On Wealth and Money,
the Nation and the World
*
First Part:
Wealth, The Law of Markets, National Interest
*
* * *
*
Throughout all the lines of all the pages of this chapter,
keep in mind that the purpose of this chapter is
to recalibrate and rebalance the monetary-economic-financial system
so that there is no longer a need to sell at all costs,
even what’s harmful and useless,
which results in the destruction of everything
but, on the contrary,
to preserve and promote universal well-being and prosperity.
*
* * *
*
By nature and by definition, forever and ever,
death is unquantifiable.
*
On pricelessness
Death cannot be quantified.
Likewise,
Life is priceless.
If you know that,
then you know almost everything about economics.
You know what there is to know,
at least to know where to go, and to work in the right direction.
Since normal, contemporary capitalist economic ‘science’ is based on figures,
then recognizing figures for what they are
is crucial and decisive.
Insignificant compared to the miracle, insignificant compared to infinity,
figures are by definition inadequate to assess either death or life.
The miracle of life is necessarily infinite.
Infinite.
The rest is just derivatives, consequences.
It is impossible to treat the Earth and humanity like slaves
subject body and soul
to systemic and systematic greed and selfishness
without cataclysmic consequences
of incalculable and nightmarish severity
for the whole world.
All the more so today
as the world is interconnected and the system globalized.
It’s the same for everyone.
Since everyone is affected all over the world,
humanity must take back the reins of its destiny
against the diktat of all-powerful, heartless, soulless money.
No one will save Humankind but yourself.
No one will save Humankind but itself.
*
Symptoms and recovery
To analyze our problems is a solution
in the sense that it allows us to trace them back to their source.
Nevertheless,
the same way you do when you’re in the dark,
it’s not only by focusing on the shadows that you find light.
To get out of the dark,
we have to find the light.
Thus,
the analysis of the problem is not so much relevant and effective
as is the discovery of its cure.
It is in discovering that wisdom is the only alternative to madness,
that balance is the only answer to imbalance,
that good is the only cure for evil
that we find the path to recovery.
I can very well analyze in length and breadth the reasons
why I am addicted to tobacco, alcohol, shopping or gambling
and form statistics and statements on the effects these things
have on my health, my life and my bank account.
It is obvious, however,
that if I want to recover from my addictions,
there’s only one solution.
Abstinence or at least moderation to finally become aware,
by moving from one state to another,
of all the benefits we’ve been deprived of all these years.
We can only get out of the way of problems
that constrain us, limit us and make us suffer
when we discover that the alternative to who we are
is, in essence, of a totally different nature,
different from the blinding and terrible,
uncontrollable and dynamic situation,
which we find ourselves in.
In general, economists, experts, the rich and powerful
never seem to stop analyzing
increasingly complex, obscure and problematic situations
without ever being able, so it seems, to get back to their source,
nor discover the path that could set us free
from the biggest flaws in our economic system.
As staunch defenders of the status quo,
they seem to be focusing on the problem,
but not the solutions, not the real cure.
Thus,
the reasoning that precedes and that will follow
will not make a detailed analysis of the situation
in which we find ourselves,
which, by the way, is most probably quite impossible to achieve.
On the other hand,
they will give you both an overview of the situation
and a deep reading of the very core of the system.
They will try to answer some decisive and essential questions,
and to portray, with strength and humility, the world that we are missing,
the wonderful world that has been given to us by the heavens to inhabit
and which we continue
– reluctantly and denyingly but with unrelenting persistence –
to destroy
without ever having been able to fulfill ourselves in it,
without ever having been genuinely able to live in it.
*
* * *
*
Wealth
*
Hope
Today,
thanks to advances in knowledge, science and technology,
humankind has never produced so much wealth.
Never before in history have we been able to exploit and benefit
from the resources of our planet on such a scale.
It’s scientifically proven, according to the FAO*,
the Earth could feed between 9 and 12 billion people**
and according to the United Nations,
some $267 billion a year would be enough
to eradicate poverty from the entire planet***.
*Food and Agriculture Organization
** If, of course, the recommended agro-ecological measures were implemented.
www.fao.org › templates › wsfs › docs › Issues_papers › Issues_papers_FR
Destruction massive, Géopolitique de la faim
Jean Ziegler, Editions Seuil, 2011
only available in French.
*** http://www.fao.org/news/story/fr/item/298189/icode/
Never have we ever been able as a species
to satisfy all our basic needs.
Please, let’s not nitpick at the figures,
it’s the orders of magnitude that matter.
Indeed,
what is 267 billion at the level of the whole of humanity,
all the more so when we know that the rich countries can pump out
thousands of billions to save the economy?
Even though there are nearly 8 billion human beings on this planet,
we could all live on Earth with dignity and freedom, decently, truly.
Once our basic needs are met,
then we can satisfy our higher aspirations.
From this point on,
the universal benefits of the development of the being and the citizen
are self-evident.
Realize! Let’s realize!
The Earth’s food resources would be sufficient
to feed up to 12 billion human beings if tapped justly and wisely.*
* Destruction Massive,
Jean Ziegler, Ed. Seuils, Oct. 2011
Its food resources are therefore largely sufficient
to feed every human being on the planet today.
And even though they’re getting smaller every year,
we still have, and for a long time to come,
the earth’s resources to take care of all humanity.
And even though we’re getting more and more numerous every day,
even though it is in the interest
of the financial-political-media-corporatist establishment
to give us so many reasons to think otherwise,
to frighten us, divide us and control us,
even though we sometimes have so many reasons to believe them,
our technological power, our historical advances,
our chances of survival grow
as our knowledge and understanding grow.
A universal system of free enterprise and commercial cooperation
that is truly humanist, measured and well thought out,
wisely administered and strictly regulated throughout the world,
which would take local specificities into account,
is not only possible,
it is at this stage desirable and even indispensable.
Humanity’s challenges are certainly titanic,
but our powers are immense.
Would it be possible that one day humankind
could harness its full potential?
Even if it is clear that scientific and technological progress
will not be enough to enable us to find solutions
to our gigantic problems, to our madness, to our generalized dementia,
salvation is within our reach,
salvation is possible.
We are all free to choose what we all fundamentally need:
self-fulfillment and satisfaction, reciprocity and mutual respect,
serenity and peace, dignity,
satisfaction and intelligence, sharing and understanding…
or the reverse.
Our powers and knowledge are so far-reaching in their consequences
that humanity will never be able to save itself without wisdom.
Whether we like it or not,
no reality is stationary:
Either the systemic situation gets better
or worse and worse and worse
for an ever-increasing and increasingly dramatic number of people.
There are no half measures.
Today,
all members of society are, without exception, in one way or another,
affected by a system that is fundamentally flawed
because based on the tyranny of money.
A tyranny where, as in all tyrannies,
the greatest slaves are the slavers themselves
who, by perpetuating blind and alienating domination,
in the worst sense
– in the “socio-pyschiatric”, socio-psychopathological sense –
of the term,
are enslaving society as a whole.
To one degree or another, without exception,
we are all affected by the dynamics
of the historic economic, sociological, political, philosophical
and psychological systemic ruthless, global,
cold and soulless juggernaut.
Can anyone quantify
the victims of this international state of affairs?
Can anyone quantify
the suffering and misfortune of human beings and humanity?
If we learned, from the most modest to the most decision-making levels,
to draw inspiration from the universal and earthly,
humanistic and humanist peacemaking wisdom,
we could finally realize that the earth offers us immense riches,
to the point where the burden of misery and necessity
could at last be lightened
and cease to weigh so heavily on our shoulders
and on the shoulders of humanity
to the point where we could stop pushing ourselves
into uneasiness, resentment, hatred, conflict, war and tragedy.
Is that not wonderful news?
It would just be enough for us as a species to convince ourselves
that unity, wisdom, benevolence, solidarity and knowledge
are far more productive and a far more powerful source of happiness
than division, suspicion, enmity, domination, exploitation,
conflict, malice, ignorance and greed.
That’s all it takes.
The rest will follow.
As soon as we learn to adopt such an attitude on a systemic level,
our problems will all find a solution.
Let us learn to work together
and gradually all our systemic problems will disappear.
It is not so much that they will never reappear or resurface
but we will have found ways to defuse them, to ‘exorcise’ them.
Universal harmonization alone
will transcend, transfigure the world.
It is the only solution.
It is the only one,
but it is nonetheless highly achievable and possible
because it bears within itself the fruits
that will nourish its fundamentally new dynamics,
– revolutionary in this respect –
rooted in a vision that is very modestly human,
yet great, simple, accessible, universal, democratic
and irremediably necessary.
It is obvious
that since we are all interconnected in this now globalized world,
if the whole Earth is in harmony,
then I will have every chance to be in harmony with myself,
then we will all have every chance to be in harmony with ourselves,
in harmony with our children and the generations to come.
It’s obvious that all over the world,
the justice with which we act is not only profitable for us here and now,
but also always and everywhere, forever and ever.
*
To that end,
one condition is absolute:
To take back the power to create money.
*
What’s the matter?
It is noteworthy and remarkable
that profitable companies producing quality products or services,
which therefore ensure their long-term sustainability,
too often close up shop
on the pretext that they are not sufficiently productive and profitable,
mainly because their shareholders want more and more
and thus go where labor is ruthlessly exploited at will, paid like slaves,
and where there is no respect for human health, life and the environment.
In other words,
it turns out that on a given territory, in Europe or elsewhere in the world,
we have the means of production, infrastructure and logistics,
the know-how and highly competent human ‘resources’
to manufacture and produce high quality products or services,
products or services that sell because people need them,
that sell so well that the company that produces them makes a profit.
It turns out that we have everything we need
to produce quality products or services
that are not only necessary for the population that consumes them,
but also to support employees and employers.
It turns out that we have everything we need
to run a healthy and ‘normal’ economy,
but that the only thing missing
is the most artificial, symbolic and arbitrary thing that can be,
the easiest thing to create and produce
whether on scraps of paper, or just by typing on a computer keyboard:
Money!
Think about it,
this irrefutable and undeniable reality has far-reaching consequences
which are fundamentally and deeply revolutionary.
Throughout the pages that follow, we will say it again and again.
We will digress sometimes,
but here is the foundation,
solidly anchored in the ‘hardest’ and most concrete bedrock of realities
for the reflections and observations that will follow.
Therefore,
whenever almost unknowingly and automatically,
your partisan and subjective reflexes
force you to call us an unrealistic utopian,
bear this in mind:
We have more than everything we need
to run a healthy and ‘normal’ economy,
yet the only thing missing
is the easiest thing to create and produce
whether on scraps of paper,
or just by typing digits on a keyboard:
Money.
*
Wealth creation:
Jobs, duties and missions.
To bring about this new world we so badly need,
to build tomorrow’s world,
to get through the energy and ecological transition,
to prepare for the new climate and new conditions,
our tasks are immense and numerous.
And yet,
we are constantly complaining about not creating enough jobs??
On the contrary,
there is a great, great deal of work.
It is obvious:
we have even more than enough work.
In order to finance it,
we need to be able to steer investments in the right direction.
With a view to harmonizing the world,
we, all the peoples, all the nations of the world,
have a lot of work to do.
Useful and remunerative,
beneficial to everyone
as they are essential to the individual and collective survival of humanity,
we have a lot of jobs and missions to carry out.
If it is a question today of survival or self-destruction,
then life has a higher and inescapably essential value.
In this sense,
any action or work, any action or non-action or non-work*
that promotes life over death, respect over intolerance, peace over violence,
harmony and unity over conflict and division,
is a source of wealth.
