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A THOUGHT. Life as we have known it, or revered and aspired to. A dreamed about life of richness, abundance, and more specific products of humanity's cleverness and vanity such wine, women, song (but also the products of human stupidity such as class, caste, race and gender hierarchy), ...this dream of the 'good' life appears to have faded away or be available to an ever-diminishing fraction of humanity so that we now have a world of grossly asymmetric 'mis-sharing' of life's promises. We are now come to a dire need to deal with the reality has near irreversibly come to be a finite, zero-sum game, and perhaps life ever was a zero-sum proposition despite the dreams of the Ages of exploration and colonialization (global scale resource rape and pillage). This awakening to a post-surfeit reality appears to have occurred over the past 15 to 20 years and now shapes up as a bad, bad human-made nightmare in the wakened state. We face a crisis that is ripping apart our previous fantasy world of perpetual bonbons, colorful gumdrops, unending natural resources, clean air, good water...all provided by Mother Earth without requiring much effort, concern or husbandry from humanity, and delivered on a perpetual conveyor belt feeding directly into our mouths and bank accounts. But we now sense this was all a dream and we must face the consequences from greed and willy-nilly over-exploiting earth's resources - a situation supported and made worse by our cleverness in inventing the 'corporate blind' whereby a paper (fictitious) concept is equal, or more, to a living being but with fewer and fewer controls over corporate behavior. Our 'esteemed' legal minds have even by writ given these false corporate entities the leeway to use their immense money reserves to influence politics with even less monitoring than for human citizens.
The result of this overall trend to ignore the nonsensicalness and excesses from our misled priorities has resulted in 'badness' on many fronts - extreme inequality (of human sharing of earth's resources and financial profits) on almost all categories, especially financially, and dangerous over-exploiting of our planet's resources and blindness to global pollution. Especially disheartening if not grossly puzzling, has been the loosening of industrial regulations to increase the leger's bottom line...as the major if not the sole priority of corporate behavior. All of these 'actions' and consequences threaten to end our existence! (Or at least substantially lessen a standard of living that we've giddily assumed would last forever.)
'We', the globe's 'haves', the rulers of humanity (and their subjects in tow), all are wakening it seems with a really bad hangover from having believed we live in a world of infinite resources - a belief set too often and too conveniently supported by made-to-order 'religious' permissiveness or our self-serving interpretations of such. We have come to see that humanity has been carelessly play-acting at life in Eden when in actuality we've squandered away a beautiful world of 'enough-for-all'... a world that was bountiful but needed careful attention to the consequences of humanity's actions ... a set of 'husbandry' rules (like the 'good shepherd'). We've woven the 'good shepherd' into our culture but not taken that meme seriously - it's often served to keep populations under control.
We've wakened to a living nightmare, a frighteningly bad video game become real where life is a finite sum matter that is now seen to be obscenely asymmetric where alien rules apply and it's near too late to learn them.
The 'rules' of good planet husbandry have been replaced in favor of the interests of fictitious entities (corporations) and false priorities of profit propped up by legal rationalizing. We've willfully turned away from humanity's role in climate change, giddily squandered Nature's resources, blindly erected 'laws' that protect non-human, fictitious instruments that wander the planet exploiting natural resources (and murdering whole populations as collateral damage in the sacred pursuit of such profits), and all too often supported by convenient religious praise of profitable effort as the ticket to Valhalla.
Umar Haque's views on the nightmare that we wakened to, in September 11, 2019, 'Medium'webzine ((How) Capitalism Turned Life, the Planet, and Civilization into Money — and Our Challenge is Turning it Back - Why the 21st Century Needs a Revolution (If We Don’t Want Civilization to Keep on Collapsing)), is that global economic inequality is the root of our nightmare because the degree of inequality is extreme and encompasses just about everything around us that can be purchased, exploited and monetized.
(Pericles21, blogged this view several years ago in wondering if 'real-product' economies were at the end because 'demand' has shifted from economically depleted customers (with no more money to purchase) to owners of capital (paper fiat) whose 'demands' continue and have multiplied...even if capital owners' actual needs in the Maslovian sense are satisfied...to sinful excess. Also, Pericles21 pointed out few if any economic theory includes, or even attempts to include, 'greed' as perhaps the major underlying shaper of cultural economics throughout history.
