Part Three, Magazine Version
This is the magazine version of part three to appear in the Winter Communities Magazine. I will have a more detailed version of this article ths Fall. Please check back to this location.
From Five Earths to One, Part Three: Transforming Our Economy
By Jan Spencer
For Parts One and Two of this article, see Communities #187 and #188.
Unlearn
One of my favorite tracks by Bob Dylan is from his Slow Train Coming album. He’s singing about himself wanting to become a better person and to do that, he sings a lot of what he needs to do is unlearn.
When I was in public elementary school in Texas, circa 1965, we were taught our country was so prosperous because Americans are exceptional in their capacity to dream big and work hard. Besides prayer at lunchtime, we were taught the song “Texas, Our Texas.” One stanza and refrain are enough to illustrate social engineering in the classroom of a public school.
Texas, Our Texas! All hail the mighty State!
Texas, Our Texas! So wonderful so great!
Boldest and grandest, withstanding ev’ry test,
O Empire wide and glorious, you stand supremely blest.
God bless you Texas! And keep you brave and strong,
That you may grow in power and worth, throughout the ages long.
We were taught and required to sing an anthem to market capitalism. For me in my innocence, this was early in the process of being on the receiving end of one of history’s most effective examples of social, cultural, and lifestyle engineering. In our Land of the Free, at Arthur Kramer Elementary School, in a well-off suburban neighborhood with lots of maids and swimming pools in north Dallas, the kids are being educated to believe our economic system is the best possible, that it equates to democracy, and that excess consumption and vanity are virtuous.
I am sure just about everyone can reflect on their own version of this experience. And of course, that social engineering doesn’t stop. Refresher courses are with us all day long. The average American is exposed to hundreds of commercial messages every day. There have never been so many compelling reasons to unlearn a lifetime of consumer culture social engineering.
Market capitalism essentially controls the way we think and live. Perhaps the most remarkable product of this economic system is the success it has had in degrading individual’s and society’s capacity to imagine and create alternatives.
priorities time and money
We all have time and money. How we manage our time and money means the difference between a viable future and a dead end. The more people making smart choices with their time and money, the better. Participation in the economic system is not a package deal. We can pick and choose. Capitalism has provided us with many tools for its own replacement.
The priority goal for our society, at this point in history, should be to create a society and economic system that bring out the best in positive human potential and exist within the boundaries of the natural world. But first, it’s important to look at the essential problems of the system we currently have:
Problem #1: Externalized costs. Market capitalism as we know it cannot exist without externalizing the cost of virtually every product and service it has to sell.
An external cost is damage caused to people and planet that is not accounted for in the price paid for a product. One of the primary claims of capitalism is the magic of the market. Give people the choice of competing products and let people choose. The cheap prices made possible by external costs deprive people of the chance to make an informed choice what to buy. The price paid for almost every product in the store is dishonest because it doesn’t represent the true story of the product’s life cycle—extraction, manufacture, use, and disposal.
External costs damage public health, they damage the environment, they contribute to the corruption of our political system. Here are several good examples of external costs:
Oil: Looking for oil and extracting it, either conventional or fracking, typically damages the environment and often degrades the well-being of the people who live where the oil is located. Moving the crude—by pipeline, train, ship—has a history of costly accidents. Combustion in a car engine causes air and water pollution which damages habitat and public health.
Every year, cars kill over 40,000 people in the US and cause hundreds of billions in property damage. When you buy a gallon of gas, you do not pay for all that damage. Public well-being pays and the natural world pays. If the cost of all the damage to people and planet caused by oil showed up in the price, various educated guesses for the cost of a gallon of gasoline range from $15 to $100 a gallon.
Meat has an enormous external cost—feedlots pollute water and air. Confined feeding operations are cruel to animals. Feedlots require factory farming which leads to soil erosion, more water and air pollution, and a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Meat consumed at levels typical of most Americans produces many kinds of disease that cost society hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The price of a burger ignores those problems.