All the more intrinsically legitimate, profitable and sacred wealth
as it is undeniably, irrevocably and irrefutably vital.
* Indeed, if an organization,
whether legal or not, chooses to pollute an ecosystem
at the risk of endangering the people who live there,
or to pay a mercenary in order to get rid of an opponent,
is it fair that it should continue to operate?
In this regard,
is it not sometimes better to refrain from acting
rather than continuing to destroy?
Thus,
in tomorrow’s world,
everyone who does not work for the destruction of the nation and the living
has a place, a raison d’être,
a modest and measured and at the same time universal and transcendent recognition and legitimacy
within his or her community.
For we have work for all.
Not only can our missions, however modest they may be,
record us in the march of history and give us a place in the World,
but they can, moreover, transform us all as human beings and as humanity.
Rome was not built in a day.
Building a new world ‘in balance’, in harmony
will not be done in one day,
but it can be done very quickly.
Above all,
we must understand that if life has and can have an absolute value,
money (and the wealth associated with it) has a relative value.
The value of money
is therefore a complex concept to grasp and understand,
multi-faceted and therefore subject to interpretation.
A product of our collective and simultaneous,
conscious and unconscious perception,
it remains and will remain,
until the end of time, a relative and arbitrary value
which can by no means be absolute or supreme.
Thus,
the value of money in no way reflects
either the value of Humanity, life, the Earth,
or all the spatio-temporal, spiritual and material, personal and collective,
entangled and interconnected dynamic dimensions of a society.
If, as much as anything else on Earth, money has a relative value,
then so does the economic thing.
Let the truths set forth here,
as well as those encrypted within yourselves,
of humanistic, universal and solidary wisdom,
convince and even inspire you.
How much do we estimate the cost of humankind’s survival to be?
Thus,
any action or non-action,
any investment or non-investment, any work or non-work
that has the effect of sustaining life and harmony
between men, women, children and all species,
is useful and has an irrevocable fundamental intrinsic value
which we must urgently invest in.
Similarly,
whether unconsciously or deliberately,
we can no longer continue to denigrate, neglect or even destroy
the world’s true wealth
without sooner or later having to pay the price.
*
The price of greed
To save the Earth and Humans is priceless.
If life is priceless,
then what value do you think
these works, these missions, these enterprises
designed to save it
have?
On the contrary,
our system pushes us
to give an unreasonable and irrational, stupid and counterproductive value
to sectors of activity that are harmful to the sustainability of the species.
Under the pretext that they provide employment
and are supposedly indispensable to our wealth and well-being,
we are sacrificing our future to them.
In a world dominated by greed and ultra-competitiveness,
markets are afraid of losing what they invest.
Would it not be wiser, more efficient and constructive
to choose to unite our forces, our knowledge, our intelligence,
our technologies, our wealth, our consciences
to direct them towards life and harmony?
Right now,
we are twice losers,
losers to a point that we can neither measure, calculate nor imagine.
Even though everything got so crazy and neurotically complicated
that it’s becoming increasingly difficult
to distinguish illusion and falsehood from reality and truth,
it is so far clear that not only the real and financial costs
– financial because real, real because financial, of our mistakes –
are growing and exponentially accelerating,
here and now, like in a freefall,
ever madder, faster and ultimately destructive…
…but in addition,
our loss of income is becoming more and more unimaginably unquantifiable.
If indeed,
it is relatively easy to calculate what is and is measurable,
it is impossible to calculate what is not.
What is not
is therefore, at least potentially,
immeasurable.
That which no one or nothing can put a price tag on
tends naturally towards the absolute and the infinite.
This natural trend,
once it could be taken into account,
is the only one capable of making us perceive the positive dynamics
which, in the absence of infinite growth,
could give us hope for immeasurable, lasting progress,
as long as we use the resources at our disposal
with wisdom and in balance with our natural environments.
We can choose to continue to succumb
to the illusion that they are selling us
in exchange for the ultra-precarious pseudo comfort of capitalist materialism,
the every man for himself ideology
and the ultra-generalized ultra-competition
that everywhere in the world spreads insecurity and dependence,
fear, distrust, poverty, conflict and suffering.
We can forever continue to succumb
to all unnecessary and consumerist needs,
all superfluous, superficial, ephemeral, futile and fragile addictions.
We can desperately continue to sell them to each other,
or we can choose to do a good job and live
free, dignified, satisfied and prosperous lives.
We can choose to continue to believe that greed
is not a source of ignorance, violence and suffering.
We can choose to continue
to believe that greed and despair are not two sides of the same coin.
We can choose to continue
to believe that injustice and inequality can,
now or in the uncertain future, be profitable and beneficial.
We can choose to continue
to believe that setting greed for money and for power
as supreme values and motivations par excellence
at the heart of the global system
has never had and will never have any devastating consequences
on a large scale.
We can choose to continue
to believe that tyranny and slavery
are not two sides of the same coin.
We can choose to continue
to believe that the management of the monetary question
by inherently greedy banking institutions
is a good solution for now and for our children.
Or we can choose to create hope.
I am begging you,
before it is too late,
we can choose to open our eyes to the best of possibilities
and see.
*
The price of solidarity
Today,
with regard to the inequalities, wars and injustices raging around the world,
we are slipping into inhumanity,
we are sinking and we seem to resign ourselves to it.
This is all too true.
In reality,
we are so far from moving towards universal harmony
that it just seems impossible,
so much so that all those who fight for a better world
are described as unrealistic utopians.
And yet,
when a people or a community reaches a certain level of fulfilment and well-being,
the scourges of necessity, urgency and precariousness
inevitably fade away.
The urgency for growth to proceed at full speed
is bound to diminish.
The urgency for technology and financial innovations
that are necessarily costly
to replace the free services of nature and generosity
necessarily diminishes.
The urgency to create wealth at all costs
and regardless of its consequences
weakens.
The urgency of getting new stuff loosens.
The urgency to increase one’s wealth and assets diminishes.
We say it over and over again,
it is because a human being alone is so weak and vulnerable
that we founded the tribe, then society, nations, and civilizations.
Human beings are by nature social beings.
Without our fellow human beings,
we are nothing.
If all our fellow citizens were united,
then what could we still be afraid of?
Social protection systems are a very good example of this.
At least in some countries, when you get sick,
the community is, at a minimum, there to take care of you.
Moreover,
if a child, a genius, a future Mozart or Einstein,
a Pasteur or Al-Razi, a Rousseau or Confucius falls ill,
if society does not care,
then so much the worse for progress and benefits,
so much the worse for the present and future human community….
Rich or poor,
without your fellow human beings,
you die in the gutter,
and no one turns around even to glimpse the tragedy of your life.
Few tears are shed over your plight and your memory,
especially so since if we were to continue
on this evil path of the curse of history,
then there might soon be, no doubt, no human being left to carry,
through the ages, any memory whatsoever.
Sadly,
we have fallen into the spiral of hell:
Because social solidarity systems are collapsing,
because the possibility for a human being to be left with almost nothing overnight,
without even a roof over his or her head, a plot of land or any food to eat,
because the deterioration of societies is becoming systemic,
and more importantly, global,
humankind is becoming increasingly greedy and in competition with itself
and the human condition is becoming precarious and scary for all of us.
I do not know how to put it more clearly,
it is so obvious.
Our being afraid of the chronic instability of this system
is the reason why we wish to hoard more and more.
Rich to the billions, or poor to cry your eyes out,
it’s true for you, it’s true for me, it’s true for humanity.
Thus,
between the rights and duties
of every citizen, of every company and organization,
there is a threshold of general redistribution
from which society must be able to deal with individual emergencies,
or ‘life accidents’ as they say.
The relationship between the individual and society
can therefore find a balance in the reciprocal relationship
of self to all and of all to self,
and benefit everyone, without exception.
This is all the more true
because when we know that we are covered in case of a setback,
then we can take risks and initiatives
and thus move society forward.
In this way,
the nation can reactivate a positive dynamic
of mutually supportive reciprocity
from nation to citizen and from citizen to nation,
which gets increasingly solid and fertile as it grows and develops.
*
The price of overconsumption
In view of the rapidly deteriorating condition
of all life forms everywhere on Earth,
there is a ceiling to the excesses
not only of production but also of consumption
which must be able to allow human beings to live decently
while at the same time preserving their environment.
This may seem paradoxical to some,
but it’s no less true that the value of money is best assessed
as fewer needs are required,
or, to put it another way,
our relationship to money gets a lot healthier
when we have fewer needs.
Indeed,
as soon as our needs or desires are excessive,
then our need for money becomes compulsive
and the perception of the value of money becomes exponential.
Such a drift can lead many to over-indebtedness
or even to crime or destruction.
At the collective level,
this drift engenders corruption, crime
and destruction of societies, nations,
climate, land, oceans and living beings, creatures and systems.
Conversely,
as soon as our expenses are balanced with our income
and our both physical and spiritual basic needs are sufficiently satisfied,
then we can no longer consider ourselves poor
because we are no longer in need, no longer struggling to survive.
It therefore seems logical
that the value of money should be assessed proportionately
to the urgency of the need we have for it.
It therefore seems logical
that the more financial, artificial or natural resources
are shared by a large number of people,
the richer a nation is.
Only then can the gaps between extreme wealth and extreme poverty
be narrowed.
This is the measure of the effectiveness of money in society.
If, on the other hand,
a super-minority of ultra-rich people possesses everything
and the vast majority gets nothing or almost nothing,
what real efficiency can we be talking about?
It is the rich who are rich,
the nation lies in poverty.
If to sustain this economic system we have to destroy the planet,
then what real efficiency can we be talking about?
Everything is relative and subjective,
and wealth is even more so.
And money is even more so,
because, as we have said and as we shall prove,
money is one of the most arbitrary and symbolic,
insubstantial and abstract things that exist.
Indeed,
what does it matter
if the number of zeros in the credit box of my bank statement decreases,
if prices go down and the wealth of all tends to converge,
especially in an environment where not only primary needs are met
but also where there is no longer any need to exploit my fellow humans
in order to overcome my fear of death and feel at peace and safe?
Are we seriously hoping to free ourselves
from the fear of running out of money
by acquiring as much as possible,
when in doing so we are becoming increasingly dependent on it
and the struggle to secure it is getting tougher and tougher?
Conversely,
can we consider that the best way to free ourselves from money
is to be less dependent on it?
Can we consider
that the fair value of money is best appreciated the less we need it,
or the more we become addicted to or dependent on it?
Does the answer to this question
lie in a mathematical formula or in an economic philosophy?
What is certain is that in order to get out
of the implacable and extremely, profoundly inhuman logic of slavery,
to free ourselves from our total submission to money,
and to build a society that is both economically and financially,
but also ecologically and socially balanced,
in order for no one to feel the need to always possess more and more money
as if caught in an infinite loop of greed,
everyone must have a minimum of it.
In order for the members of a society
to improve their relationship with money,
not only must everyone have enough to live decently,
but also, because we will be less afraid of running out of it,
we won’t need it as much anymore.
Furthermore,
we will have fewer needs
because we won’t need to create so many new needs anymore.
For indeed,
profit-maximization
is the very reason why our society is constantly creating new desires.
There is no other solution:
The only cure for greed and destructive inequality
not only of all the economies of the world,
but also of the planet, of humans and living things,
is the search for the most universal balance that can be found
between real needs and the satisfaction of those needs.
In other words,
the cure for the poison of systemic greed
is sobriety, generosity and solidarity.
This is true from a moral and a humanist point of view.
