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Gerbil Pi

Essentials for A Values Based Participatory Economy

In my view, both the binary categories of the left and the right want the same thing. They want a system of some kind that they can point to, to make themselves feel secure. The marketplace economy with all its pseudo science rules and laws is one such system. It operates in an ideologized framework beyond the participatory and interactive control of the subjects. Decisions about resource development and consumption occur as a result of Social Darwinistic laws that were parsed from a small segment of Darwin's much broader and more comprehensive evolutionary theory, and have been pasted over our innate intelligence by the management oriented intellectual minds who seem to have nothing better to do than sit around and figure all this out.

In this context the implication that just about everyone has brought to our current cultural consciousness is that, except for a special few, humans are little more than rats in a box trying to achieve self satisfaction through schedules of reward and punishment. If only they would all just try to be better rats and learn how to maneuver through the box and jump through the hoops, all would be well. If you want to insist on using such concepts, then I would say that both the left and the right are hooked into this dominance system ideology in only slightly different ways. The result is a nation in an increasingly globalized and dangerously interconnected international society -- with occasional warring factions that must be controlled of course -- that is driven by fear and dependency because the people of the nation and increasingly the world no longer have the cultural skills to make their own self determined way through life as we all once did.

That segment of the brain that once took part in that activity is hardly used now as people increasingly specialize themselves to fit into the cog of a giant marketing supply/demand side system. If you are an accountant, then from that specialized niche, you would be aware that comptrollers and their department personnel are generally in a position of immense influence in management structures, at least partly because, like the priests of ancient times, nobody knows what the heck they are talking about. Look at how the financial world shakes when Greenspan opens his mouth.

The way I see it this whole mindset of dependency on a system needs to go or we are doomed; which means we are probably doomed because I know it won't go easy. In my view, it's the mistaken result of a path taken about ten thousand years ago when, by developing agriculture as a means of controlling the vagaries of ecological fluctuation, apparently first at about where all the turmoil in Iraq is occurring, a whole system of dominance ideology evolved. The variations of capitalism are a recent variant; as would be the versions of Marxism that tend towards centralized control.

In relation to all that I want to be a bit more specific, and hopefully much clearer about where I'm coming from on this general attitude of the left/right dichotomy that I’ve heard expressed thusly:

I also notice a common idea that concentrated ownership of resources by corporations is inherently a bad thing.                                                                                                 

You see, it's not the problem of concentrated ownership I am talking about (I don't speak for anyone else) it’s the vast system of hierarchical organizations designed to dominate and control the resources, in a system that is regarded with almost religious awe. The hierarchical systems themselves are the problems. Stockholders are irrelevant, because the systems have a built in ontology that by nature excludes democratically based participatory control. As a system, it fits into the larger ideological market system perfectly. It's efficiency and capacity to garner resources makes it one of the strongest organizational constructs in that system. As a system that engenders ways to develop certain unimportant human capacities, like caring for one another, interactive concern for one's environment, trivialities like that, it is completely deficient.

Those are, incidentally, the values I choose. If they are irrelevant in one's life then they become like an appendix. They wither and die. To nurture them they must be actively engaged in working out life's many problems, which implies a participatory environment of some sort. All of one's life and educational effort must go into it, not just a few scant moments in the evening between dinner and television.

So I'm talking about democracy, and democracy is something altogether different than these externally conceived systems everyone has accepted as a fact of life, and that they allow themselves to be governed by. I believe human beings are inherently democratic in nature. But it needs to be learned and nurtured. If we could wake ourselves up we might just find that "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is built into the hard wiring of our brain, and would function naturally as a part of our everyday existence.

It's about people getting together and making reasoned choices as a group based on the situations they find themselves in, starting from the truly advantageous point, in terms of survival, of caring for one another and the welfare of the group as a whole, instead of treating each other as competitors in a hostile environment. Each person in a democracy participating, not letting specialists do it. Training ourselves as we go along to do it better and better, thus providing a different kind of evolutionary framework from the Social Darwinist, free trade market competitive evolutionary scheme that has led to this conundrum of a situation, as I see it. That way of being cannot be forced on anyone, it has to be freely chosen by everyone. It is fragile. Systems of dominance have always been able to disrupt and destroy democracy. That's certainly one lesson from the past 10,000 years.

In the end, democracy and corporate globalization are the antithesis of each other. Democracy is a locally interactive process, capable of being environmentally sensitive. Globalization is a system of increasing centralization and autocratization of human beings into larger and more efficient management systems, which could easily end up being a planet of nothing but monstrous corporations one day if it can go to it's logical conclusion. Such entities have already demonstrated their complete lack of concern for the value of life, and disinterest in correcting the wrongs that are left in their wake after a disaster. I submit Bhopal as an example.

What I'm interested in is having the freedom not to be a well trained cog in any of these systems. These systems offer the carrot of security. I don't believe security is possible. I think the idea itself is a mistake. By looking for security humans have developed these huge, unwieldy, passive populations who live lives in which they have very little active engagement. Once they have bought into the concept of security, discover that they have few real alternatives with their lives but to depend on the system, then fear is the easiest motivator that can be employed in the event of some minor ripple in the system of obedience. In other words, everyone scarcely develops beyond the dependency level of a child.

As it stands these days, your choice is to look at the system, figure out where you want to be in that system, and try to somehow get there. In a shifting global marketplace where employers have the entire planet of people in increasingly vulnerable life sustaining environments to move around in, one can only hope the job one has trained for is still worth something in the "job market" when the training is over. The sensation of scale, up and down, is smothering. It permeates all aspects of cultural life. Ask anyone: Do you want your child to grow up to be a fully emotionally mature, self actuated human being or to be a leader? You know most people don't even ask the question. It's always: he or she has leadership potential! with much pride of course. How many are proud to say their child looks like a good empathizer, or a potential synthesizer person. Priority is leadership because we are in a dominator stratified system. Anyway, that's just a side example.

If you fit yourself into the scheme of things well enough, chances are you will live a nice, steady secure life, maybe there will even be a little excitement somewhere. All this as long as the system you depend on works.

I have no real interest in arguing about how to adjust the existing system one way or another. The way I see it the adjustments from either side are usually necessary, the logic of maintaining business profits for the wealthy to maintain their “incentives” versus the ambiguous logic of health and welfare of the population.  Nobody ever seems satisfied so the ongoing struggle seems to suffice to keep some sort of balance.  In the course of my life, I have become intolerant of the dominant social institutions and values imposed by an authoritarian system of ideas over human life and freedom. My efforts now go towards opposing processes that negate the self sustaining democratic values I care about, and I do so by emphasizing different goals, values, and aspirations that undermine this system of domination. Basically these entail concepts of participatory democracy and of course participatory economic activities necessary to life. I've been successful in doing this in a private enterprise environment with a group of acquaintances to some small degree over the past 14 years.