Stephen Hinton of Invest In Peace speaks of our economy as a safe house for humanity.
Thought Leader Clara Miller talks about finance as the plumbing of our economy.
Putting these two metaphors together, we get a way of talking about the changes we must make in these, our changing times, that might be useful: we need to upgrade the plumbing in humanity’s safe house.
Throughout the 20th Century we have been adding new pooling and pumping capabilities, without really doing anything to upgrade the actual plumbing. As a result, we still have many rooms in the house without adequate water pressure and too many rooms without water service at all. Instead, we have been pushing more and more water through the existing plumbing, causing leaks at all the fittings and water damage throughout the house. The leaking has gotten so bad, in fact, that we are now actually undermining the foundations and eroding the safety and security of our supposedly safe home.
We need to fix this. By adding some new plumbing that will deliver water pressure, and water service, where it is needed, while taking the pressure off the rest of the system, so we can stop the leaks, repair the water damage, and start shoring up our eroding foundations.
We don’t have to replace the existing plumbing. Most of what we have will work just fine if we use it only the way it was installed to be used. But we do have to add new capacity, because the system that we have now is just not capable of doing all the work we need to be doing today to keep our safe home functioning well, stable and viable.
We need to modernize.
The new plumbing will, of course, use the latest technology. Which will require some carpentry work, to accommodate the new pipes and fixtures. And also some re-wiring.
Our existing energy supply systems - extracting energy from hydrocarbons that Nature is already using to make habitats on earth inhabitable by humans - have to be replaced. More carpentry.
And some new space will be needed for various reasons. Our home will have to be reconfigured, and maybe expanded, to accommodate the new plumbing, and the new possibilities for living our best lives that will be created by installing that new plumbing.
A big job.
But not an impossible one.
It begins with an Awakening. To the truth that it must be done.
And the discovery of Fiduciary Money as a new 21st Century Global Commons, with the power to negotiate, and the duty to negotiate towards a dignified future. For all.
This is giving us a new Fiduciary Finance for financing social and environmental equity in the conduct of commerce.
And a new 21st Century Global Citizenship that will create unprecedented new opportunities, and responsibilities, for individual contributions - by people who self-select from among the general population of everyday people living our everyday lives as caring enough to participate - to local community engagement in globally curated conversations about how the new plumbing can, should and will be designed to flow fiduciary financing into social and environmental equity in the conduct of commerce and the stewardship of a new Human-Nature partnership that is interactive and not extractive.
There is drama in this Awakening.
There will be opposition to this upgrade. Far too many acolytes of Neoliberalism are getting far too personally wealthy off the leaky plumbing we have now. They like their privileged positions as elite experts with specialized expertise that seems mysterious, and even magical, to us “mere mortals”. These people will not want the leaking to be stopped, because then their sources of personal wealth and social privilege will be cut off.
So, mobilizing to upgrade our plumbing will bring us into direct conflict with the monstrosity of social and environmental inequity that has been created through the Neoliberal Financialization of Fiduciary Money, starting back in 1972, that is making Modern Finance frankly terrifying for all too many people.
Through our collective action, in the exercise of a new global citizenship, we must slay this monster of Neoliberalism, to set Fiduciary Money free from Financialization so that it can be used to finance a safe and dignified home for all of us, that includes a place of dignity for each of us.
That collective action begins with a new global conversation, about Money and Finance and Fiduciary Duty. Will you join this conversation?