This is true from an economic and ecological point of view.
This is true from a political and social point of view.
No harmony is possible without balance and solidarity.
Therefore,
if money is master of the world
and if we want to free ourselves from the tyranny of crazy money,
then we need to democratize money.
This is all the more true and relevant
when in a context of selfish and greedy ultra-competitiveness,
the current system’s unquenchable desire for yield and profit
way too often offers forced labour
as the only alternative to grinding poverty.
I hope that our children, your children,
that no more children are born into slavery,
that no more babies are born into the world with a clear destiny:
A life of forced labor and/or misery
just because a dehumanized minority can’t put a stop
to its collective pride, narcissism and greed.
Thus,
solidarity is the price to be paid
for the harmony and survival of society and humanity.
Isn’t that wonderful news?
*
On the value of money and the purpose of commercial exchange
Without prejudice to the respect I may have for it,
an object for which I feel only a very weak desire or need has,
in the material, monetary, economic sense of the term,
no or very little value in my eyes.
If measuring the value of things
is an undeniable sign of intelligence, greatness and dignity,
it is certain that greed sees only through the prism of money
and financial value and gain.
Thus,
greed cannot and will never allow us to measure
the real, intrinsic value of things,
because it only sees the value of money.
Indeed,
he or she who is moved by pride, greed and cupidity
will seek to acquire even that
which he or she feels no real or genuine desire or need for.
Greed in this sense is a scourge.
Will we all be contaminated one day?
Will we all ever become conceited and greedy and covetous?
Less for better is not a slogan,
it is a logical and simple consequence of all ecological and economic crises.
It is simple wisdom.
At the global, systemic level,
it has become a necessity.
To combat global warming,
not only is it all that is possible,
but it’s also all we need
to create a healthier, simpler and more humane economy,
to build a healthier, simpler and more serene world.
In a schizophrenic system
that now only knows how to produce extreme wealth for a dominant elite
and extreme poverty for the overwhelmingly hyper-exploited majority,
hyper greed and hyper precariousness
are undeniably, inexorably and irreversibly
two sides of the same coin.
Thus, and conversely,
a society has less need to be hyper-productivist and hyper-competitive
as it becomes less hyper-inegalitarian.
Is it indeed so useful
to take over all the wealth, all the resources of the earth
when we no longer feel the need to own fifteen cars,
one of which made of solid gold,
or several huge properties that most of the time remain unoccupied?
Is it indeed so useful
to work so hard to produce items that are either not really useful to us
or that we already possess or will never really possess,
that we will never really be able to enjoy,
and that we could easily do without
if indeed humanity could finally invest in its capacity
to be happy, and fulfilled, wise and just and in harmony,
rather than in its unequal, conflicting, tyrannical and destructive greed?
A product is not made to be sold,
but to be used for a useful purpose.
Why would it not be desirable and possible
to have a little less need to sell and own
in order to sell and own better,
to produce less in order to produce better,
to work less in order to work better,
without stopping progress
and the improvement of well-being for the majority?
Today,
because the economic, financial and monetary system is so designed,
a company’s absolute necessity to sell
dictates the need and therefore the purchase.
Whereas
from the dawn of time until the advent of this financial capitalist system,
it was the opposite that presided over the economy of humanity:
Everyone’s necessity dictated production and therefore sales.
In other words, in the past,
innovation was about what was essential,
not about what was superfluous, excessive or useless.
Today, it’s the opposite:
we innovate in order to innovate, whatever the cost,
even if it means creating fake and stupid needs,
encouraging all excesses, selfishness, vaingloriousness,
extreme and insane greed.
The easiest need to create
is fear and the desire for security.
Create a problem to invent the cure, and make some money on it,
illness for pharmacy and health, war, terrorism, violence for security,
flexibility and precariousness for automobiles and mobility,
the fear of the future and death for insurance purposes,
the relocation of companies for import-export and oil companies,
etc, etc, etc…
absolute dependence and need to sell, sell, sell,
anything and everything, by and for anyone, anywhere, anyhow
and we don’t care because that is indeed the paradigm of our society.
And yet,
there is more wealth or work
than monetarized wealth or paid work.
A word of advice, the climate, bees,
perform miracles that we have no way of measuring at their true value.
At work, at home,
to help others, to help oneself,
wherever it may be,
there are always things that we do that we’re not paid for,
in any case, for which we do not engage in monetary or financial bargaining.
Nature
of both the Earth, the Living on the one hand
and of humankind on the other,
is a source of unquantifiable, immeasurable and priceless natural wealth
which naturally tend towards infinity.
If we want to be serious and take stock of the state of humankind,
in order to save it, we have to be aware of it.
It is therefore a question of taking into account
the intrinsic quality of what cannot be measured.
It is therefore a question of knowing
how to take into account the non-moneyable value of wealth.
It is only a question of whether we prefer
an excessive and uncontrolled, unbalanced,
absurd and self-destructive system
where everything is done to chain us to money
through envy, frustration, over-indebtedness and want,
where everything is done to cut us off
from all possible sources of from all possible sources of freeness* and generosity…
*Freeness = the concept of being free of charge
It is only a question of whether we prefer
to create a world where everything has a price and everything is precarious,
where the level of stress and suffering is very high…
Or if we prefer
a coherent and healthy, wise and moderate system,
conducive to the balance of each and every one of us,
where our relationship to wealth and money, to ourselves and each other
have become healthier.
Out of the great global economic disorder,
made up of myriads of antagonistic interests,
we will not be able to give birth to a new model of society,
we will never be able to a new economic, social and political system
without restoring value to that which has no monetary or financial value.
*
Hope
We need hope in order not to die.
That is true for all of us.
That is true for humankind itself.
How to put a price on hope?
How to put a price on wisdom? Love? Generosity?
We need to believe in life, in the future,
in the non-financialisation of its intrinsically invaluable worth
to live on and not give up.
At the level of humanity the challenge is set.
Save life, save the Earth, save ourselves.
If the universal is infinite and humanity is universal,
is there any limit to humanity’s worth?
*
Material wealth and spiritual wealth
The wealth of a society or a person
is measured by what they own and can acquire.
So the reverse is also true:
Wealth deficiency is measured
by what a society or a person wants or needs, superficially or not,
but cannot acquire.
Indeed,
whether in monetary, material or spiritual terms,
the greater the needs are in relation to the resources capable of satisfying them,
the poorer a society or an individual is.
Indeed,
I may have billions in my bank account,
but if what I want remains inaccessible to me,
I am poor.
This is all the more true
since every human being aspires to the absolute and the transcendent,
to fullness and to surpassing oneself.
Since the human being is a sensitive mind,
then this state of being superior to oneself
is accessible only through the heart and mind.
No material possession will ever be able to fill that
which by nature is immaterial.
This is why we always want more and more.
By definition,
fullness is inaccessible through having.
Do you understand that?
Creating artificial needs ad infinitum
amounts to creating poverty where it doesn’t exist,
in people’s hearts, in your own heart…
Since humans are both body and mind,
overlooking spiritual nourishment
by seeking to fill it with only physical and materialistic food
is inevitably an illusion,
all the more so as spiritual wealth can in and of itself touch the infinite,
while by definition material wealth, which is naturally limited, cannot.
Do you understand the psychological, metaphysical,
economic and ecological importance
of what I’m trying to say?
Creating artificial needs in aeternum
is like creating poverty where it does not exist,
in the hearts of people, in your own heart…
Thus,
seeking to fill this void
by the acquisition and accumulation
of monetary, financial or physical wealth
necessarily creates existentialist and psychic, mental depression.
In other words,
seeking to replace being with having
is a neurotic illusion that leads us to the greatest excesses
and therefore to the greatest individual or collective disasters
of which the environmental crises are the ultimate consequence.
Denying our inter-dimensional and inter-relational
mental, emotional and spiritual realities
thus amounts to denying ourselves…
… denying not only that which is most intimate,
but also and above all, in an absolute and irrevocable manner,
that which is most solid, real, tangible, inalienable and infinite:
our heart, our mind, our spirit, our consciousness, our soul.
Indeed,
denying ourselves, our innermost being
undeniably and inevitably equates denying our own identity,
our own ability to touch the absolute
and therefore the infinite
and even the divine.
Thus,
however rich we may be,
in economic, monetary, financial, or capitalistic terms,
since no possession will be able to fill the spiritual and emotional void
that the imbalance of ‘being and having’ generates within us,
not only our inherently and fundamentally materialistic greed
makes us poor and miserable,
but on top of that, by denying this imbalance, this reality,
we persist in our mistake and aggravate all the problems that ensue.
It is for this reason that never, ever, will the 1%,
the elite, the oligarchy, the mega-rich of the planet,
let us call them what we will,
have enough.
Because they seek to fill what by definition cannot be filled
and because they are in the narcissistic neurotic materialistic illusion,
there is, and never will be, an end or a bottom to predatory greed.
According to the United Nations,
it would only take $267 billion a year* for a few years
for all humanity to have access to all basic social services…
* http://www.fao.org/news/story/fr/item/298189/icode/
Implementing the 20/20 Initiative.
Achieving universal access to basic social services, 1998,
A joint publication of
UNDP, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF, WHO and the World Bank
Today we spend $400 billion worldwide on advertising,
just to increase our consumerist and materialistic desires.
Spending $400 billion today on advertising in the world
is financing our compulsion to buy, to spend our money, to consume.
We are financing our needs, our dependencies, our addictions.
We are financing our sense of poverty,
we are financing our own frustration.
Global military spending in 2010
is estimated at $1.63 trillion ($1630 billion)
just to protect what we have, at least just to protect what they have,
and in no way to promote truly humane or humanistic values.
Anyone who would claim the opposite would be naïve and ill-informed.
Imagine the money spent on the wrong thing for the wrong thing.
Wars,
systemically and historically justified
or outright unnecessary polluting industries,
legal fees and court costs to bend the law to the will of profit and greed,
the increasing need for goods transport due to relocation and social dumping,
tax evasion, lobbying, corruption…
In 2013,
tax evasion in Europe
is estimated by the European Commission itself at
2,000 billion euros !*
Therefore,
it would seem wise not only to transform GDP,
but also to ensure that the measure given to money and prices
corresponds as humanely as possible
to the value of what they represent,
i.e. that it truly reflects the relationship between
1. identified basic material and immaterial needs
(economic, pragmatic, industrial, logistical, social, educational,
metaphysical, spiritual, emotional, physical, philosophical)
2. available resources.
I repeat:
From the human point of view,
the wealth of a person or a group of people
is measured by the relationship between needs and desires on the one hand
and the ability or probability of the person or group
to satisfy them on the other.
*
Utopian?
If you read these lines and with a certain amount of disdain,
without even thinking about it deeply, seriously and sincerely,
if you say to yourself, when you close the window, the book or the file,
never to come back to it again,
that this is an unrealistic and unattainable utopia,
we already know for a fact
that when the whole world comes crashing down,
in the great Apocalypse of the extinction of humankind,
no matter what form it takes,
you will remember the only hope we had left,
whose voice we make our own.
Unless you’re on the side of the executioners and the unrighteous,
we already know that it is with pain and bitterness
that you will regret
not having put your faith in it.
*
The wealth of the Earth.
On renewability and non-renewability.
The Earth and the future carry all the possibilities,
the best as well as the worst.
Will it be when we have plundered everything,
polluted, massacred, ransacked, contaminated,
when we have lost everything
that we will become aware that the riches of the Earth’s biosphere,
its laws and its ecosystems,
all of its retroactive, interdependent and exponential
ultra-complex micro and macro entities
could not by nature be quantified or measured by money?