Passive entertainment with its hundreds of billions of hours of unproductive time can be considered an external cost because those lost hours could have been used instead for all kinds of public good such as mentoring a young person, making a garden, volunteering in the community, or a million other positive actions.
Market capitalism as we know it could not exist without the dishonesty of external costs. A society that paid the full and honest price to cover the damage of what it used would be close to unrecognizable. The cost of almost everything would be much greater—housing, transportation, food choices, recreation, just about everything. Millions of today’s jobs would not exist.
Problem #2: The mythology of efficiency. Market capitalism claims it is the most efficient way to allocate resources for the greatest good of society. Consider the many sectors of jobs that exist such as manufacturing, health care, administration, resource extraction, agriculture, retail sales, utilities, public, environmental protection, construction, financial services.
Millions of jobs exist to repair the avoidable damage caused by millions of other jobs. Consider cleaning up pollution. Consider health care. Recall the comments above about external costs. That’s tens of millions of jobs and trillions of dollars spent manufacturing, buying, using, and discarding the products that make the problems and then millions more jobs and trillions more dollars cleaning up the air, water, land, and addressing the injury to people. This arrangement is the opposite of efficient. Market capitalism’s boast about being efficient could not be further from the truth.
What can you say about an economic system that spends trillions of dollars on repairing the avoidable damage it creates and considers that good business? What can you say about an economic system that spends hundreds of billions of dollars promoting vanity and excess consumption at the same time it encourages people to buy products and services known to damage public health and the natural world?
Problem #3 Disequity. In a guest opinion this past summer in The Guardian, Bernie Sanders pointed out that the richest three people in the United States control financial assets equal to the least well-off 150 million Americans. Money buys the political system. The uneven possession and control of money insures enormous social, economic and political disequity.
Market capitalism is not broken. What we see is simply what it does. It concentrates economic and political power. It degrades public health and the well-being of the natural world. It is profoundly dishonest. It is inefficient to epic proportions. It encourages human behavior at near complete odds to the teachings of the world’s great spiritual traditions.
Market capitalism and its various elected and administrative helpers are guilty of so much wrongdoing that the country would be well served to set up a national truth and reconciliation process modeled after the truth and reconciliation structure used in South Africa to deal with the damage caused by Apartheid. Our own economic system and its sponsors deserve similar attention so our society can heal, unlearn, and chart a new and healthy direction.
A New Movement Already Exists
Imagine:
1) Hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of organizations realizing they are on the same team because they are all addressing a problem created or made worse by capitalism and the consumer culture. A victory for one is a victory for all.
2) A basic set of ideals and principles that could help activate this team through a mission statement, well-planned outreach, and agreed-upon common messages.
3) Hundreds of thousands of people motivated to shift from “concern to action” to help bring about a deep paradigm shift.
The wisdom of the world’s great spiritual traditions adds another level of value:
1) Care for the natural world.
2) Service to the community.
3) Modesty of lifestyle.
4) Uplift of the spirit.
5) Accountability for actions we take in our own lives.
Imagine a movement with an outreach message that articulated a set of practical ideas and principles to encourage individuals and organizations to take widespread synchronized action on behalf of creating healthy alternatives to capitalism and its consumer culture.
That outreach would include a mission statement—for example, “We are striving to bring about a society, economy, and political system that is just, accountable, and uplifting to the spirit and that can exist within the boundaries of the natural world.”
This message would describe the social, economic, political, and environmental challenges of our time and what is causing them. It would describe how hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of organizations are all working on repairing the extensive damage caused by capitalism and the consumer culture.
Two basic actions encouraged in the message would be to reduce individual, community, and society’s ecological footprint, and to build multi-level social cohesion.
The outreach would welcome individuals and organizations to make common cause. There would be no forms to fill out. No permission needed. People could take these actions alone, with friends nearby, a mutual assistance group, or as part of a nonprofit, workplace, labor union, neighborhood association, school, or faith organization.
