from the Department of What if...?
Just finished reading The Idealist, Wendell Wilkie's Wartime Quest to Build One World, by Brown University Professor of Cultural and Intellectual History Samuel Zipp.
Just started reading The Logic of Sufficiency by Thomas Pincen, Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning at the Univerity of Michigan.
What if two themes from these two scholarly works are converging in that most practical of all places: money, and finance?
The last line in Professor Zipp's tour through the formative years of Modern American Internationalism, at page 320, is this:
"How can we live in the world without needing to dominate it?"
The answer may well be, we can't, if by "living in the world" we mean living together politically, through one world government.
Building political consensus is famously difficult, as the current climate conundrum reminds us almost daily. Professor Zipp explains why when he writes, earlier in his exposition, at page 276:
"[Pictures of FDR’s Four Freedoms painted by Norman Rockwell] represented both an imaginary past and a hoped-for future that the nation might either recreate or achieve once it dispensed with the nasty business of another foolish foreign war."
The kernel of truth in this wise statement for our purposes is this: political consensus requires that the entire political populace coalesce around the same shared stories of an imaginary past and a hoped-for future.
Thinking that we can somehow bring the entire global population of some 7.8 billion souls, and rising, all living within vastly diverse cultural and intellectual time sequences and geophysical relationships with differing bioregions of Nature, together in one, shared imaginary past and hoped-for future in order to cooperate in One World Government feels like a bridge too far.
But then we encounter Professor Pincen's thinking about the driving principle of American Internationalism and the pursuit of a New World Order of global peace and prosperity through Corporate Finance (I added that, Professor Pincen's work is not, at least as yet, so overtly political and financial in its framing) as efficiency, and his proposal that we replace this principle of efficiency with a new and more right for our times principle of sufficiency, as the right way to redefine humanity's relationship with Nature, and each other.
Sufficiency begins to feel like the right principle to guide the prudent intergenerational loyalty to future generations, and to the future of current generations, by the fiduciary owners of society's Pensions & Endowments.
This Mid-Century Modern 20th Century invention of a new social structure for social decision making through Finance as fiduciary ownership for an open class of current and future beneficiaries is authentically both local and global in a way that politics, I do not think, can ever truly be.
Fiduciary owners of Pensions and Endowments are responsible, directly, to their local populations of current and future retirees, or other beneficiaries. But to honor their fiduciary duties of loyalty to these local populations, both today and in the future, these fiduciary owners need to be active participants, as institutional investors, in an economy that is anything but local.
What if the fiduciary owners of society's local-and-global Pensions & Endowments became the organizing force for a new world order driven by this new principle of sufficiency?
This local-and-global fiduciary community would need to share a common narrative of imaginary history and hoped-for future, but the entire global population would not have to actively embrace that narrative, as individuals. It will be enough if most people simply trust that these fiduciary owners are investing prudently, as good stewards of their fiduciary mission. This can be accomplished through transparency and accountability and lived experience. It doesn't need, necessarily, the same degree of conscious cultural cohesion that self-government requires.
What if Bank of Nature became the leading institution through which these insitutions of fiduciary ownership led the world in a new pursuit of shared sufficiency?
An institution for institutions.
What if we also created within Bank of Nature a Sidecar Fund for individuals who want to go along for the ride, to give us all a way to make and maintain our own direct and personal connection to this new way of being human in the world through prudent stewardship of global sufficiency in business and finance?
An institution of institutions for individuals.
What if that changed everyone's personal relationship to Money, and also to Nature?
What do you think? Would that inspire you?