What we create out of greed,
our greed itself will make us pay the price.
In addition to climatic, ecological and health disasters,
there are financial, economic, monetary, ‘terrorist’,
warlike and military cataclysms
that remind us, have reminded us,
and irretrievably will continue to remind us
of reality.
Some economists have tried to put a price tag on the benefits
nature provides free of charge.
Alas,
and fortunately at the same time,
measuring the Earth’s priceless riches
is by definition an illusion doomed to imprecision
not only because our needs and the value of money are constantly changing,
but also because time and its fertility are by nature random.
Indeed,
if the Earth and Time can take it all away from us,
especially if we continue to behave the way we do,
the question is simply:
When?
The good news is,
when we make the right decisions and the right direction,
the value of the earth’s resources increases exponentially
when we spread it out over time,
when we project our eyes as far into the future as possible.
Indeed,
if we consider that every moment that keeps us alive
is a moment that saves us from death,
then that moment is unquantifiable.
Its intrinsic value is thus infinite.
The longer the earth can sustain us,
the more priceless the price of the earth’s benefits will be.
Thus,
investing in the long-term and in the protection of nature
is not a waste of monetary resources.
Quite the opposite.
Not to invest in the protection of Nature and Life is to this day
a condemnation in the very short term,
a condemnation of Humanity to certain misery and death.
The Earth and the future
are therefore as priceless as they are unpredictable.
None of the possible scenarios can be measured or quantified,
neither the best nor the worst.
It’s not possible.
In order to quantify life,
one would have to be able to quantify death.
How do you quantify death?
How much is it worth?
If indeed death is the negation of life,
then life has an infinite value.
There’s no doubt about that.
Still,
we strive to quantify everything,
to translate everything into financial terms,
but faced up with the possibility of a future so long
that it appears to have no end,
in the face of the fact that time itself could allow humankind
to live as long as perhaps the universe will last,
to quantify our survival, the survival of our own species
seems to be a very derisory exercise.
It goes without saying.
Indeed,
imagine what only 10,000 years of additional knowledge and understanding
will allow us to do, imagine and be!
Perhaps one day
we may even be able to extricate ourselves from this solar system,
however miraculous, fertile and beneficial it may be,
or even our galaxy…
All our measurements and reference points are arbitrary and relative values,
constantly changing over time,
therefore imperfect and imprecise,
out of all proportion to the destiny of humanity.
If having more material and financial wealth
is something that can be measured
compared to what you don’t have but which exists,
how do we measure what we are losing and yet is vital to us
without even seeing or acknowledging it?
Once again:
To quantify life,
one would have to be able to quantify death.
How much do you think death is worth?
Mere respect for the earth, life, the future,
love, consciousness, wisdom and humanity
is enough for their real value to be revealed to us
and for them to appear to us as they are:
Priceless.
*
Intergalactic Guests
It took 4.5 billion years for the Earth to produce humanity.
According to studies, in about 4.5 billion years,
the Earth will be reunited with the sun;
melting by fire, the sun and earth will once again merge
before finally dying as a single star,
forever united across interstellar space,
in a cloud of molecules that will likely recycle again and again
into stars, planets,
or stay alive for as long and as far as space extends and stars last.
Because no one can do without it,
because it defines the boundaries between life and death,
because for every living being the value of the Earth is absolute,
the Earth by essence has no price,
Life by essence has no price.
*
A price to nature*?
A price to immeasurability?
*« Faut-il donner un prix à la nature ? »
Jean Gadrey et Aurore Lalucq.
Éditions Les Petits Matins-Institut Veblen.
Only available in French
Some believe
that giving a price to nature, species and ecosystems
according to the services they render
would be a pragmatic way to save the planet and especially our own species.
Already financiers are putting securities on the markets
involving species or ecosystems
which it is possible to speculate on.
That goes without saying,
this stage of financialization is extremely dangerous
because, indeed, securities about nature,
kinds of abstract and arbitrary representations of the living,
are traded and insured by insurance companies.
No one is fooled
by the consequences of such a financialisation of nature and living things,
in many respects a vain, sterile, at best impracticable
and at worst destructive deception.
For indeed,
by insuring against something,
when that something disappears,
then the insured can make a big buck.*
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_Nature
Will traders and other financial institutions
bet on the extinction of a particular species or ecosystem
listed on the stock exchange?
Will dividends be paid
to that bank, organization, trader, or whatever,
who will be, who is already insured
in case of the disappearance of that species or ecosystem?
Will it be possible one day to generate a profit
by the destruction of living things?
Of course,
that is already the case.
Self-destruction has never saved anyone.
It’s a self-evident fact.
This financialization of the living leads to death.
When the financial product has more value than life itself,
what does life and the living become?
Since death is absolute,
what price can be given to the absolute?
What price to death?
What price to the living?
What price to life?
When the financial product becomes more important than life itself,
life becomes worthless.
It’s betting against yourself.
Betting against oneself is stupid and suicidal.
At the climax of the 2007-2008 crisis,
didn’t the Goldman Sachs bank make considerable profits
(didn’t it emerge as the most powerful bank in the world?)
by speculating against the rotten securities it sold to its own clients,
while insuring itself against defaults,
which in turn would have caused the bankruptcy
of huge insurance companies such as AIG,
had it not been bailed out by the American Federal Reserve?
In speculation,
speculating against is sometimes, too often alas, more profitable
than speculating in favour of what is.
Do you realize what this means?
You don’t need any trading knowledge to see it
and take the horrible and horrifying measure.
Financial products, bank securities, whatever we call them,
are arbitrary values that are exchanged between people
who have enough money to exchange them,
at the whim of the market.
The document, the contractual writing of the possession of the living
has, in their eyes, more value, is more real
than life itself.
The inevitable consequence
is unprecedented blindness and collective erring.
A piece of paper, a writing exercise, a contract between wealthy people
should be declared null and void compared to life and the living.
These financial products are violations of the living.
Just because money creation,
banking and financial rules and property rights
have been enshrined in law
does not mean that they are not unjust and guilty,
seriously guilty and that nothing should be done about it.
Being rich
does not give the right to destroy the living and the future.
As a consequence,
strict financial regulation must be imposed on everyone
in finance, banks and other pension funds, insurance companies, etc.
throughout the world.
In the era of the sixth mass extinction,
there is nothing more urgent than saving the living.
Or we shall all pay the price.
*
Endless riches.
Wealth and freeness.
What is wealth for humanity,
in the eyes of humanity as a whole?
Does it consist in the fact that a few individuals
hold a very large amount of wealth,
even if it means accumulating the superfluous,
and depriving the whole world of the essential,
to the detriment of all the others, of all beings and of everything else,
on the pretext that when the greed of a few
becomes disproportionately immense,
then the collectivity will perhaps reap a few meagre crumbs?
Or is the raison d’être, the legitimacy of wealth
to ensure that the majority has access to the most essential,
preconditional for well-being
and indispensable for personal, relational and social fulfilment,
and that a kind of universal harmony prevails?
What is the measure of human welfare?
Is there a mathematical formula?
Is there a magic formula?
Is wealth measured in terms of GDP, Gross Domestic Product?
Or in terms of HDI, Human Development Index?
Or in terms of GPI, Genuine Progress Indicator?*
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine_progress_indicator
Are there other indicators or benchmarks
that can help us better understand
where we stand and where we are going?
What is the price of knowledge and intelligence?
What is the value of human rights?
Of Democracy based on these rights?
What is the value of goodness?
What is the value of generosity? Happiness?
Of understanding, solidarity, friendship and love?
How could we measure the benefits of wisdom
when we do not even know what wisdom is,
when we do not even want to see it anymore,
when we no longer even know that wisdom integrates all
the interrelational and multidimensional dynamics,
from the smallest to the largest or most complex ones?
What benefits does a society derive
from all non-market goods and services,
all the donations, and the formidable and colossal charity work,
by definition non-profit?
How can we measure what the Earth offers us,
when the quality and quantity it gives us has a value
that is difficult to quantify and capture not only in space,
but also in time, in a future that is by nature unpredictable?
How much is the future?
What measure to the unknown?
What measure to infinity?
Asking the question of wealth
inevitably raises the question of purpose,
of the meaning of life.
It amounts to asking whether the purpose of life
is to own hundreds of millions of dollars
but to have to live in a bunker
because outside not only poverty, social conflict and chaos are rampant,
but also because ecosystems are devastated and the real economy ruined,
democracy is dying and the air is polluted,
or whether the purpose of life
is to meet our basic physical and spiritual needs
in an earthly, social, cultural, economic, political, relational, healthy,
authentic and fulfilling environment
for as many people as possible?
“The tree is known by its fruit” says Jesus Christ.
There are things that the cold and disembodied economy
will never be able to deal with, quantify and thus solve or even consider:
Harmony alone
can create and perpetuate the stability
required for prosperity and sustainability.
Wisdom, generosity, freeness, solidarity, love and humanity,
creativity, freedom, meaning and equity
are part of something other than numbers, statistics and mathematics.
Infinity is by nature immeasurable.
Mathematics will never describe infinity.
Mathematics will never be able to put a figure
on what is beyond space and time.
If the price they have to pay for their madness is death,
if death is worth nothing,
if nothing has any value without life,
then life simply has no price.
Does what has no price have an infinite value?
If life is priceless,
then the value of life necessarily tends towards infinity.
Symbiosis is life.
What is the price of osmosis and harmony?
Today,
we have elucidated no benchmarks or effective measuring instruments,
no reference, no centreline
that could give us a pretty good idea of the added value of a system
which would be based on social harmony and the common good,
on the use of our resources, knowledge and power
in the best and wisest way on a global scale.
Humanity carries within itself an intelligence, strength and wisdom
without which no system, be it economic, political, social or individual,
can hope to find any harmony, any state of grace,
where justice and peace would prevail.
For everything lies in there.
Considering that when two elements,
no matter how insignificant,
interact,
then they give rise to a balance of power
and thus to an embryonic and primary form of politics,
then we understand that for any system to survive,
harmony is both primordial and foundational anywhere in the universe,
from the infinitely large to the infinitely small,
and that the same is true of all politics, at all levels of society,
whether there are two or millions of us.
Harmony
necessarily stems from real and relative multiple and multidimensional balances.
Symbiosis is life, isn’t it?
Is it conceivable that we could one day find an equation,
a symbiotic balance
between the basic needs of human beings,
the capacity of the vessel Earth
and the number of human beings?
From the most elementary atomic and subatomic levels
to the astronomical levels,
since it is harmony that generates life,
not only is harmony alone sustainable,
but it is also sustainable at all levels:
Scientific, personal, intimate, interrelational, political,
economic, ecological, monetary, financial, and systemic levels.
It therefore naturally tends towards infinity.
Who would dare to claim that its opposite, disharmony,
is not necessarily synonymous with decay, degeneration,
death and destruction?
As we have said,
from the perspective of death,
isn’t life a miracle whose value is priceless?
Even if infinity is forever inaccessible to the number,
it is its limitlessness that makes us touch it with our eyes.
Incommensurability is not quantifiable by nature,
but incommensurability itself becomes an order of magnitude, an unknown
to be integrated into our methods of evaluation, our calculations
and our decisions.
Not to do so
would be as though astronomers ignored and denied
that 96% of what makes up the universe
is unknown and incomprehensible to us today.
If indeed astrophysicists denied that 96% of what constitutes the universe
is unknown to them,
then all their calculations would be distorted
and thus all their conclusions.