The message would explain concepts such as permaculture, one earth lifestyles, mutual assistance, economic and political democracy, place making, solidarity, and more.
Part of the message would explain what individuals can do at home and nearby such as turning yards to garden, moving towards a plant-based diet, collaborating with neighbors, sharing these ideas with others, creating a mutual assistance network.
For organizations, the message would explain why they are essential and the role they can play for this movement. Organizations have standing in the community; they have members, networks, and perhaps contacts with other groups, elected officials, and other agencies they can reach out to.
Organizations often ask their members and associates to help with the cause. If downsizing lifestyles becomes part of the cause, the organization can encourage members to downsize and provide educational materials and organize events for its members and the public explaining how to downsize, and why reducing eco-footprints is so important to people and planet and an essential step in replacing the current economic system and consumer culture.
Moving towards Political Democracy
Grassroots actions at home and the community are the base of the paradigm shift pyramid. That pyramid can grow to support people running for political office. With enough coordinated activation in the community and region, paradigm shift activists can viably run for city, county, state, and even national office.
Given the extraordinary mobilization of movements such as the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter, and actions related to climate change, Indigenous rights, and resource scarcity, there is a great deal of energy for positive change and I believe far more stored up that is yet to manifest. A well-articulated movement bringing diverse groups together could set free an historical level of local, regional, and national activism that could well go global.
What might real political power lead to? High priorities would include reforms to voting and taxes, budget changes to favor people and planet, environmental legislation on behalf of the natural world, policies to encourage public transportation and rail, to assert labor and women’s rights, to affirm that corporations are not people, and more.
Political democracy would be partnered with economic democracy. Public will, along with government policies, could bring about far more worker-owned and -managed businesses and cooperatives that are rooted in their communities. New financial institutions could facilitate keeping money local to be invested in local projects.
Public options, services that are not-for-profit with charters committing them to responsible management, can offer alternatives to for-profit business. Community-minded businesses could gain a sort of “organic standard” that identifies them as friendly to people and planet.
COVID-19 and a More Viable, Downsized Future
The effects of COVID-19 can shed some light on what a possible downsized future might look like. Disruption of supply chains and certain industries like hospitality, real estate, food production, and luxury products show how vulnerable our society is. A downsized future society will not resemble the current economy based on entertainment, vanity, and excess.
The virus shows how Americans can be impatient, undisciplined, and susceptible to inaccurate information. The virus also shows how most people are capable of making uninvited changes to adapt, while still others rise heroically to the occasion.
Moving towards sustainability will require heroes and those who can adjust. It will call on people to learn challenging new skills, both social and material. The virus is showing us great numbers of people will struggle with and even resist needed changes. Paradigm shift will require a great deal of care and compassion.
In the short term, we would be smart to invest time and money, while we have it, in transforming our lifestyles and communities. Verily, those actions are the start of paradigm shift.
Paradigm shift will depend on repurposing both public and private money, time, and assets towards the well-being of society and the natural world. We have a great deal to work with. We have enormous challenges. We have an historical opportunity that deserves our best effort.
For a longer and more detailed version of “From Five Earths to One, Part Three,” please visit suburbanpermaculture.org.
Parts One and Two in this series, found in the Summer and Fall 2020 issues of Communities, provide more context for Part Three by explaining downsizing and many existing examples of the “preferred future” such as suburban permaculture, ecovillages, placemaking, streets for people, and more.
Jan Spencer goes into considerable detail about market capitalism, one earth lifestyles, transforming suburbia, pushing back on cars, and ecovillages with his podcasts at player.whooshkaa.com/shows/creating-a-resilient-future. Check his website, too, for more content and links to YouTube videos: suburbanpermaculture.org. Also see his YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/channel/UClIooiYJZvCxb2ruWOodrUg?view_as=subscriber. Jan is available for making presentations over the internet. Contact him at [email protected].
