In order for each of us to live well, and be our best selves, we need to belong to this network of exchanges in technology surpluses that we call the economy. We have to have our own place, and participate. Or we won’t get our share of the surpluses being created by the community.
Our sense of self and others must align with the population that participates in this economy of exchanges within which we live.
Our sense of place and time must align with the spacetime of that economy.
People are not ciphers that can be reduced to a number. We all have our own unique personalities, our own natural proclivities, our own unique histories of our own lived experiences. All of that makes us different, and each, in our own way, special.
So the design of an economy that is sufficient to keep a good society ongoing into a dignified future must be able to accommodate this kaleidoscopic diversity of unique personalities.
It must be inclusive, and not reductionist; interactive, and not extractive; accountable, and not externalizing; caring, and not uncaring.
The exact opposite of the economy in which we are living today.
Today’s economy is:
reductionist - all the interactions between people are reduced to numbers, as prices paid in money, pushing all the people out;
extractive - we extract from Nature, and each other, and our future, recklessly, without any reckoning for the consequences of our taking, on Nature, on each other, or on our Future; we do this not out of some kind of mean-spirited moral failing by bad actors acting badly (although bad actors are given wide open spaces and rich rewards for acting badly in this economy), but because we imagine there are no consequences to our taking: Nature is vast, and we are not, so we can take and take and take and take without ever any thought of giving back, because the consequences of our taking will always be absorbed back into Nature, without consequent to us - or so the story goes;
externalizing - since we extract recklessly, because we do not believe there will ever be a reckoning, we externalize costs in order to maximize extractions in the false belief that we are thereby being efficient and delivering the lowest cost (when what we are actually doing is extracting the highest profit for ourselves at the expense of Nature, other People, and our own Future);
uncaring - our modern economy is designed on the assumption that unqualified growth in transaction volumes measured as prices paid in money (i.e. reduced to numbers that push people and our humanity out of the calculations) is both necessary and sufficient to keep a good society ongoing into a dignified future, even though this faith in unqualified quantified growth in transaction volumes measured in money defies experience and common sense and is, fundamentally, irrational and illogical; still, it cannot be questioned.
It is time we said enough to the above, both as protest, and as an expression of the right principle for designing an economy that is truly sufficient to keep a good society ongoing into a dignified future.
It is time to say enough in protest, rejecting the theory of the economy that in its imagining is reductionist, extractive, externalizing and uncaring and that, in its application, delivers a lived experience of:
Short-termism;
Economic Elitism;
Corporate Gigantism;
Financial System Instability;
Retirement System Unreliability;
Social and Environmental Unsustainability;
Corporate Capture of Politics and Public Discourse;
Political Divisiveness Degenerating Towards Violence; and
Institutional Inability to take action on climate and other challenges in our changing times that require humanity to take action at the scale of climate and in the time of climate.
It is time to embrace enough as a principle for imaging an economy that is inclusive, interactive, accountable and caring, that prioritizes cash flows through the economy for:
Sufficiency
A Good Society
A Dignified Future
For all
Forever
Fair Trading
Fair Hearing
Fair Caring
Fair Working
Fair Dealing
Fair Sharing