Making Less, Success
Despite what my conservative friends say, I actually cleave to few radical notions, but one idea that they and their moderate brethren would consider pretty offensive follows. If we are to survive as a nation, as an economy, as a civilization, perhaps even as a species, we need to have an almost complete reversal in how we value success.
Economists have in mind that success is not measured by profitability but by the continual growth of profitability. When the Chairman of the Federal Reserve assesses the fiscal health of the nation, he looks at indices like the Dow and the S&P and the GDP and asks if they are getting bigger, not if they are holding steady. This idea fits in very well with a speculative market, one that generates as much or more of its wealth off of the movement of money as it does from the production and delivery of services and goods. A speculative market essentially assumes, though, that those goods and services, while sometimes in flux, will always be in some sense available, that the “invisible hand” will automatically shrink those markets that are in decline and open up new ones that aren’t. So $100 a barrel oil doesn’t bother the market all that much as there’s as much money to be made in trading in its futures as there is in its heres and nows, maybe more.
But this is also where the speculative market has it all wrong. It simply does not know what to do with zero. It can handle less, and it can handle more, but it cannot handle none. At some point, those goods and services actually need to be produced and rendered, and if there’s no oil to fuel production and transportation, the whole thing collapses like a card house in an air raid.
Thus it ever was with civilizations that develop around a single source of energy. For the pre-Columbian cultures of Meso-America, it was corn; for us it’s oil. Failure of the single fuel source equals collapse. The market cannot seem to get its head around the fact that all that money it makes from speculation will be useless when the civilization that determines its value, that supplies its shoe shops and airplane factories and movie theaters, is no longer around.
The only way to avoid this situation is not just to fuel the market with a new energy source, as the market will lock-up just as suddenly when we reach the new fuel’s capacity as well. The way to solve the problem is a transvaluation of the value of what it means to be successful. The whole idea that markets should continually grow is itself the root of the problem. Whether it is fueled by oil or corn or dilithium crystals, our current market model will always assume a continual rise in production and consumption that will always deplete resources.
Simply put, “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.
But make no mistake: the desire for continual growth is a value. There is nothing universal or natural about it. In fact, we have a term for continual, unchecked growth: we call it cancer. When anything metastasizes, it threatens the life of the host. Our host is the Earth.
From an anthropological perspective, an economy is simply the means by which a culture survives in its environment. By this standard, our current economy is dysfunctional, as it will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture. In a sense, we do not have an economy that supports a culture; we have a culture that supports an economy.
Much the same could be said of Feudalism or Communism as practiced by the Soviet Union. These were systems destined to fail because they confused the tool for the goal, or they subsumed their entire culture into an ideology that was itself expressed through an economy. Our own situation is much the same. Recently, I heard someone from an anti-tax PAC complain about a proposed rise in taxes on the ultra-wealthy managers of hedge funds by arguing that such a tax was antithetical to a “capitalist system,” and that the government had no right to tax at all. Besides the obvious practical problems this might cause if we should adopt this man’s ideology, the whole notion that our entire economy should be beholden to this ideology is dangerous beyond sense. Hedge fund managers’ activities are actually harming our economy overall while making the managers and their clients incredibly wealthy in the process. The proposed tax was meant to make up for a federal income gap caused by a proposed alleviation of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is set to hit the middle class especially hard. By cleaving to his ideology, the anti-tax zealot would take money out of the hands of millions who spend it locally and put it in the hands of the rich few who, chances are, wouldl use it to gamble on more risky investments.
This illustrates that our current system is about values, not market fundamentals—indeed, market fundamentals are a direct offshoot of our values. There is no natural law of the marketplace because markets are not natural; they are technologies, essentially, created by cultures as applications of a certain type of adaptation to an environment. Best done, they change with environmental conditions in such a way as to further the chances a culture has of surviving. In this case, they are defective since they are doing just the opposite. But at the heart of the current market is a value which says that continual growth is ideal; this is a value based, to put it bluntly, on greed. If we wish to create a system that is truly sustainable, we must first change our values to reflect that. The end product will not resemble the marketplace we have now, and indeed it cannot, as what we have now threatens to destroy itself and take us with it. This does not mean that we cannot live a lifestyle that somewhat resembles the one we have now, simply that the new economics must be based on a different basic value, one not synonymous with continual growth, one that values sustainability and views too much growth as a sign of failure. This system would necessarily punish greed, or at least sanction it socially.
A careful reader might argue that greed, or she might even call it “self-interest,” is a natural part of being human. Markets, she might argue, simply harness this tendency and create wealth. This may be true, but people are also naturally murderous, thieving, filled with lust, and mad for power. This does not mean our culture needs to countenance a certain amount killing, larceny, rape, or enslavement just because it is, on some level, good for us. We’ve decided, and rightly so, that these things are on the whole much worse than they are cathartic or useful, even though they keep police departments in business. Likewise, when our greed—pardon me, our “self interest”—becomes more destructive than constructive, it must be reined in. “Wealth” may be considered anything a culture derives from an environment beyond what is needed to meet a basic need. Thus wealth is never “created” as such: resources are exploited beyond supplying a basic need. “Wealth,” then, becomes a function of our values, what we want more of than the minimal amount required for us to survive. A million tons of slime-mold does not make a man wealthy, but a million tons of amethyst does. Both are about as useful. One is simply valued by human beings more than the other one is. Markets do not decide what something is worth; people do. If we reward people for how much they conserve instead of how much they use, the naturally greedy would be harnessed to the goal of conservation, but then, they would also be measuring wealth in a completely different way.
I don’t expect any change in values to happen while most of us are still alive, of course. It will probably only happen as the result of systemic collapse and rebuilding. The way to change the values of a society is generally through the destruction of that society and its rebirth or through the death of those who hold those values. We cling to our cultural values to maintain our sense of self, and either we die or the culture dies if those values are to be transformed. I fear it shall be both, but that the former shall precede the latter, and it shall happen as a result of the expression of the old values until the cold, chaotic, and bitter end.