The system's architecture
Is it just me, or have we humans simply forgotten our origins? Most of us now live so cushioned and wrapped up that we've never really felt nature in our teeth or experienced the elements on our own bodies. In many ways, we're as disconnected from the laws of physics as we are subject to those of the market.
A kind of collective, cultural jet lag, where everything damn well has to be so fine and fancy, because it's ultimately nicer to put on a brave face than to run the risk of stigma. Not running around barefoot like some hippie. We want to be part of the cave, don't we!
(...) one pleasant distraction overlaps the next, and I must admit that the market (if nothing else) has a formidable ability to satisfy all primal needs, as well as to soothe any existential anxiety.
When we choose to conform, to be good citizens and taxpayers, and generally participate in the daily consumer-economic routine, it's not exactly because someone is holding a gun to our heads and forcing us.
We could choose to devote our lives to volunteer work, and generally reduce our consumption, and try to leave a smaller footprint on our surroundings and planet. Lead by example, and live out the change we—on paper and in principle—wish to see in the world. There are just so many other things that also need to be taken care of, and a daily life that always ends up stealing our attention.
Frighteningly enough, it's far from a secret how things are put together. Easily digestible news surfaces, ditto so-called foods, professional sports and entertainment, porn, alcohol, nicotine, euphoric drugs, likes and confirming biases; one pleasant distraction overlaps the next, and I must admit that the market (if nothing else) has a formidable ability to satisfy all primal needs, as well as to soothe any existential anxiety.
When it comes down to it, who decides?
But who really decides what happens in our lives, and how we arrange our world? The politicians? The elite? The theater of Christiansborg, with ambitious, party-disciplined academics in the leading roles?
Types like my dear neighbor—(whose Stinger-like determination I respect as well as envy)—who diligently and with great self-assurance flies back and forth across the Atlantic in his work to promote a more sustainable agenda?
The market? The culture?
But that doesn't change the fact that most of our preferred scapegoats are actually honorable and hardworking people who approach a thankless and often quite impossible task with the best intentions in the world.
What we, for lack of better words, resort to calling the system?—which has for far too long been the neoliberal narrative.
Almost every single day, we can hear a grave politician, who, in front of rolling cameras, emphasizes the importance of the state balancing its budgets like everyone else, and chants that it's obviously not possible to both blow and have flour in your mouth; to both prioritize core welfare and be ambitious about the green transition.
Blatantly wrong statements, and yet I'm aware that the person in question may well be speaking with the best intentions and conviction, and moreover be just as much on shaky ground in their life as I am. On my bad days—and God knows I have those!—I want to beat up both the finance minister and the whole gang of bank directors with all four leather-bound volumes of Das Kapital.
It absolutely doesn't suit anyone to blindly mock either our elected officials or the people in the financial sector, and yet I end up doing it again and again in pure idiotic, pent-up frustration. Shrilly, so it screams to the heavens. It's not as if I've spent the majority of my youth on the barricades, or in other ways contributed to any constructive and nuanced political debate.
It seems to me to be an important, but unfortunately often overlooked point, that we need to address the systemic flaws without simultaneously attributing all sorts of evil motives to other people.
Clearly, there are those who, in a given situation, act more for their own gain than others, and others again, who become so corrupted by power or money that they no longer have the ability to see the big picture.
The power apparatus is largely self-sustaining, and fundamentally, it's just difficult to transform something so complete and complex that the decision-makers themselves have long since become an integral part of it.
But that doesn't change the fact that most of our preferred scapegoats are actually honorable and hardworking people who approach a thankless and often quite impossible task with the best intentions in the world.
The task is far from insurmountable
When in these years we are on a sure course towards a true climatic (and perhaps also cultural?) apocalypse, it's far from because we 8 billion world citizens each wish to ruin the future for either ourselves or our descendants.
Faced with clear choices and manageable consequences, none, or at least vanishingly few of us would choose our own comfort at the expense of our children and grandchildren.
The interest-bearing, expansive logic of bank money will continue to fell rainforests, and create green deserts and divides between people, simply because that's how we've chosen to design the system's architecture.
Yet that's exactly what we do as a collective humanity.
Even though many of us strive and fight on an individual basis, we severely fail our collective obligation.
If the prerequisite for making the right and sensible choices is that we must draw up a complete cradle-to-grave account for any given situation, even a simple trip to the supermarket becomes completely and utterly overwhelming; not to mention the more complicated choices like jobs and careers, transportation, and housing and energy.
The project is doomed to fail, which the last forty years of development in the global economy only confirms. The incentives we encounter in everyday life encourage us to make our choices on the terms of bank money, and prioritize short-term gains over the long, tough haul.
As long as the neoliberal narrative is valid, and our policies are structured so that they rely on the market's ability to streamline and optimize at all levels, it will never be different. It takes something else and more than tech, and new, and more sustainable trappings to change the course.
In the current regime, it's far too cumbersome to act rationally and in the interest of the planet and community.
The interest-bearing, expansive logic of bank money will continue to fell rainforests, and create green deserts and divides between people, simply because that's how we've chosen to design the system's architecture.
That said, the real challenge is to construct our money and our economy so that we can each make our choices with our heads under our arms, without simultaneously compromising either each other or the ecosystem we're all part of.
Complicated—certainly—but for a species that has both built the pyramids, sent satellites into orbit around Earth, and created all the world's different languages, the task should be far from insurmountable.
No train to hold?
Properly considered, it makes no sense to rage against either career politicians or financiers, when what we need is anything but—
More appropriately, we could perhaps start by looking ourselves in the eye, and activating our own little place in the world. Let the cave be a cave, and for heaven's sake just not care if we end up falling outside of category: Get our hands dirty, and make a virtue of doing things again in the old Nordic, difficult and slow way.
It is actually us, ordinary people who decide. Without all of us, and our collective acceptance, no society or system in the world can be maintained.
If all the rest of us poor sods purely refuse and say no, even the richest, single privileged percent is screwed. Without us, bank money is worth absolutely nothing in the world.
Precisely for this reason, it is imperative to insist, and like a little brat keep repeating that the emperor is stark naked; that maybe, in reality, there simply is no train to hold . . .