Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Monetary-Market Apostasy

When a person who grows up in a religious environment begins to see some cracks in the cathedral, their process of becoming non-religious is usually not instantaneous.  It begins with cognitive quakes, perhaps by seeing how awful conditions are for others or for themselves.  Great hardship, illness, or death have often been circumstances that instigate questioning into firmly held beliefs.  Or, the quakes come more slowly through dialog and reading different perspectives than those they’ve been surrounded by their whole lives. Traveling has always been a great means of broadening one’s perspective because the traveler becomes the outsider, the one whose culture becomes foreign. The light that shines through those cracks feels shocking at first.  Like the moment when they remove their sunglasses, the sun shines so bright that they wince and close their eyes. But, as they adapt, it becomes easier to bear.  And after some time, the sunlight feels natural and wholesome.  The cathedral becomes a dark place of cruelty in the way that it robs people of the joy of the bountiful outdoors.

I went through a similar emotional evolution in regards to a resource-based economy.  For many years I had seen the cracks: giant fissures revealing the fragile nature of our social system partly crumbled atop people around me.  I had also grown up watching Star Trek The Next Generation.  That show was very explicit about living in a time when scarcity, money, and enslavement to work were seen not only as archaic, but as a regrettable era of human history.  That was the first light that had shone through the cracks.  It was all wrapped under the guise of entertainment, and as such, the humanistic philosophy of the series was not taken seriously as a call to change culture (which I think was the real goal of Gene Roddenberry).  I felt alone, like a non-believer in a church of fanatics.  I had gotten used to this feeling, particularly because I had so much experience being non-religious in Christian and Buddhist cultures. 

When I watched the Zeitgeist Addendum film, I had an immediate sense of connection with the message.  I pored over the website materials and was equal parts incredulous and excited.  It was like ET phoning home.  I felt like there was a community of people who took the “Star Trek values” seriously and wanted to take them from fiction to fact.  Becoming involved and advocating for the Zeitgeist Movement had a twinge of rebelliousness to it.  It was so counter-culture that I felt like I was joining a cult.  Of course, the ZM does not seek followers or believers loyal to any particular person or superstition.  It does not engage people in any bizarre or unhealthy rituals.  Most importantly, it does not draw clear lines between “us” vs. “them.”  It was for the simple fact that the ZM stands squarely in contrast to the prevailing monetary-based values that it felt awkward.  We are social creatures, and we have a natural tendency to recalibrate our perspectives based on what people around us understand to be true.  Even if we are intellectually aware of ad populum fallacies, there is some measure of emotional susceptibility that causes us to doubt ourselves.  This tendency is actually helpful in that it doesn’t allow us to get trapped in habitual thinking of a self-created delusion.

In the year that has passed since my introduction to the Zeitgeist Movement, feelings of its counter-culture nature have subsided.  To use my analogy, in the beginning, it was like I took a quick jog outside the cathedral, but still found myself partly chained to the hallowed interiors.  That feeling has since subsided, and a resource-based economy, or whatever one wants to call it, feels like a natural step in our evolution. It does not feel counter-anything, it feels like it's part of our natural development. The sanctity of the monetary-market paradigm feels silly and reckless.  Underlying nearly every societal and environmental problem or solution is the constant consideration of money--where it goes and where it comes from.  The solution isn’t in money, it is in human effort, and as long as we have humans, we have an abundance of human effort and resourcefulness to call upon.

A world in which each person’s dignity is respected and every person is encouraged to manifest their talents not only for their own well-being, but for the well-being of humanity, feels like a natural place to “come home” to.  There is plenty of new research that demonstrates the ills our current system produces and the benefits of an environment that fosters collaboration. This is not idealism; it is a reconciliation of current findings with the way we organize society.  Abolitionists and suffragists used to seem revolutionary, and the rights granted from their struggles now seem obvious.  Despite the heavy rhetoric of the human instinct to care only about oneself, science is marshalling in destructive evidence to that cherished assumption.  One study’s author  (Moll, J.) concluded, “humans are hardwired with the neural architecture for such pro-social sentiments as generosity, guilt, and compassion.”  We need only to embrace that understanding and be willing to step out of our anachronistic cathedrals to appreciate the many splendors that await us outside.