Mr. Haque employs Marx and Keynes in using their insights to describe our current emergency of gross resource-sharing asymmetry as a “crisis of overaccumulation.” Haque's insight is that if pressures on the globe's inequality-burdened populations (the 'have-nots' of 50 years ago) remain unanswered, this will lead to a perhaps terminally harmful social explosion..for all humanity.
A social explosion seems perhaps likely because there are few or no alternative (peaceful) options left to the 'unequal' (the 99% or more of humanity) whose interests are becoming increasingly marginal in importance relative to the big picture of replacement of real markets with financial manipulations, e.g., hedge funds and third-and-higher-order derivatives. The 'un-equals' receive little regard for education to maintain labor competitiveness, even less regard for their health with healthcare having been rationalized away as some kind of luxury to be juggled against a cable tv subscription or smartphone.
In this blogger's view, there is a basic observation that seems undeniable - humanity has about reached the end of the 'saving rope' and the rope's end looks to be little more than frayed threads.
Mr. Haque, on solid ground, suggests the resolution is to somehow convince the owners of over-accumulated resources into re-investing in restoring the planet's health.
But Pericles21 sees that just the recognition of economic inequality should also incorporate reconceptualizing of the meaning of 'living'. We've defined life, at least bio-life, satisfactorily but, typically, in techno terms - DNA, etc. But now, in this age of extreme economic inequality, it appears something of major importance has been missing from our self-congratulatory metrics of life... there is a missing cultural pillar, a moral gap whose ignorance of has impacted us like a meteor.
We sense that this gap is something so far intangible that we are grasping for can quite 'get'. We are in dire need of a new metric guiding us 'how' we might best live this precious 'life'.
But, just arriving at this realization seems, hopefully, just in time. To many, Capitalism seems to be at the heart of the problem of the missing gap.
Capitalism has been described as a working market system...sometimes, maybe increasingly, requiring too much effort to prop up and too much rationalizing to continue to be useful or beneficial to sustaining social stability and progress.
The 'Capitalism Game" relies on two major factors - first, our human species' left-over monkey trait of competing 'for it all' (even wanting 'yours' when our bellies and hands are full of our AND your stuff we can never use); and second, an open-end supply of resources that require minimal effort (cost) to bring to market.
Although dwindling resources have required more and more 'effort' to bring to them to market, Our never-satisfied 'wanting' has continued as capitalism's driving force... and this 'drive' to over-satisfying has been given 'modern' clothing as 'objectivist self-interest' (selfishness, Rand-ism), objective 'reality', so-called natural economic competitiveness (nothing personal, mind you, it's just business), etc.
This has led to our present state of extremum...our monkey acquisitiveness has gone berserk and is about to wreck global stability through absurd economic inequality.
Somehow, without global revolution of the bloody historical kind, Humanity must reconceptualize our priorities and redefine what 'life' is. 'Life is much more than just technological-scientific definitions. 'Life' must be seen as a process and system for living in full value, i.e., seeing 'life' in its whole as a symbiosis of peoples, needs and wants. This is the 'game of living' and we should see the game as a finite sum balance that requires careful attention.
One's impression is that we are finally coming to understand that our right to exist (yes, it's that dire) must be earned and depends on how smart we are to preserve our sanity, our physical being, and the planet…all three together.
This means to realize that 'life' results from HOW we live it and 'living life' should be a priority. Radically speaking, this ends up with the concept that life and living is not a race to satisfy primordial monkey urges to accumulate but a new 'game' (since we monkeys seem drawn to like games) based on realizing that humanity is precious, more so than gold, and that we live on a 'symbiotic plane' with each other, the planet and its resources. 'Sane and sensible' should be the mantra of the new concept of living, a game where every human has value and though not 'free' in a sybaritic way (!!!), deserves to have at least basic needs met - the 'needs' of surviving as a human.
A corollary has to be a recognition that above a certain threshold of accumulation, any one individual and class endangers the greater 'game' of sane living for all. Yes, here is proposed that 'Life' is living in and through the greater good (a concept Pericles21 pointed out 10 years ago was a conceptual pillar proposed by the founders of the American nation who inherited it from the line of Western and Asian thinkers the past 4000 years.
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