I can sense and understand that our method of Economics and Capitalism is a problem, but I'm really struggling to wrap my head around a solution...
It seems like a pretty important thing in life, and possibly something that people wouldn't expect just one person to find a solution for, but I think many great writers and thinkers have, individually, come up with solutions for these great pressing problems of our time.
So I'm sitting here at the "why" stage--I know why it's not working, I also know THAT it's not working. But now I need to move into the stage of where do we go from here?
It's really hard to articulate this, but I'm really noticing in every conversation people have that is economics related or capitalism related just how bad those things are. Our understandings of economics is so ingrained into people that they don't realize there could be alternatives. Take for instance when people assign value to something: their first instinct is to say that the value is based on what someone will pay for it. That supply and demand is the main generator of value then. --That's not accurate, and that would put Marx's theory in some strange water because then the controlers of the means of production are those people who can create demand. It puts power in society into the hands of PR firms, Marketeers, and Sales people, which are an end product of value not a begining product. Those people sell created value, they don't create value to sell!
And capitalism. We often associate capitalism with corporate capitalism, or the public's ownership of public companies. But we have seen where that line of argument leads: corporations are treated like people rather than entities controlled by people. People use their ownership in companies as leverage for other things, even leveraging the assumed value of the corporation (although it is unrealized) to generate value. They offer up their shares are collateral to private investors who lend them money and in effect create value out of nothing. This is economic capitalism at its finest, but that doesn't mean there is actual value there. There is no real value to those deals yet people believe into them and it causes the economic engine to turn--generating increased value from nothingness! How can this be sustainable? How can this be equitable? It's no wonder there are so many huckers in the world today--so many people pitching lies to accumulate wealth--because that is in effect tapping into a limitless source of economic power: the belief of a lie that says there is value in something when there isn't!
What's more, when we take a step back, no one has really put much thought into whether running this economic engine for the long-haul is actually beneficial to people? Is it? Is it beneficial to everyone or just a select few, because it seems to me like it is another form of propaganda, no different from religion. Economics is the new religion. Religion was the old method for controlling the masses and even, eventually, for controlling kings. The new method is economics. Kings rise and fall based on that "Economic engine," and not all kings hold geographic holdings in the same way that they did back 500 years ago. Some kings own corporations.
What a lie this world is. What an illusion! What a waste. We humans are such a wasted species. We rely on fiction, we build our whole world on fiction, we are fiction. Is it really a human trait to look at the truth and turn away from it only to embrace a fiction that is more digestible?