And despite everything,
astrophysicists have never made as many discoveries as they have
since they discovered that they know almost nothing.
Indeed,
no one can understand the great systemic and cosmic laws
by not recognizing what he or she does not know,
which would make him or her even more ignorant.
To have the arrogance to believe
that we know everything when we know almost nothing
is to condemn ourselves to never learn anything,
to never progress any further.
Worse, to regress.
Was it not Socrates who said
that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing?
In metaphysical, psychological, economic, sociological and political terms,
our greatest mistake is that we ignore, or choose to ignore,
what does not exist,
or what we are led to believe could never exist.
By ignoring the possible,
we not only ignore what is not but which can be,
but furthermore, without any goal or reference, we ignore what is,
and vice versa.
Thus,
we ignore hope and the means of hope.
*
Ungraspable
Is true wealth
to realize what best
earthly and human nature
has to give us?
Cultivating our sustainable and renewable resources
while sparing our raw, fossil and perishable materials as much as possible
is a titanic, gigantic challenge.
Whether we like it or not,
sooner or later we will have to meet it.
So how can we put a price, a value or a cost
on an earthly and human nature
that we know we cannot, and probably never will be able
to assess objectively?
This is where the question of the notion of intrinsic value
to give to the harmony of life on earth
and thus its renewability
arises.
Value only accessible
through the understanding of ultra-complex multidimensional interactions
that not even the most powerful of our supercomputers
is at the beginning of putting a figure on,
ciphering, let alone deciphering.
Thus,
if we could evaluate the Earth, Nature and, or Humanity
with the help of a statistical or monetary unit,
then we should never lose sight of the fact
that these measurements would forever be imperfect
and that they could only approach perfection by taking into account
what can neither be known, nor quantified, nor calculated:
1. The absolute worth of life and the living
2. Time
We will come back to the question of time,
but we’ll add this first:
If we have demonstrated
that it is almost impossible to estimate the value of what is,
how therefore could we estimate the value, price or cost
of what is not, is no longer, or does not yet exist?
*
Life, Time and Infinity
There will always be wealth
whose value will forever elude money and currency,
and therefore the person who possesses it.
Even though some people will always believe
that they have the power to buy what is priceless,
and that the power to buy is the only thing that is priceless,
there are certain things that money does not control.
The future and humanity, death and life
are among those things over which money has little or no power at all.
It’s inevitable:
Ecosystems, life and living things, our Earth, our oceans and our sky,
our atmosphere, knowledge, consciousness, our self-awareness,
our relationships with others,
democracy, freedom, fulfilment, passion, affection, compassion,
wellness, harmony and interaction
are inherently unquantifiable,
all the more priceless, all the more elusive
as the future of humanity
can only have in the eyes of humankind
an absolute and therefore infinite value.
Because it is priceless,
life is an unknown
that must be incorporated into economic equations.
And if this unknown is also the future,
then it must tend towards infinity.
For it grows as time passes.
Our ignorance of what is not but could be
is getting worse and worse
and we fall headfirst into mass destruction, bodies and souls,
without even imagining any possible alternative?
Because postponing the end of time is priceless,
its value naturally tends towards infinity.
It is because the future tends towards infinity
that we must give ourselves the monetary, economic and financial means
to invest in the future,
not to destroy it.
*
To be or not to be
It is between these two states
that the value of what is
can be measured.
If the destruction of a natural resource
is an eternal, irrevocable, irretrievable and therefore infinite loss,
the value of its preservation
is therefore necessarily, irretrievably and irrefutably
proportionally inverse.
It is mathematical,
it therefore naturally tends towards infinity.
Indeed,
how can we quantify now all the benefits
that would bring us in 5 years, in 10 years, in 50 years
the sustainable and perennial exploitation of the resources
necessary to generate renewable energy for example?
Not only the improvements
that we would make in the good and wise production of this energy,
but also the benefits and new technological discoveries
that they would allow us to make
are as yet unknown to us;
they are therefore unquantifiable, priceless, immeasurable.
If, in addition to these exponential advances,
we take as a starting point for our equation
the fact that we either lose these resources
or, on the contrary, retain the capacity to exploit them,
then the wealth generated if we made the right choice
mathematically tends towards infinity.
Nothingness alone gives the measure of the living.
Thus,
the intrinsic value of the wealth we would generate
would tend towards infinity.
The only difference
is that it would not be an ultra-productionist, ultra-materialist and ultra-consumerist
development model of more, more, more and more,
but rather a constant improvement
in the added value, quality and durability
of our material and immaterial, visible and invisible,
worldly and spiritual, terrestrial and celestial wealth.
This would not only allow the rebirth of stagnant economies,
but it would also reconcile the dominant economic ideology
according to which infinite growth would be possible
with ecology, the protection of the environment,
of the being and of the living.
In the truest sense of the word,
it would be an economic and environmental miracle.
*
Material and immaterial wealth
Market and non-market wealth
In a very simple and down-to-earth way of seeing the economy,
the ‘real’, tangible wealth of a community, global or local, is :
– the fertility of its Earth, its food, water and raw material resources;
– its infrastructure, housing, means of production,
irrigation, transport, communication;
– the strength and intelligence of the citizens,
their education, knowledge, creativity, culture, skills,
the quality of their bonds, the awareness
of what brings them together and unites them,
which necessarily leads to a system of democratic transmission
and sharing of knowledge and wisdom;
– sound, humane and sustainable management
of resources and the economy,
– a wise and human-oriented political system,
– geopolitical positions
exploited with inventiveness and wisdom,
– the quality of the nation’s relations
with the rest of the world.*
*The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
in 2005 identified four forms of capital:
– Manufacturing capital (infrastructure and work tools)
– human capital (labour and skills)
– social capital (networks and relationships)
– natural capital (resources and ecosystems).
https://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.html
This list may not be complete,
but omit or neglect one of these things
and society necessarily gets out of balance
and sooner or later into conflict.
And if we consider that there is conflict when,
for a few seconds, or for a lifetime,
a power struggle sets out,
then we can imagine how the world is in constant conflict with itself,
how humankind has been indulging in a unceasing fratricidal Cold War.
A system based on predation is doomed
to throw more and more fuel on the fire.
In the sense that these forms of wealth or capital,
whatever we call them,
are all vital to us,
and they are all part of this cosmic and human whole
called human life on Earth,
these are undeniably of real value to all members of society,
for it is they who, at this stage of evolution,
can and must create the balance of the whole social and human edifice.
All are essential.
And yet, how many of them have we been failing to appreciate the value of?
Is it because some, if not all, of this wealth
cannot be measured in terms of money?
Money that we consider as the only measure and point of reference
to the extent of ignoring what actually keeps us alive.
Where is the logic behind our powerful system when,
despite the fact that energy sources are inexorably running out,
all energy companies are striving to sell as much energy as possible at all costs,
and our precious remaining energy sources
are literally messed up and thrown to the wind?
Even though we know full well
that all our resources on Earth, under the Earth and in the Sea
are being depleted at high speed,
all we are trying to do, as a system and as members of a system,
is to grab them for sale, only to sell them,
by all possible means, as much as possible, as quickly as possible.
It is an economist’s adage
that the economy knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
So the question arises again:
How do you calculate the value of something
that is basically unquantifiable?
What is the price of salvation?
What’s the price of grace? What’s the price of life?
Once we find a balance at the systemic and global level
between the needs and satisfaction of the needs of all human beings,
we will be able to give things the value they deserve.
The key lies in balance.
The benefits of harmony are absolutely priceless.
If you are not convinced of this,
then you only have to compare them to how much
all the disorder, conflicts, excesses and imbalances, violence and hatred
that are already raging throughout the world
cost and will continue to cost us and all our children,
not to mention,
in addition to the unquantifiable and horrible suffering
that all this can cause,
the loss of earnings and benefits.
If a society also operates on what cannot be measured,
then a society’s wealth is not just its economic and financial wealth.
It is not because a society is not obsessed with money
that it is necessarily poor, miserable or enslaved,
on the contrary.
It means that it operates differently, nothing else.
How many unions, organizations, societies, tribes, peoples and nations,
human beings, friends and families have functioned
and are still desperately trying to function
on the basis of harmony, balance,
beneficial and creative wisdom, fruitful and fertile solidarity,
to be productive without being productivist?
Two prominent anthropologists, Marcel Mauss* and David Graeber**,
point out that undeniably, solidarity, gift and freeness,
understanding and a certain form of free and consenting reciprocity
are at the basis of any lasting relationship,
union, cooperation or human organization
that is not based on a confrontational balance of power***,
be it economic, hierarchical, political or military.
*”The Gift”
an essay by Marcel Mauss
published in the journal ‘L’année Anthropologique’ in 1923-4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(essay)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Mauss
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
***This inevitably brings us to the question of the nature of the debt,
to which we will return later.
Their benefits are considerable, their value priceless.
What kind of society can go so crazy
to the extent of giving up social peace and sustainability
as its goals and foundations?
More than obvious, it’s natural.
No need for mathematical calculation to know and recognize that.
And yet,
because in an unequal, poorly managed
and, arguably, developed society to the point where growth is stagnating,
capitalist logic could throw society
into war, violence, death and the horror of barbarism
in order to make money from arms sales, for example,
and when everything is destroyed restart growth with reconstruction,
and a new cycle of financial bulimia that,
once you reach the natural limits of a systemic monster
whose greed nothing can satiate,
will self-reproduce and end up in horror once again,
as happened in the two world wars of the 20th century.
*
« He who is contented is rich. »
Lao Tseu
Thus,
more efficiently than any calculation or ultra-complex theory
will probably ever allow,
ecological and economic sustainability can be reconciled
if and only if the simple equation
between resources and needs is in equilibrium,
if and only if society succeeds in finding the balance
between its resources and its needs.
This is, at the global level,
what we cannot fail to pursue.
In conclusion,
the sum of our thoughts at this stage could be summarized as follows:
The more we destroy the environment,
the more the loss tends to be irrevocable and irreparable.
The loss is priceless.
The more the equation needs and resources are in balance,
the richer we are.
It’s very simple.
*
Humane and humanist wisdom is more than an asset.
How much do we value humans and human rights?
How much do you value your own rights?
Because collective wisdom is vital,
then collective wisdom is wealth.
Then, like everything vital,
collective wisdom is a right.
And if wisdom is a right, then universal right is wise,
universal law is a vital asset with totally priceless benefits.
Universal law are not empty words.
Universal rights are inalienable and sacred.
So sacred that if God exists,
then universal law is divine, divine in essence.
Its benefits are priceless.
*
Generosity and GDP
While this does not fundamentally challenge the fact
that everyone is free to monetize
whatever he or she chooses to exchange for money,
the institutionalization, the systematization
of the commodification of the living and the world,
the pursuit of profit as the only way to flourish is an antisocial calamity
because it hinders the expression of generosity and solidarity
among all Citizens and citizen groups around the world
and drags us collectively into the infernal spiral of widespread competition,
into the vicious circles of the disintegration of all human societies
and the destruction of the environment,
sources of immense problems
that constantly generate even more gigantic problems.
Because every human person can freely choose
to give and to share with his or her loved ones and, or fellow human beings in the joy of being together,
every service, every human creation or production
can be the object of a gift,
a non-monetarized exchange, a free act of generosity
and of tacit and authentic reciprocity.
Whether we like it or not, whether we recognize it or not,
we all function through spontaneous, informal, spiritual, affective, informative, exciting exchange.
Even if we are the ultimate selfish and self-centered being,
whether we are aware of it or not,
we all function through giving, exchanging, receiving,
helping each other, offering.