From Five Earths to One, Part Three: Transforming Our Economy
By Jan Spencer
For Parts One and Two of this article, see Communities #187 and #188.
Unlearn
One of my favorite tracks by Bob Dylan is from his Slow Train Coming album. He’s singing about himself wanting to become a better person and to do that, he sings a lot of what he needs to do is unlearn.
When I was in public elementary school in Texas, circa 1965, we were taught our country was so prosperous because Americans are exceptional in their capacity to dream big and work hard. Besides prayer at lunchtime, we were taught the song “Texas, Our Texas.” One stanza and refrain are enough to illustrate social engineering in the classroom of a public school.
Texas, Our Texas! All hail the mighty State!
Texas, Our Texas! So wonderful so great!
Boldest and grandest, withstanding ev’ry test,
O Empire wide and glorious, you stand supremely blest.
God bless you Texas! And keep you brave and strong,
That you may grow in power and worth, throughout the ages long.
We were taught and required to sing an anthem to market capitalism. For me in my innocence, this was early in the process of being on the receiving end of one of history’s most effective examples of social, cultural, and lifestyle engineering. In our Land of the Free, at Arthur Kramer Elementary School, in a well-off suburban neighborhood with lots of maids and swimming pools in north Dallas, the kids are being educated to believe our economic system is the best possible, that it equates to democracy, and that excess consumption and vanity are virtuous.
I am sure just about everyone can reflect on their own version of this experience. And of course, that social engineering doesn’t stop. Refresher courses are with us all day long. The average American is exposed to hundreds of commercial messages every day. There have never been so many compelling reasons to unlearn a lifetime of consumer culture social engineering.
Market capitalism essentially controls the way we think and live. Perhaps the most remarkable product of this economic system is the success it has had in degrading individual’s and society’s capacity to imagine and create alternatives.
priorities time and money
We all have time and money. How we manage our time and money means the difference between a viable future and a dead end. The more people making smart choices with their time and money, the better. Participation in the economic system is not a package deal. We can pick and choose. Capitalism has provided us with many tools for its own replacement.
The priority goal for our society, at this point in history, should be to create a society and economic system that bring out the best in positive human potential and exist within the boundaries of the natural world. But first, it’s important to look at the essential problems of the system we currently have:
Problem #1: Externalized costs. Market capitalism as we know it cannot exist without externalizing the cost of virtually every product and service it has to sell.
An external cost is damage caused to people and planet that is not accounted for in the price paid for a product. One of the primary claims of capitalism is the magic of the market. Give people the choice of competing products and let people choose. The cheap prices made possible by external costs deprive people of the chance to make an informed choice what to buy. The price paid for almost every product in the store is dishonest because it doesn’t represent the true story of the product’s life cycle—extraction, manufacture, use, and disposal.
External costs damage public health, they damage the environment, they contribute to the corruption of our political system. Here are several good examples of external costs:
Oil: Looking for oil and extracting it, either conventional or fracking, typically damages the environment and often degrades the well-being of the people who live where the oil is located. Moving the crude—by pipeline, train, ship—has a history of costly accidents. Combustion in a car engine causes air and water pollution which damages habitat and public health.
Every year, cars kill over 40,000 people in the US and cause hundreds of billions in property damage. When you buy a gallon of gas, you do not pay for all that damage. Public well-being pays and the natural world pays. If the cost of all the damage to people and planet caused by oil showed up in the price, various educated guesses for the cost of a gallon of gasoline range from $15 to $100 a gallon.
Meat has an enormous external cost—feedlots pollute water and air. Confined feeding operations are cruel to animals. Feedlots require factory farming which leads to soil erosion, more water and air pollution, and a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Meat consumed at levels typical of most Americans produces many kinds of disease that cost society hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The price of a burger ignores those problems.
