I suppose the rest of my thought pieces on this site are going to reflect the fact that we have a finite amount of years on this planet. Humanity used to change at a steady pace, but the rate of change has been exponentially growing and we are now approaching an infinite rate of change. What that means is chaos, anarchy. When we hit that point, everything is up in the air and whether we escape from it or not is dependent on whether humans are inherently good, or inherently bad; but the fact that we reached that point in the first place says that we are inherently bad. And by bad I mean, predominantly those negative traits that people think of.
Which leads me to the topic I wanted to write about:
Our current method of economics is fatally flawed and is directly tied into the flawed side of capitalism. The flawed side of capitalism is the side that over-exploits, seeks profit above all else, emphasizes and rewards greedy behavior, and leads to only a select few bubbling to the surface.
This is flawed because it presumes that there is such a thing as "best of the best" in regards to human beings, yet anyone who studies humanity will tell you that humans greatest trait is that their weaknesses are actually strengths when pooled as a collective. The flawed capitalism concepts have been pushed throughout history, arrogantly, for centuries under different names like imperialism, or colonialism, serfdom, tributaries, and despotism. Capitalism is being wielded by greedy individuals to amass power, and unfortunately, Capitalism has done a much better job of it that its predecessors.
As the rate of societal changes continues to press forward though, Capitalists ought to be quivering right now because social change is inevitable and just as the Rome was built and fell on the backs of the refugees it created though its wars, or how Imperialism crested and then was replaced, so too will capitalism die and be replaced and the people who it served will be forgotten.
Economics is presently a tool of capitalism. Money, currency, fiat, all representations of economics and not something tangible. Economics is founded on a principle that growth means more and loss means less. One flaw to economics-thinking is that it attempts to explain the resources of a finite world as though they are infinite. Infinite growth is impossible. In a natural system, there are a finite number of resources and the value of those resources don't go up when they run out, the value plateaus at a maximum value that I would coin "survival maximum." It is the price that one pays to survive--to live--which cannot be greater than the value of their life. Animals have a survival maximum the same as humans, yet economics undervalues them substantially. Plants, even bacteria have a survival maximum. Just because we can wipe out an organism relatively easy, doesn't mean that it's survival maximum is the same as the cost to wipe out said organism. The value of a wine culture is not the value of a campden tablet used to kill it off before bottling the wine, and yet the same approach is applied in many instances of the economics world.
Wild animals that are often hunted for sport or sustenance do everything in their power to outwit the hunter, and yet the ecological services that these animals provide far surpass the lead and gunpowder used to kill them. How easy it is to destroy something that took so much to build, and yet, destruction or threat of destruction has been used for eons as a means to devalue resources and snatch them up well under their true economic value.
Economics can never accurately value a living organism, and because of that inadequacy, it will always lead of false pretenses. Economics, by nature of being a faulty system, is therefore inadequate for most of the tools it has been used for. If anything, the only merit that economics serves is to deceive the unwitting into offload highly valuable tangibles and real property into the hands of master deceivers.
After the thousands of years that money has been around--the prerequisite to economics--I think now is a good time to start developing a system to replace it. Some people have proposed cryptocurrency, but it is only a further expansion of the flaws of economics because it relies on economics for its very existence--moreso than previous currencies. Instead, we either need to latch our currency onto semi-infinite sources of energy, such as the sun, or do away with currency altogether. And yet, if we manage to harness the power of the sun and create infinite energy, there may no longer be a need for currency.
Sadly, the easiest alternative to currency is worldly power and political structures, and when society hits the chaos stage, those with amassed worldly and political power will attempt to base currency on this resource they believe they have an abundance of. "Favors" will attempt to replace "money," and yet that will not suffice because it has never been a stable nor a long-term solution.
This all sounds like I am suggesting we all switch to a "wild" life, supposedly moving out into the bush to live off the land like our ancestors, but sadly we have never lived a sustainable lifestyle in the wilds. Human evolution has assured us that forming society is one of our greatest attributes as a species because it pools our weaknesses for certain traits and collaborates them with others' strengths. Living in smaller communities out in nature only gives a face-lift to the problem we are all facing--those people who live that lifestyle face the same problem, but they approach it in a different way and believe that they have evaded the "rat-race." Instead of competing with other humans over resources deemed valuable, they are competing against wild animals (who they perceive to be inferior to themselves) or Nature (who they perceive to be superior). At least in modern society, humans recognize that their greatest threats are their fellow humans--nature has been tamed as much as it can be and wild animals no longer pose a threat, but some humans are perceived as inferior and others as superior. The wild man or woman is merely avoiding facing his or her inadequacies and staring down the problem at hand and doing something about it. They are choosing to engage in selfish human behavior by focusing on their own survival and abandoning the global community at a very challenging time and I don't see that as a valid solution.
We are all facing Nature. Nature hasn't been tamed. It is bigger than all of us and by attempting to tame it we have destroyed it. As Nature dies, it will destroy everything in its grasp, including all humans who so arrogantly thought that they could conquer it.