Just as neither the future nor the unknown is observable or measurable,
neither feelings nor emotions are measurable or quantifiable.
Neither love, nor hate, nor joy, nor suffering
can be reduced to data or mathematical calculations.
You don’t need to be an expert, scientist or have a PhD to know this.
This is all the more understandable
since by a simple act of recognition,
the gift calls for the gift.
In that it is self-multiplying,
the gift is also for this reason wealth that cannot be quantified.
Unquantifiable by nature, if it too is unknown,
generosity is an everyday reality, just and legitimate,
which must be taken into account in socio-economic systems.
Recognized as such, it must be extended and promoted.
And yet,
in this world of ultra-competitiveness
obsessed with monetary-financial wealth alone,
we put, or seek to put a label and a price
on everything and on every activity,
with the sole aim of increasing GDP.
Do you know the meaning of the word ‘venality’?
*
* * *
*
Growth and GDP :
a cosmic error?
GDP is the accounting of all monetary exchanges in a given economic area.
It is therefore hardly surprising that GDP does not grow
when money is hoarded and therefore no longer circulates in the economy,
while there is no money in the system,
at least not for the 99%.
So-called expert economists throw dust in your eyes from morning to night
with their supposedly revolutionary ideas
and their supposedly unquestionable figures and analyses,
and yet never or too rarely do they explain
that the banks no longer lend, or too little,
because all those who have money hoard it,
or even build up astronomical fortunes
that are well sheltered in the many tax havens on the planet.
GDP is at best a huge ideological bias,
at worst a globalized scam,
probably both.
In any case,
GDP misleads people, present and future generations
to submit the whole Earth to a planetary capitalist monster
with a bottomless stomach and endless appetite.
Will there even come the day
when job centers will threaten to write off men
who will not accept a job as a pimp, a hitman or a mercenary?
When will the day come
when job centers threaten to write off women
who won’t accept a job as a stripper or an erotic masseuse?
Who will have to,
which one of your children will have to,
which one of you has already had to
sell your body or parts of your body
to get some of the money needed to survive
in this world where the slightest service, the slightest good,
the slightest seed
is monetized, recorded, computerized, controlled, manipulated?
Will there come a day
when all those who love each other
will have nothing left but their eyes to cry with?
Or maybe not any more
because they’ll have had to sell them to a wealthy lab
for a pittance?
When will we find the foresight, the strength, the courage and the faith
to finally rise up,
like a roaring ocean, out of indignation, out of greatness and dignity
to impose more harmony, humanity, justice, law and equality
on the leaders of the world?
Convergence
of multiple international and multidimensional,
climatic, political, economic, energy, financial, sanitary,
humanitarian, social, individual,
affective, intimate, identity, interrelational, psychological and military crises,
is the Great Crisis of the 21st Century, already begun,
the ultimate crisis?
*
Wealth indices
The GDP is the accounting of all monetary transactions
in a given economic zone.
Only trade then, not pre-existing wealth,
which poses a major existential, economic and conceptual problem.
This is its first shortcoming.
In addition,
there is a major mathematical flaw inherent in GDP measures,
an index, I remind you, on which all of society, and therefore all of our lives, depend.
This is what Stéphane Laborde says about GDP
in his Relative Theory of Money (RTM)* :
“There is a fundamental error in estimating’growth’ via GDP,
which measures the exchange of values.
This is because the increase in the money supply, if any,
is sufficiently dense in the economy, will have the effect,
at constant production, of mechanically raising prices,
without affecting quantity,
costs being generally passed on as a result of price increases,
and not at the same time as prices.
In time, this will therefore increase GDP,
even though the same goods and services
would be produced and consumed from one year to the next.”
*Théorie Relative de la Monnaie
Version 2.718,
Stéphane Laborde
In French.
In other words,
as soon as inflation rises, GDP increases
even though the same number of exchanges has been made.
Thus,
without even mentioning what it does not take into account,
at least for these two major shortcomings,
GDP as the measuring instrument of choice
is flawed and insufficient, to say the least.
Already though,
we have at our disposal all kinds of statistics, indicators and indices,
Human Development Index, HDI,
and Genuine Progress Indicator, GPI, to name but a few,
that could go a long way towards helping us consider the unquantifiable
and give us a good idea of where we’re going.
GDP only takes into account what is produced and exchanged
but does not account for everything that could be,
that which GDP itself prevents us from seeing
and therefore from cultivating :
Natural ecosystems,
the world in its interrelational, multidimensional,
extremely complex global reality,
democracy, well-being, stability, freedom,
beauty, generosity, trust, love, friendship, mindfulness, justice, wisdom…
In this sense,
to complete and improve this sacrosanct, now only indicator of wealth
that GDP is
is to decide to no longer make the choice of overexploitation,
slavery, systemic instability, blindness and illusion.
Dominique Méda, a philosopher, sociologist and labour specialist,
gives her views on this subject in her book,
“Beyond GDP, For Another Measure of Wealth*”,
in which she summarizes the progress made in this area:
*original title:
« Au-delà du PIB,
Pour une autre mesure de la richesse »
Dominique Méda,
Editions Flammarion, Champs Actuels, 2008
In French
« On the one hand, several synthetic human development indicators
are available:
since 1990, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
has been proposing the Human Development Index (HDI).
This is the average of three indices that measure life expectancy at birth,
educational attainment and GDP per capita in PPP
(purchasing power parities).
In subsequent years, it will be enriched to include
an indicator of women’s participation in economic and political life,
and two indicators of human poverty,
one for developing countries and one for developed countries.
At the end of the 1980s, the Miringoffs developed work
within the Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy
that led to an “Index of Social Health” (SHI)*:
16 variables assigned to age groups make up the body of this index.
These 16 variables include infant mortality, child poverty, unemployment,
poverty of the over-65s, alcohol-related fatal road accidents, etc.
* http://iisp.vassar.edu/ish.html
A Personal Security Index (PSI) was developed in the 1990s
by the Canadian Council on Social Development.
It takes into consideration three types of security:
economic security, health security and physical security,
which it identifies through a series of objective variables
(unemployment rate, workplace injuries, physical violence)
that are weighted by subjective data.
On the other hand, there are several indices
that aim rather to take into account the damage inflicted
on the environment and some try to monetize it
(or, conversely, to value the gains), while others do not.
The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), developed in 1994
by the Redefining Progress association, is an alternative index to GDP,
resulting from the correction of the latter.
Broadly speaking, this type of indicator starts
from household market consumption,
to which is added the valuation of certain activities
(domestic work, leisure, etc.) and non-defensive public spending
(part of public spending that does not serve to repair the damage
caused by growth) and from which is removed the valuation
of defensive public spending and ecological damage.
The GPI has many refinements: a very large number of costs
are calculated and removed (costs of crime, car accidents,
water and air pollution, etc.) and the value of domestic work,
volunteer work, services, durable goods and road infrastructure is added.
The ecological footprint is another type of indicator,
focusing exclusively on the environment.
It aims to measure the renewable resources consumed
by a given population and compare them
with the capacity of the environment to renew them.
Finally, among the many indicators
(not all of which are mentioned here), special attention should be paid
to the economic well-being indicator developed by two Canadians,
and Sharpe, which was designed for several European countries
using very precise statistical data*.
* https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_1403-2
An indicator of economic well-being
for several European countries
[…]
This indicator takes into consideration four different dimensions,
each of which constitutes a sub-index and each of which highlights
of the key aspects of what can be considered a “good society”.
The first sub-index consists of current consumption flows
(consumption of market goods and services,
real flows of household production, leisure and other non-market goods
and services).
The second one aims to measure the net accumulation
of productive resources: it takes into account the decline
in natural resource stocks.
The third one concerns the way in which income is distributed
among the population, using the classic Gini indices and the poverty rate.
The last one, highly innovative, measures the degree of economic security
or insecurity and aims to measure the extent to which public policies
enable or disable individuals to cope with different social risks
and thus to assess them.
Based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
the authors analyse trends in the four major social risks:
sickness, old age, unemployment and single parenthood
(rather than simply having children), and take into consideration
the way in which the systems cover these risks.
Finally, the very interesting nature of this index
comes from the way in which it is open to the use of subjective data
(and opinion survey results) to weight its different dimensions.
Although it still has many limitations*,
it remains one of the most elaborate of all. »
As we read these few lines,
we can see that we do not lack the necessary tools
to move in right the direction
if we could only wish to do so,
the Genuine Progress Indicator
being the one that seems the most appropriate
because, as a real alternative to GDP,
it takes into account the damage caused to the environment,
with the addition, of course, of the Ecological Footprint Index.
*
Destructions + profits = GDP ?
A territory that we’ve ransacked, even for profit,
can no longer be a source of profit or life for anyone.
This is now well known,
and you just read it from the pen of Madame Meda:
Because GDP only takes into account the financial aspects
of so-called development,
because it only focuses on numbers and statistics,
GDP also counts as positive events that which induce real losses
such as economic, financial, ecological disasters, physical, mental,
social or environmental destruction.
Indeed,
if GDP measures only monetary and merchant trade,
so when disaster strikes, an oil spill for example,
the money that the State or the community spends
to pay a company to do damage control
is considered to be growth,
thus progress according to GDP criteria.
It’s globalized madness.
Thus,
GDP has to be challenged by other indices and benchmarks
that can measure the balance between wealth and trade,
basic needs and personal satisfaction,
as well as the balances between scales and values.
These tools, these statistics already exist.
We’ve just seen them.
We just need to start using them seriously.
*
The value of services provided to nature.
The price of its destruction.
If a species, an ecosystem are intrinsic riches,
then protecting, saving, restoring and/or enhancing them
are services rendered to all,
both in time and in the moment,
services rendered to the planetosphere and therefore to life on Earth.
Such actions therefore have intrinsic value.
In this world dominated by money,
it is therefore justified and legitimate to remunerate them.
On the other hand,
in the case of the destruction of the environment
and the slaughter of living things,
forcing the guilty parties, most of them large companies,
to pay compensation,
however astronomical it may be, is derisory
compared to the immeasurable damage and losses
for present and future living generations,
because when land or an ocean is contaminated,
when a forest is cut down,
when a species is extinct, or when bees have disappeared,
then it is absolutely and irrevocably impossible to resuscitate them.
Unfortunately,
those who have the means to pay
do not have to suffer the consequences of their actions,
be it in the case of the horrors inflicted on their fellow human beings,
other living species, and/or ecosystems or even the entire planet.
Compensating with money
for the ecological and/or economic destruction that one has committed
is the same as committing murder and paying to escape the judgment
that an uncorrupted justice system would demand.
Thus,
in addition to ecocide,
we add insult to injury
by stupidly legalizing and tolerating corruption.
*
Nature has no price.
If social peace, democracy, the rule of law,
the proper irrigation of the currency or currencies throughout society,
the quality of life together,
the quality of public services and private organizations,
the quality and sustainability of production and consumption,
education and fulfilment
are conditions for the sustainability and prosperity of peoples and nations,
then they are of infinite value.
Similarly,
when an eco-system is destroyed,
the Earth loses its overall ‘renewability’,
and thus, we all, without exception,
lose something non-quantifiable, priceless, immeasurable.
Since we lose what is not measurable anyway,
since we cannot measure the future consequences
of such losses in space or time,
environmental destruction has an infinite value in itself.
These priceless, unquantifiable, immeasurable, infinite, or absolute values, call it what you will,
must be taken into account, one way or another,
in statistical, accounting and mathematical calculations.