Passive entertainment with its hundreds of billions of hours of unproductive time can be considered an external cost because those lost hours could have been used instead for all kinds of public good such as mentoring a young person, making a garden, volunteering in the community, or a million other positive actions.
Market capitalism as we know it could not exist without the dishonesty of external costs. A society that paid the full and honest price to cover the damage of what it used would be close to unrecognizable. The cost of almost everything would be much greater—housing, transportation, food choices, recreation, just about everything. Millions of today’s jobs would not exist.
Problem #2: The mythology of efficiency. Market capitalism claims it is the most efficient way to allocate resources for the greatest good of society. Consider the many sectors of jobs that exist such as manufacturing, health care, administration, resource extraction, agriculture, retail sales, utilities, public, environmental protection, construction, financial services.
Millions of jobs exist to repair the avoidable damage caused by millions of other jobs. Consider cleaning up pollution. Consider health care. Recall the comments above about external costs. That’s tens of millions of jobs and trillions of dollars spent manufacturing, buying, using, and discarding the products that make the problems and then millions more jobs and trillions more dollars cleaning up the air, water, land, and addressing the injury to people. This arrangement is the opposite of efficient. Market capitalism’s boast about being efficient could not be further from the truth.
What can you say about an economic system that spends trillions of dollars on repairing the avoidable damage it creates and considers that good business? What can you say about an economic system that spends hundreds of billions of dollars promoting vanity and excess consumption at the same time it encourages people to buy products and services known to damage public health and the natural world?
Problem #3 Disequity. In a guest opinion this past summer in The Guardian, Bernie Sanders pointed out that the richest three people in the United States control financial assets equal to the least well-off 150 million Americans. Money buys the political system. The uneven possession and control of money insures enormous social, economic and political disequity.
Market capitalism is not broken. What we see is simply what it does. It concentrates economic and political power. It degrades public health and the well-being of the natural world. It is profoundly dishonest. It is inefficient to epic proportions. It encourages human behavior at near complete odds to the teachings of the world’s great spiritual traditions.
Market capitalism and its various elected and administrative helpers are guilty of so much wrongdoing that the country would be well served to set up a national truth and reconciliation process modeled after the truth and reconciliation structure used in South Africa to deal with the damage caused by Apartheid. Our own economic system and its sponsors deserve similar attention so our society can heal, unlearn, and chart a new and healthy direction.
A New Movement Already Exists
Imagine:
1) Hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of organizations realizing they are on the same team because they are all addressing a problem created or made worse by capitalism and the consumer culture. A victory for one is a victory for all.
2) A basic set of ideals and principles that could help activate this team through a mission statement, well-planned outreach, and agreed-upon common messages.
3) Hundreds of thousands of people motivated to shift from “concern to action” to help bring about a deep paradigm shift.
The wisdom of the world’s great spiritual traditions adds another level of value:
1) Care for the natural world.
2) Service to the community.
3) Modesty of lifestyle.
4) Uplift of the spirit.
5) Accountability for actions we take in our own lives.
Imagine a movement with an outreach message that articulated a set of practical ideas and principles to encourage individuals and organizations to take widespread synchronized action on behalf of creating healthy alternatives to capitalism and its consumer culture.
That outreach would include a mission statement—for example, “We are striving to bring about a society, economy, and political system that is just, accountable, and uplifting to the spirit and that can exist within the boundaries of the natural world.”
This message would describe the social, economic, political, and environmental challenges of our time and what is causing them. It would describe how hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of organizations are all working on repairing the extensive damage caused by capitalism and the consumer culture.
Two basic actions encouraged in the message would be to reduce individual, community, and society’s ecological footprint, and to build multi-level social cohesion.
The outreach would welcome individuals and organizations to make common cause. There would be no forms to fill out. No permission needed. People could take these actions alone, with friends nearby, a mutual assistance group, or as part of a nonprofit, workplace, labor union, neighborhood association, school, or faith organization.
