The symbol above is an ancient Nordic rune standing for cattle, wealth and new beginnings.
Cattle served the same function as modern money in some pre-ziggurat societies. So, the modern meaning of this ancient Nordic rune would be
“money, wealth and new beginnings”.
Because money is what we use in modern times to trade surpluses, and trading surpluses is how we live as humans in the world.
Our Uniquely Human Way of Being in the World
Famed entomologist and theorist of human being E. O. Wilson made quite a stir back in 1975, when he published a book that he called On Human Nature. In this book he shared his observations about how similar ant societies are to human societies.
At the time, most human behavioral scientists were busy studying chimpanzees, as our closest genetic relatives, looking for insights among chimps into what it means to be human.
E. O. Wilson pointed out that chimpanzee societies are not really that similar to our own human societies. Chimpanzees don’t collaborate the way we people do. Chimpanzees will collaborate on a task only to a point. Then they get bored, and wander off. Humans stick with it, working together until the job is done. Then, we find a new job to do. Together. In this way, people are more like ants, according to Dr. Wilson. Ants stick with it, like people do, until the job is done. And once one job is done, like people, ants take on another task.
Dr. Wilson may have gotten the collaboration part right, but he missed this other part. He missed the part about creativity.
Ants are not really like people, because ants are not creative. Ants do not make history. The history of ants is that there were some ants, then there were some different ants. But they all just did the same ant things.
Ants do not have culture. They do not have civilization.
We, as people, do.
People make history. That’s what we do. Our lives today are very different from the lives that our parents lived, and those lives are different from the lives of their parents, and so on back into the darkest recesses of Time, when Man first picked up a stick, and lit a fire.
Ever since then, we have been making things, and the thing we make the most is change. We do that collaboratively, as Dr. Wilson pointed out. We also do it creatively.
Human history is the history of our creative collaborations in taking the world about us as we find it, and changing it to be more a way we choose to make it. This history is creative. It is collaborative. It is also adaptive. And evolutionary. Dr. Wilson missed that also. Ants don’t evolve. Generation after generation, ants are just ants.
In some ways people are just people from one generation to the next. In other ways, each generation is also unique, the creation of its own creations.
And these creations are always getting better, generation after generation.
That’s the evolutionary part. Every time one generation makes a change in one thing, that creates both the need and the opportunity for other generations (and sometimes the same generation) to make other changes, in other things.
The World We Make Through Our Technology Out Of The World of Nature Into Which We All Are Born
To be human is to live in constant exploration along the creative edge of new learning about how the world about us works, and how we can apply that learning to change the way the world works, to make it work more a way we choose to make it.
What we collaborate on is learning, and putting that learning into action, through technology. We share the surpluses created by technology through commerce, exchanging surpluses we collaboratively co-create through our technology for the surpluses that others collaboratively co-create through their technology.
In this way, we can live lives of engineered abundance, and diversity of choice for how we want to live, providing for ourselves by providing for others, and pursuing what it is we each of us choose to pursue in our lives.
Choice creates change. Our world is a world of constant change.
As times change, we evolve new learning, and develop new technologies which give us new choices, driving a recurring pattern of flourish and fade between enterprise for putting learning into action through technology and popular choice of which technologies people are going to choose as times change, and humanity evolves prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes, making new choices more popular as better fit to changing times, and letting previously popular choices fade into history, as a good fit at an earlier time.
The Technologies We Choose
What keeps our lives of constant change from degenerating into constant chaos is us, and the unchanging structure of our human beingness. The choices that we make change more or less constantly with changing times, and through our changing choices we make our own history of learning and technology and collaborative co-creation, but why we choose - what it is that we are pursuing through our choices - is always the same.
We have not yet learned enough about ourselves to agree maybe on what those constants are that we are each and all constantly pursuing, but we can perhaps begin to move towards a generally accepted articulation of what makes us uniquely “us” by seeing our technology choices as as diverse points of interface between us Humans and Nature. The details of these points of interface change over time, as times change, and humanity evolves new learning for making prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes, but the points of interface themselves, they never change.
Who Decides? Who Decides Who Decides?
So, the question now becomes, when times change, and new learning is needed to evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes, who decides what new learning will be evolved and what new technologies will be developed?
Conventional economic thinking wants us to believe that we each decide for ourselves as individual self-interested, utility-maximizing rational actors acting rationally to match Supply to Demand (or Demand to Supply) through competition on price under conditions of scarcity in markets for maintaining a market clearing price.
But that theory is unsatisfactory on multiple points. It fails to acknowledge the fundamentally social nature of both learning and technology, and the fundamentally abundant surpluses of choices that technology provides.
We do each make certain individual choices for ourselves, individually. Within the broad parameters set out by the circumstances of our individuals lives, we each decide for ourselves what learning we are going to choose to learn, which will allow us to choose what work we are going to do and how we are going to earn, which empowers us to choose how we are going to spend, and save, and invest, so that we can evolve new learning to fit our changing times.
But the choices that are available for us to choose from are largely determined not by us, individually, but by the social structures for social decision making within the society in which we live, and on which we depend for our choices, and our prosperity.
Conventional economic theory offers no insights into the workings of these social structures for social decision making that shape the choices that we can then make as individuals. It speaks only about individuals, and ignores these institutions, contending that institutions are just points for aggregating the individual choices of individuals who participate in those institutions. This runs contrary to common sense and lived experience.
Institutions of Civil Society, Enterprise, Finance and Government are all unique social structures for social decision making that make decisions according to their own, unique language and logic. The decisions made according to the logic of these institutions largely determine the choices that are available to each of us to make as individuals.
Since these institutional social structures for social decision making are important to our individual possibilities, and since the decisions that get made within these institutions get made according to the logic of each institution, it is important that we, as individuals, are able to hold these institutions accountable for the integrity of their decision making.
When we reorganize the concept map of the social structures for social decision making presented above, to focus on these structures of accountability, we discover something that conventional economic thinking does not show us. We discover that there is a problem in the mechanisms of accountability for holding our institutions of Finance as a social structure for social decision making accountable .
Once we do see that this is a problem, by letting go of conventional thinking, and reasoning from common sense and common experience, we can begin to inquire into the design of the diverse structures of social decision making through Finance, and the mechanisms of accountability that are built into each, in order to discover where these mechanisms are failing, and how to restore them to their proper function.
As we conduct this inquiry, we discover that the cause of the problem is Pensions, and that the problem with Pensions is a failure of the law of fiduciary duty to recognize the differences between the fiduciary purposes and powers of ordinary fiduciary owners of generational trusts for a closed class of specifically identified or identifiable individuals, and the fiduciary purposes and powers of extraordinary fiduciaries of intergenerational trusts for an open class of current and future beneficiaries that is ongoing, and evergreen, and that is so large and so representative of society more generally, as to include as a matter of fact, if not technically as a matter of law, all of us.
Once we fix this mistake in the law of intergenerational fiduciary duty, we can fix how pensions (and also endowments) invest.
Once we fix how pensions and endowments invest, we can fix how finance functions.
Once we fix how finance functions, we can transform our economy, from extractive and unsustainable to interactive and ongoing.
Once we transform our economy, we can transform Modern Society.
But we do have to start with Pensions, and their intergenerational fiduciary duties to future generations.