTT). Cert.Mgt (UPE), MA. Cum Laude (NMMU), Chief of Staff

 

 

 

Download the article

 

Share content with FFD

 

Features Archive

PARTNERS & SPONSORS

new-sampnode-logo rockefeller-logo-footer-new

Foresight For Development - Funding for this uniquely African foresight site was generously provided by Rockefeller Foundation. Email Us | Creative Commons Deed | Terms of Conditions