The message would explain concepts such as permaculture, one earth lifestyles, mutual assistance, economic and political democracy, place making, solidarity, and more.
Part of the message would explain what individuals can do at home and nearby such as turning yards to garden, moving towards a plant-based diet, collaborating with neighbors, sharing these ideas with others, creating a mutual assistance network.
For organizations, the message would explain why they are essential and the role they can play for this movement. Organizations have standing in the community; they have members, networks, and perhaps contacts with other groups, elected officials, and other agencies they can reach out to.
Organizations often ask their members and associates to help with the cause. If downsizing lifestyles becomes part of the cause, the organization can encourage members to downsize and provide educational materials and organize events for its members and the public explaining how to downsize, and why reducing eco-footprints is so important to people and planet and an essential step in replacing the current economic system and consumer culture.
Moving towards Political Democracy
Grassroots actions at home and the community are the base of the paradigm shift pyramid. That pyramid can grow to support people running for political office. With enough coordinated activation in the community and region, paradigm shift activists can viably run for city, county, state, and even national office.
Given the extraordinary mobilization of movements such as the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter, and actions related to climate change, Indigenous rights, and resource scarcity, there is a great deal of energy for positive change and I believe far more stored up that is yet to manifest. A well-articulated movement bringing diverse groups together could set free an historical level of local, regional, and national activism that could well go global.
What might real political power lead to? High priorities would include reforms to voting and taxes, budget changes to favor people and planet, environmental legislation on behalf of the natural world, policies to encourage public transportation and rail, to assert labor and women’s rights, to affirm that corporations are not people, and more.
Political democracy would be partnered with economic democracy. Public will, along with government policies, could bring about far more worker-owned and -managed businesses and cooperatives that are rooted in their communities. New financial institutions could facilitate keeping money local to be invested in local projects.
Public options, services that are not-for-profit with charters committing them to responsible management, can offer alternatives to for-profit business. Community-minded businesses could gain a sort of “organic standard” that identifies them as friendly to people and planet.
COVID-19 and a More Viable, Downsized Future
The effects of COVID-19 can shed some light on what a possible downsized future might look like. Disruption of supply chains and certain industries like hospitality, real estate, food production, and luxury products show how vulnerable our society is. A downsized future society will not resemble the current economy based on entertainment, vanity, and excess.
The virus shows how Americans can be impatient, undisciplined, and susceptible to inaccurate information. The virus also shows how most people are capable of making uninvited changes to adapt, while still others rise heroically to the occasion.
Moving towards sustainability will require heroes and those who can adjust. It will call on people to learn challenging new skills, both social and material. The virus is showing us great numbers of people will struggle with and even resist needed changes. Paradigm shift will require a great deal of care and compassion.
In the short term, we would be smart to invest time and money, while we have it, in transforming our lifestyles and communities. Verily, those actions are the start of paradigm shift.
Paradigm shift will depend on repurposing both public and private money, time, and assets towards the well-being of society and the natural world. We have a great deal to work with. We have enormous challenges. We have an historical opportunity that deserves our best effort.
For a longer and more detailed version of “From Five Earths to One, Part Three,” please visit suburbanpermaculture.org.
Parts One and Two in this series, found in the Summer and Fall 2020 issues of Communities, provide more context for Part Three by explaining downsizing and many existing examples of the “preferred future” such as suburban permaculture, ecovillages, placemaking, streets for people, and more.
Jan Spencer goes into considerable detail about market capitalism, one earth lifestyles, transforming suburbia, pushing back on cars, and ecovillages with his podcasts at player.whooshkaa.com/shows/creating-a-resilient-future. Check his website, too, for more content and links to YouTube videos: suburbanpermaculture.org. Also see his YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/channel/UClIooiYJZvCxb2ruWOodrUg?view_as=subscriber. Jan is available for making presentations over the internet. Contact him at [email protected].