Here’s a great read: Hope in Common by David Graeber
There’s so many ideas and so much information in this, that I am going to have to read it a few more times to fully digest it. All of this, I feel like I already know but hadn’t put it together so clearly in my head. Like, in the first paragraph, he says about capitalism that, “it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet.” Right. I knew that, I knew that that was the issue. But the phrase, “engine of perpetual growth.” That’s a neat and tight little phrase. That’s how capitalism works, isn’t it? Perpetual growth is required for any degree of stability in capitalism as it is.
He ends the article with,
The power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of capitalism—its moral foundation—now revealed to be a collection of broken promises—but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made us by the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs, we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of the promise offered by capitalism—that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another. Directly. Without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?
I think about these concepts when I hear about anyone who did everything “right,” went to a good school, got a degree, bought the house, and expected their “due” because they had done their part. They expected lifelong financial and status stability, and when they got laid off, everything fell apart. The world stopped seeming real. It’s really almost a spiritual-type crisis when this happens. Have you ever believed with your whole self that the world existed only in a certain way, only to find out you were wrong? It happened to me a couple of years ago, and it was a shattering experience. I became the walking dead, unable to function because I didn’t see the point of anything, because the world stopped making sense.
The good news is that we are always free to create our own vision for what the world can be. As this article talks about, there are a lot of power players that are heavily invested in citizens feeling hopeless. Possibly, our (false) feelings of hopelessness are the only real barrier to us creating something new, right now.
One great movement which relates to this topic of alternatives to debt-based capitalism is the Asheville Currancy Project. They are doing great work, and are intelligent and creative folks.
At the Evolver Asheville event on Saturday, one audience member talked to me after the event and expressed a lot of feelings of hopelessness, because she didn’t think people were waking up fast enough, and she asked me if I thought awakening was going to happen fast enough to save the species. I do believe that the species will survive, but I don’t know how much things will fall apart before we can put them back together. Part of the work many groups, like ACP, are doing right now is creating alternative structures so that when failing structures fall, there will already be some (better) replacements.
I do think people are waking up at an accelerated pace. I feel like I’m constantly surrounded by people that are beginning to ask some tough questions for the first time about the efficacy of capitalism, about whether communities can survive disasters, about interconnectedness between all life. There are a lot of people, faced with the failures of the economic system, who are questioning the same old stories they’ve heard about how life in America works. People are waking up and asking questions, which is why I think that right now is a particularly critical time for conversations. Not only about capitalism, but also peak oil and climate change, community resilience, social justice, human values, human rights, and many other complex issues.
Additionally, I think that it’s time for the cross-pollination of political action and spiritual practice. Note, I don’t say spiritual belief, but spiritual practice. As we approach these tumultuous times, spiritual practices offer respite, hope, peace of mind, motivation, interrelatedness skills, stories to shape our visions, archetypes to draw strength from, and wells of inspiration. One single small example is that there are Buddhist practices of meditation that can help a person remain centered in peacefulness even as they work to make changes in their world. Anger can be great motivation for change but makes poor long-term fuel. Also, in spiritual groups there is often a lot of work around how to build healthy relationships, etc, and those tools are readily applicable to activist groups as well.
On the flip side, I have noticed that many people who have been doing spiritual practices and/or personal growth work for enough time to have done a lot of healing, feel a need to take that healing to the next level. They want to begin healing their relationship with the larger world, with the surrounding human systems, but aren’t always sure where to begin. I would love to see a barter mentorship program happen where activists offer beginning training to spiritual folks who are fledgling activists, and spiritual folks offer guidance and practice tools to activists who are interested in opening up more to their inner wisdom.
See, when I say spiritual, I don’t mean dogma. I don’t mean a belief in reincarnation, or in heaven, or in Jesus or any other figure. What I mean is connection with one’s internal wisdom. Deep within, everyone has a spark of divinity (I believe) that informs them of what healthy living is like, what healthy relationship is like, what healthy human structures feel like. Hence, this internal voice can be a great source of inspiration, strength and hope. Different people find it in different ways, some people find it in gardening, some find it in meditation and prayer. There is no one right way to connect with Spirit, and anyone who says there is only right way is literally selling something. That’s why I am uncomfortable with religion. I think religious practice can be good if it connects a person to their inner source, but religion itself is a product of the state, and was created for control of people, which is the opposite of true inner spiritual connection.
Back to the article, the part where he mentions “the promise offered by capitalism—that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination.” He hits it on the nose, huh? And I think that’s something we all feel, at a soul level, that the current American way of life is “collective subordination.” I personally feel it at a soul level anyway. Because that’s how I connect to things. I like articles like this, academic-like articles that lay out great facts and ideas. I evaluate them with the logical side of my brain but I also always check them with my internal sense of alignment, because that’s where my center is, in my sense of intuition and spiritual connection.
Thing is, not everyone connects with change in the same way. One of the things that will advance change is if we take into account different personality styles and means of learning. Part of the current status quo is reductionism, where ideas are broken into small pieces and studied seperately. This happens culturally, too, with career specialization, our current caste system, and even and especially racism. People tend isolate themselves from others that are not like them. Scientists hang out with scientists and artists hang out with artists. We feel discomfort with confronting different styles of people, however, I think this is another flaw of the broken system of human relations. I think if we connect, especially across different ways of knowing, we will find that we have more in common than we knew, and we have tools to share with each other. The more we connect with each other, the more we bypass the corrupt and broken system, the more we triumph and find reasons for hope and proof of change.
Have I swung entirely off-topic? I know I’m not discussing the economics he discussed in his article, but I am talking about human systems of power and relatedness, and how the current American system is very broken. Economics, in my opinion, are possibly the hugest factor of the brokenness, but not the only factor or symptom. Also, I’m talking about stories, stories of how culture works. Power players in this game win by divisiveness and the cultivation of fear and confusion. If we join together with other people who see the system as broken, even if their ways of experiencing the world are different, we gain tools and power that we wouldn’t have otherwise. Change needs to happen on many different levels in many different venues, and if the change-makers connect with each other and learn from each other, we all win.