Mathematicians and computer modelers
have already incorporated the infinite ∞
into their algorithms to take into account an infinity of possibilities,
which are by nature immeasurable, unpredictable, invaluable.
In order to make the right choices,
the non-accounting, the invaluable, the intrinsically human
must invite himself into the accounting.
An investment is not necessarily bad if it is not short-term.
In fact, it would be rather the opposite.
If the consequences of bad governance
have immeasurable disastrous repercussions over time and in the moment,
and if time itself is infinite,
then progress, justice, democracy, education, harmony, life,
Earth, sentience, fulfilment, wisdom and happiness
are priceless riches whose benefits increase dramatically over time,
exponentially as things get better and better.
Not only in and of themselves,
but all the more by the measure of the pitfalls, disasters and shipwrecks
they avoid,
they can therefore be measured by infinity, and infinitely.
At once fragile and potentially infinite,
ephemeral and potentially eternal,
life and death of humanity
has an absolute value for all human beings.
The decisions and investments to be made
are glaringly obvious.
*
* * *
*
Economic, political and social efficiency is wealth
They say that the efficiency of a civilization,
of a political, economic and social system
can only be achieved through competition of all against all,
because then, gripped by economic necessity,
we are forced to be more efficient and greedy to survive.
But by encouraging competition and competitiveness,
the system necessarily encourages aggression.
This is inevitable.
To encourage aggression in a society is a total nonsense.
Not to mention the corruption that inevitably follows.
No civilization throughout history
has long survived corruption, hatred and division.
No future, no sustainability is possible
when members of the same society are aggressive towards each other,
which is obvious.
Today,
this model of society,
this way of thinking goes around the world.
Between extreme poverty, destitution, precariousness, and obscene opulence,
there has to be a balance, not just an economic balance,
but also a psychological, political and social one
where there is real creative and progressive efficiency,
a kind of relative, optimal and universal state of harmony
which would not make us have to give up the benefits
of entrepreneurial freedom, progress or well-being,
quite the reverse.
To be sure, and to a certain extent,
as long as it does not lead to disgrace or death,
a certain form of competition, a ”sporting” one,
can undoubtedly be positive and constructive,
but today, alas, the kind of competition based on the power struggle, exploitation and domination
that ‘they’ incessantly profess is just ruthless, merciless,
and akin to a real killing of people and peoples,
if not all of humanity.
Greed and the will to power know no bounds.
Precisely because they can never be satiated,
greed and the will to power are insatiable, endless, bottomless,
a kind of infinity of negative value.
You don’t need to be an economist, statistician or mathematician
to know this.
If trust and collaboration are the source
of the most beautiful, rewarding and exhilarating things in life,
excessive competition is the source of ever more struggles for power.
Based on domination and enslavement
by money, by merchandising, financialisation,
by precariousness, poverty and debt,
excessive competition
is the source of ever greater inequalities, indifference, enmity, fear,
mistrust, frustration, uneasiness, aggressiveness, anger,
violence, chaos, war and untold suffering.
Human beings are and will be fulfilled in cooperation for survival
and not in competition to death.
It’s fucking obvious.
The world is the new scale,
the ultimate civilization to build, harmonize and enrich.
To see that the merits of good, justice and humanity,
the merits of sharing and generosity, of gratuitousness and solidarity,
of tolerance, of understanding and intelligence, of respect for others,
whatever our origins, traditions or opinions,
is an incredible opportunity,
and perhaps, by the very fact that it exists,
a miracle.
Look.
If you could see,
and know how the rejection of all forms of difference
in general and of foreigners in particular
– discrimination, racism and communitarianism –
is only one of many ways that the minority in power uses and abuses
in order to keep us constantly and ever more deeply
in the abhorrence of difference,
to keep us in conflict and division,
to keep us subservient to their vain and sterile will to power,
because they have acquired the intuition,
in the course of their experience of power
that the power of the Union,
the Union of all peoples, of all nations of the world,
is far superior to them.
Their domination is all the more alienating because it is schizophrenic,
schizophrenic in the sense that ‘they’ constantly pit us against each other,
but when it comes to ‘welcoming’ cheap labour,
‘they’ are the first to encourage tolerance and generosity,
of which ‘they’ alone are the beneficiaries:
Indeed, from ‘their’ point of view,
putting the whole world in competition with itself
wherever there is informed resistance is a more advantageous option
than to stop plundering the resources of poor and/or war-torn countries
from which poor people have to uproot themselves and flee to survive.
Who today could state with conviction and certainty
that the alienating absurdity of the ultra-competitive, ultra-aggressive system
imposed by neo-liberal capitalism is not counter-productive,
ultimately destructive, devastating and suicidal?
The nature of man and woman is necessarily terrestrial, Earthian.
The Earth Homeland has more citizens than any other nation.
The most effective, the fastest, the wisest, the most far-sighted solution
is planetary and solidarity-based harmonization.
We just have to see,
see that the Universal is shedding new light on world events,
a worldview, a vision of the world.
All we’d all have to do is see it,
or that a majority of us around the world see it,
then change would come along.
All it would take is that all peoples,
with as much humanity as possible,
wake up to their common destiny, for the common good, the good of all.
This is all there is to it.
It is only a matter of seeing and sincerely wanting.
There is no need for anything else
in order to create a chain reaction of positive consequences.
For the good of all,
the democratic, humanistic and solidarity-based harmonization of the world,
grounded in the rights of men, women, children and the living,
is the optimum for the human species.
*
Trust
The fact that the human being is always a minimum interested,
and that money is undoubtedly a necessary tool,
the innumerable acts of sharing
that we would never imagine monetizing
prove it to us:
Giving, generosity, understanding, benevolence,
is a proof of trust
essential to the psychic and mental, emotional and spiritual balance
of the human being;
trust
without which we would be irremediably alone,
locked up in the darkest and hermetically sealed prison
of an unbearable loneliness
of which we ourselves would be our own jailers,
not only isolated from each other,
but also slaves to the whole society
and the social organization as a whole,
slaves to each other as well as ourselves.
Whether emotional, intellectual, spiritual, economic, or material,
whether these acts are economic and financial in nature or not,
as long as the interests of others are considered and honored,
as long as acts of generosity are ‘returned’,
returned in a just and legitimate manner,
and as long as a certain balance prevails,
there is nothing wrong with us
always acting more or less selfishly and/or out of self-interest.
That’s just life.
The fact that giving gives me a certain joy,
a certain well-being is a grace.
Whenever I am giving and the one to whom I have given
gives me back is a second grace.
Acts of giving are graces,
not only because they have several positive consequences,
but also, and perhaps more importantly,
because they give birth to positive dynamics,
all the more so as they give birth to a certain harmony.
It has always been so and will always remain so.
And the reverse is equally true.
Will we wait until that irreversible point
when humanity will no longer be able to turn back,
when the consequences of its mistakes,
its wanderings, its imbalances and its disharmonies
will be so great and so powerful that nothing will be able to stop them?
A world dominated by money and calculating greed
where competition is ruthless
generates so many chaotic situations with immense consequences
that chaos becomes systemic and the circle vicious.
Because money is becoming more and more indispensable
for acquiring any vital good,
because money is largely monopolised by the 1%,
and because natural generosity and freeness are disappearing,
the future is becoming more and more worrying and uncertain
for an ever-growing majority.
Global misery and systemic instability,
mistrust, fear, frustration, egocentricity, suffering and hatred
are raging on, dragging us down.
We’re just saying what you already know,
aren’t we?
Because it is based on the future
and because the future is inherently uncertain,
trust is as unquantifiable as it is priceless.
Even economics, especially economics
recognize the intrinsic value of trust.
Bankers, financiers themselves say so.
For a currency to work effectively,
it is essential that those who use it have trust in it.
But the basis of all trust
is trust in one’s environment and in oneself.
To what extent does the crisis of 2008 and the state of the world
stem from the fact that fewer and fewer people,
including even those among the richest
who desperately and childishly cling to their illusions
still believe in the durability of this ultra-financial system
and its fake currencies
that are completely disconnected from reality?
I am asking you the question.
By definition,
trust is an immeasurable thing.
Let us first have confidence in ourselves, in our humanity.
And in the future.
More than in a being, however perfect, who sits in heaven,
this is undoubtedly one of the best definitions of faith.
Faith
in oneself, in one’s species, in one’s universe, and in the future.
Even if the emphasis of our talk
is on the economic, monetary and financial aspect of things,
the present reflection can be extended to life as a whole.
Founded on the full consent of the person who lavishes it,
trust is a fundamentally free feeling.
Thus,
the benefits of social harmony and economic balance,
of humanist justice, universal democracy and solidarity
which would give back to humanity a genuine and deep trust in itself
cannot and will never be quantified,
neither translated nor expressed in figures or statistics
nor in terms of profitability.
That’s just not possible.
No one can humanly trust anything
that is based on domination, enslavement and ultimately destruction.
Therefore,
if progress is a sign of a present that is better than the past,
or in other words a future that is better than the present,
trust is a condition for progress.
And the opposite of trust is despair.
You cannot move forward in despair.
You die.
In this sense,
not only are progress and trust inseparable,
but they are also sources of undeniable wealth
that cannot be quantified, or only very approximately,
and which once again tends towards life, and therefore infinity.
Neither life, nor trust, nor progress, nor time
can be measured in conventional economic terms.
*
Who is to invest in the future?
The fact that our societies must invest wisely and pragmatically
in solidarity, law, justice, democracy, knowledge and wisdom,
does not mean that they should prohibit entrepreneurial freedom,
on the contrary,
because investing in intelligence, creative freedom, trust and harmony
is inevitably investing in progress.
It is not only possible to reconcile
progress, democracy, prudence and wisdom,
but more than highly desirable,
it is also clearly and utterly indispensable.
And if we have to invest, then we must ask ourselves,
in addition to the question of progress, to which we shall return later,
the question of who, to this day, has the greatest power to invest
with the aim of diverting the course of history in favour of Humanity
and who has the greatest legitimacy to invest and govern
within a democratic society?
Private companies,
all competing against each other
and thinking only of their own private interests
to the detriment of society as a whole?
Or something else, such as non-profit organizations?
Or the nation organized as a state?
By virtue of its intentional and federative power,
capable of respecting the interest of each and every one,
as the incarnation of the people,
emanating from the people’s body and mind
and the people’s right to self-determination,
as an expression of the collective will for well-being and relative prosperity,
in Democracy, the nation has the constitutional legitimacy,
the power and the democratic and legal possibility,
and in this sense the inescapable, total duty,
to set the course towards a common and therefore united destiny.
The private sector,
despite its countless praiseworthy and useful initiatives,
is walking hundreds of thousands of different paths
and in as many chaotic and anarchic directions.
Even though their financial, economic and systemic weight
is nowadays sometimes greater than that of some states,
the forces of the private sector are too disunited
and too subject to the irrational jolts of unbridled greedy markets
to give a rational direction to society.
One only has to look at the state of the world today to realize this.
Human or animal,
in order for the members of a group to benefit from the group,
a common direction must be followed,
or the group naturally dissolves.
For otherwise everyone goes their own way to different destinations.
The nation,
by virtue of its democratic and collective legitimacy,
(in the case of a true democracy,
a subject to which we shall return in greater detail in a later section)
must guide, harmonize and have prevalence over private forces,
in a rational balance of power
that is prompt to encourage wisdom and mutual understanding
and to promote justice, good, wisdom, democracy and harmony.
