Musings Report #45 11-9-13 The Erosion of a Human Essential
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The Erosion of a Human Essential
Two related truths seem self-evident: that community is essential to human progress, communication, development and well-being, and that the current global systems of the central state (socialism) and corporations (capitalism) erode or undermine community.
These basics inform my view that the only way forward is a community-based economy that recognizes and restores community as one of the foundations of human life.
On the most fundamental survival level, if humans were isolated, solitary hunter-gatherers, humans would likely have gone extinct long ago, as we simply aren't as physically capable as our competitors. If the species did endure, it would be equivalent to other solitary Great Apes--small in number and isolated to small pockets where it could survive.
Our dominance ("success" if you prefer) as a species flows directly from our social nature and the development of ways to spread better techniques, i.e. knowledge and cooperation, via spoken and eventually written language.
Yes, opposable thumbs boosted our toolmaking abilities and year-round fertility boosted our reproduction rates, but these advantages would be marginal were we a species of isolated individuals. Indeed, the fundamentals of sociobiology support the notion that human longevity results partly from the genetic advantages bestowed by grandparents, i.e. a generation of elders who can aid in child-rearing and serve as a repository for experiential knowledge/wisdom that would be lost to short-lived species.
In our current system, the impersonal state replaces the "value" created by participating in community with social-welfare checks; there is no need to bother cooperating with others once the state provides the basics of life.
A similiar dynamic is implicit in corporate capitalism, which assumes that large corporations dedicated to pursuing profit wherever such profits might be greatest can successfully replace communities with corporate "communities" of workers and supervisors.
The author proposes that social cooperation waxes and wanes with wealth inequality: as inequality rises, so too does polarization. People become less cooperative and socially engaged as polarization increases.
The correlation between loss of community and wealth inequality is only the first step. This sociological perspective misses the point I am making, which is the structure of our centralized state-dominated economy leads to both wealth inequality and the loss of community from the same dynamic: the substitution of the state/corporation as the organizing/controlling structure for society, displacing community.
As I mentioned in last week's Musings, this system creates aimless armies of unemployed young people who receive enough financial support from the state that the incentive to rebel is eroded, but this does not fill the gap left by the destruction of community: it simply maintains the void.
The entire notion that corporations pursuing their self-interested maximization of profit for their shareholders can organize society to benefit everyone is nonsensical; how could organizations dedicated to reaping profits replace multi-layered communities that meet needs that cannot necessarily be commoditized for a profit?
Correspondent Bart D. cogently summed up these issues in a recent email exchange:
"When boiled down to real world conditions, for a society and economy to operate sustainably and successfully, people have to do things for and with each other, and BE SEEN to be doing it.
From an evolutionary perspective a community would form the basis of the economy in which individuals lived their lives. Each participant would have known, in social terms, every other participant to some degree.
In such a ‘traditional’ system, individual participants were heavily incentivized to be valued by others. Being valued for your good works and deeds increased your chances of having other individuals help you out when you were individually unable to support yourself for some reason (sickness, old age, personal disaster). In economies of small and local scale you really strived to have others feel they owed you something based purely on their sense of fairness and conscience, because people interacted economically and socially with the same people.
This creates a pool of good will that functions as ‘social security’ (This has since been transmuted into the Frankenstein of ‘debt’ and ‘taxes’ both of which are grudging rather than volunteered.) That type of interaction has been and is continuing to be eroded away in the modern economic system that seeks desperately to separate social relationships from economic relationships.
Thus we have the disconnect between small business tax payers and welfare recipients that sets up the perfect conditions for corporatocracy and the bizarre ever-expanding debt economic models of the west.
What the architects of these current systems have lost sight of is that the illusion they created by pumping free credit into the system only works on some parts of the economic system and at the cost of GREATLY undermining the social component of the system."
"Now, there is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation. I would offer something like this: We, in our ancestral past, lived in small bands or clans, which fostered kin altruism and reciprocal altruism, because in these small bands, each individual was most likely to be surrounded by relatives and individuals who he was going to meet again and again in his life. And so the rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be nice to potential reciprocators. It would have been, Be nice to everybody, because everybody would have been included."
This is not to suggest there isn't a role for the state and profit-seeking organizations in society or the economy; it is simply to suggest that the wholesale replacement of community by the state and corporation has eroded an essential of human life that cannot be filled by impersonal states and corporations. States and corporations cannot "fix" what's broken with the model.
This fundamental incapability of the status quo model of state socialism/capitalism is visible but not yet widely understood.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
What Stanley Kauffmann Taught Me About Film
Can We Support 75 Million Retirees in 2020?
Could Bitcoin (or equivalent) Become a Global Reserve Currency?
The Generational Injustice of Social (in)Security
The Problem with Pay-As-You-Go Social Programs: They're Ponzi Schemes
Why Is Predicting Crisis/Reset So Difficult?
The bitcoin piece probably attracted the most visits, but the focus was the impossibility of pay-as-you-go social welfare programs surviving the demographics of a ballooning cohort of retirees and the end of work. My favorite piece was the weekend tribute to film critic Stanley Kauffmann.
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
I got over jetlag (mostly). What a relief.
Market Musings
I have been watching a series of wedges/triangles form in a number of markets, including gold.
I don't claim to have any big insight into gold's gyrations, though it's worth mentioning that my colleague Chartist Friend From Pittsburgh has identified a strong correlation between the yen and gold. All I am pointing out here is wedges/triangles tend to break down or break out in a major fashion. Many expect gold to break down and head to $1200, $1100 or sub-$1000. Others are looking for it to recover $1400 and $1500 soon.
Perhaps the yen will resolve the question, or perhaps a shot of "tapering" will send it crashing to $1000. On the other hand, a reversal in the risk-on trade (stocks) could send hot money into safe havens, i.e. the US dollar and gold. The first quarter of 2014 should be interesting.
From Left Field
Human helpers? Hawaii dolphin rescue caught on video (via C.N.F.) Divers capture a 'mind-blowing' scene off the coast of Kona, where a bottlenose dolphin seems to request human help in escaping a tangle of fishing lines.
The Consequences of Oceanic Destruction (Foreign Affairs) depressingly persuasive: Over the last several decades, human activities have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse: a return to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago.
"The most dangerous pollutants are chemicals. The seas are being poisoned by substances that are toxic, remain in the environment for a long time, travel great distances, accumulate in marine life, and move up the food chain."
"Humans are eliminating the lions and tigers of the seas to make room for the cockroaches and rats."
"Six years ago, Whiskie was a stray puppy at an animal shelter in rural Hastings, Mich. Today, she's a renowned whale-spotting expert who lives in central California, where she regularly joins research expeditions in Monterey Bay. According to her owner, she can detect the presence of nearby whales and dolphins with uncanny accuracy."
The Energy Sustainability Dilemma: Powering the Future in a Finite World (via John D.) Your one-stop shop for 54 charts displaying population, energy consumption, energy sources, everything you need to understand the dilemma...
Why Chinese People Buy So Many Homes in Palo Alto (via Maoxian) It's not just because it’s nice: Foreign home purchases by China's wealthy tell us a lot about the country’s economy. “If we have seven offers for a home here, three of them will be Mainland Chinese buyers with all cash." They know they need to turn their ill-gotten gains into real property....
Buyer Beware: A Bleak View Of China From A Tiger Woman On Wall Street -- her point about relative wealth and rising expectations mirror my own analysis: the real rise in living standards pales beside the pyschological "poverty" induced by seeing others zoom to multi-millionaire status. Add in a lousy job market for college grads and you get a powderkeg of high expectations unmet...
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. Winston Churchill
Thanks for reading--
charles