It is for this reason
that the more democratic, humanistic and wise a society is,
the more it will make the right choices and invest effectively and positively,
the more it will prosper and generate situations
that will gradually spread to each and every one of us,
the more virtuous circles will be created and strengthened.
Since the raison d’être and purpose of the State,
in its original form, is the common good of all the members of the nation, without exception,
a democratic and free State has the legitimacy,
in this sense and in all senses,
the duty to have or take over the power to act as a force
for the convergence of all positive energies.
In this sense,
the democratic and free State
will always be the most powerful guide and potential investor,
the largest potential employer,
all the more so if this state is the direct emanation
of a vigilant and enlightened people.
As an emanation of the common will
and of popular and citizen sovereignty,
the more the public power, embodied by the State,
knows how to govern the nation
without restraining it
to take it where it must go,
taking into account the imponderables of reality,
– like a ship that is steered in the middle of a storm -,
the more the State contributes to the welfare and well-being of the country,
the more the community participates by itself
in the harmonization and improvement of life in society
which creates a virtuous dynamic,
especially if the State is the emanation of a real and new democracy.
This topic is developed in the next chapter on politics.
To be free is to make the right choices.
Anyone who is in full possession of his or her faculties
does what is right for him or herself.
Since no one can be fundamentally free, happy and at peace
if the world in which he or she lives
is neither free nor happy nor at peace,
then what is good for oneself
necessarily implies harmony with others and the world.
This dynamic certainly only just began to emerge in the world
after the Second World War,
but its effects have been enormous for a few decades.
Only real democracy is rational and fruitful,
capable of preserving not only society, but also life and the living,
because it is guided by the collective and relative interest of each individual,
by harmony and not chaos,
by non-violence and the preservation of the whole and the living.
Without excluding each other,
compared to the private sector,
understood here in the restrictive sense of capitalist markets,
the public sector has the merit of being motivated
by something other than the lure of profit at all costs.
It is therefore the only one
that can act as a guide and a driving force
for the private sector in general
with sufficient strength and speed
to meet the enormous challenges of the 21st century.
In the broadest sense of the term,
private forces include not only finance and multinationals,
but also citizens, small businesses,
magnificent initiatives inspired by the solidarity economy
such as worker cooperatives*, charities and associations,
experiments in ecological lifestyles, close to the Earth and Nature,
independent of this increasingly dominating
and predatory ultra-capitalist civilization.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
Could private and public energies strengthen each other one day?
We cannot doubt it.
Positive dynamics are as powerful as negative ones.
This is all the more likely
if we understand the following evolutionary reality:
Such as the invention of writing
or the discovery that the Earth was not the center of the universe,
humanity has always been able to integrate the great scientific discoveries
that have moved it forward by leaps and bounds,
even though nowadays some ‘obscurantists’
dare to question such evidence while declaring themselves scholars.
In this age of information and at this stage of evolution,
humanity is integrating fundamental data about itself
which, if we survive this existential crisis,
are destined to bring us both more humility and more greatness,
more wisdom and more dignity.
Once again,
the private sector is not limited to multinationals and finance.
It is what we could call the ‘ultra’, ultracapitalist ‘predatory’ sector.
Indeed,
alongside this, the private energies that are citizen initiatives,
from the grassroots, ordinary citizens, grassroots’ people,
people like you and me,
are therefore becoming more and more enlightened,
experienced and evolved in action and in thought.
So it all comes down to finding the means and the power
to harmonize them.
Conversely,
all the failures of today’s world,
which is heading for the ultimate and supreme failure of collapse,
prove to us that markets left to their own devices
on the basis of universal competition to death
are incapable of the prowess to cope
with the apocalypse to which they are hurling us.
Do you really think
that the exploitation of human beings, the plundering of the planet,
corruption, slavery, physical and moral prostitution and the sale of organs
can be considered as progress?
Do you really think
that any form of law and social justice,
any form of humanism can be described as inadmissible regression?
Or even that humanism is a dangerous revolutionary will to be repressed,
as ‘they’, the rich and powerful, like to make us believe,
an ideology that should arouse deep indignation,
as if there were nothing more dignified
than the chaos and regression
into which the whole world is sinking?
Or do you believe that our vision
is just, dignified, humane, and therefore sacred and solemn?
The planet, Life, society, and even finance, money and economy
are part of the common goods of humanity.
They cannot be monopolized
by an elite of capitalist anarchists or autocratic political leaders
who do not want any state or law
that could hinder their narcissistic, greedy and predatory pathologies.
Finance, money and the economy
must be put back at the service of humanity.
The biggest potential investor and actor of progress
is the Citizens’ Nation, whatever its borders…
Indeed,
nothing is more powerful than a population in tune with itself.
As a direct emanation of the people and the will of the people,
public power based on citizenship is just and legitimate.
Economics is political.
In politics,
nothing is more just or legitimate.
For indeed,
the nation is nothing more than the tribe or the family,
but larger and more sophisticated.
And if the powerful multinationals, private banks
and those who run them
have too much power because they hold too much wealth
to the point of buying, corrupting and manipulating
all the tribes, all the families, all the parties, all the nations, all the democracies,
and turning the Earth into a cosmic garbage can,
then there is only one way for the peoples, for the peoples of the world,
to take back into their hands not so much the power
as their lives and their destiny:
They must unite.
Since the defence of the interests of all is just and legitimate,
the strength of the people who know what they want
and who know where they are going
is invincible.
To regain power
and seek to achieve as harmonious a state of equilibrium
as humanly possible
in the creation, circulation and distribution of money and wealth
can no longer be considered a utopia.
Truth be told,
it is, on the scale of a nation or a region,
on the scale of humanity and the world,
our only chance of survival.
The new dimension,
the one most capable to this day of reviving
freedom, harmony, peace, security, prosperity and humanity,
is the Earth.
No more and no less.
That is clear. That is certain.
That is inevitable.
In the third millennium, the challenges are universal.
So the answers must be universal.
With Man will perish history.
And yet,
will a memory, a reminiscence of our failure, of our weakness as a species,
– forgive me for saying so,
but a species too unintelligent to understand and survive,
a species too inferior to survive, open its eyes and understand, see and hear –
be perpetuated forever and ever in an echo,
like the echo of the Big-Bang, which unfolds and reverberates infinitely,
to the smallest recesses of the various multidimensional space-times of the universe:
a lost and wandering memory
in the immeasurable and incomprehensible cosmos?
Our collective failure, forever engraved like a scar
in the smallest recesses of space-time?
The mark not only of a cosmic failure,
but also of unspeakable nightmares and immeasurable sufferings?
Will God, if he exists, laugh at our foolishness?
Or will he weep for all eternity?
Probably both.
*
Market law
If the market law is governed by the law of the strongest
and if the law of the strongest is by nature confrontational,
therefore ultimately and on a large scale,
the market law is destructive and irrational.
Therefore,
market laws must be subjugated, regulated
by laws, teachings, reality, wisdom, our survival instinct, quite simply.
There is a degree of inconsistency
beyond which no entity can go
without sooner or later endangering the whole social body, humanity,
the whole world.
After shaking to the very depths of its foundations in 2007-2008,
we all now know that our model of civilization is doomed to collapse.
The diagnosis is irrefutable.
Wisdom today demands
that a democratic and legitimate system of governance
work with wisdom and truth for justice and the universal good.
Wisdom today demands
that a legitimate democratic system of governance
should have a duty to ensure that private interests are never so powerful
as to threaten whole sections of the social edifice, humanity, life itself.
When the balance of power is too unbalanced,
the more powerful will always seek to control or enslave the weaker.
Throughout history,
this has always been the case.
It always will be.
And it is now.
Who could deny that any longer?
Except people who benefit from lies and injustice?
So it’s a question of restoring essential balances.
Just as a ship must find points of balance
both in itself and in the element that carries it and on which it sails,
if we do not want to sink into the depths of the ocean,
into the void, into darkness, into death and oblivion,
humanity must absolutely find points of balance,
otherwise shipwreck is guaranteed.
That’s an understatement.
The certainty is irrefutable and absolute.
Absolute.
*
** **
** * * * **
** **
*
The supremacy of markets
lies in the fact that money has been privatized.
*
Private money creation is a form of counterfeiting.
Imagine YOU have the power to create money.
You have the word ‘Bank’
written on the wall of your home or office.
Do you know that you would have the right
to grant a credit of 1,000 dollars,
with only 100 dollars?
And even if you didn’t have those 100 dollars,
the mere signature of your debtor on the promissory note to repay
would be enough for the central bank you depend on
to give you those 100 dollars.
You give your $100 bill
and you enter the remaining 900 into your borrower’s computerized account.
When you have been reimbursed the 900 dollars,
you will destroy the 900 dollars
but will have recovered your initial 100 dollars + interest
negotiated with your borrowing customer
for as high a return on investment as possible
within the limits imposed both by the balance of power
that exists between you and your client,
i.e. your need to lend and his need to borrow,
and the laws of the market, i.e. competition, in this case banking competition.
Now imagine that a central bank
– the only one entitled to create the original monetary deposits –
which is headed by a former colleague totally tied to your own interests
prints an almost unlimited amount of initial, central bank money,
– process called ‘quantitative easing’ -,
totally disconnected with the needs of the real economy
or even and above all the real wealth of humanity.
Imagine that you are among the few who can benefit from it,
that you can repeat the process described above almost infinitely
on the scale of our totally deregulated planet,
and that you can impose interests as you wish
within the limits imposed by the aforementioned balance of power alone,
intrinsically linked to the law of the market,
what would you do then?
In this fiercely competitive world, how would you feel then?
How would it not be tempting
to create all sorts of interbank, interfinancial products
to inflate the money supply
and make as much money as possible, for as long as possible,
in an illusory, unstable and obscure system,
totally disconnected from reality,
in a post-collapse context where the real economy is almost exhausted
while at the same time the bailout of the financial system
has caused the debts of the world’s countries to skyrocket?
How would it not be tempting
to buy permanent, solid assets,
to buy Greece, Great Britain and all the nations made vulnerable
by a debt that was originally not only obscure,
but also fundamentally illegitimate?
How would it not be tempting
to plunder the peoples of the world
in order to protect yourself from the coming collapse,
of which we cannot fail to be aware
when we understand the ins and outs
of the current global monetary and financial system?
For one day or another,
it will collapse again in exactly the same way, or almost,
as it has already collapsed,
with the difference that this time,
no one will be able to save anything
and the collapse will be irreversible and the chaos terrible
because totally disconnected from reality…
Unless we choose wisdom…
Now.
Quantitative easing
as it is carried out today in the world
is an orgy of money creation by central banks
which prints brand new, fresh money
that goes directly into the coffers of banks and the pockets of bankers
and the entire ultra-elitist capitalist establishment of this early 21st century,
without there being any connection to reason or reality
other than accounting or statistics,
without there being any vision or direction.
This is the most widespread role in banking and finance
in its simplest form.*
*Even though the secrets of how money is created
are becoming more and more known among the general public,
you, dear readers, may find it difficult,
because of the unimaginable magnitude of the swindle,
to believe what is written here.
However, do not doubt for a moment.
Please be patient as we will go into more detail
about the process of creating and managing money
in the pages that follow.
Nothing left for the peoples,
nothing left for the economies of the countries
which all the creditors-bankers empty
of all their material, cultural and spiritual wealth,
leaving nothing for the Earth, life or humans.
Since central banks are in the hands of private banks,
the latter can make as much money as they want.
They’ve got the law on their side:
In the European treaties,
since 1973 in France with the Pompidou Banking Act,
in the United States, almost everywhere in the world.
The banks are also suffering from the effects of the crisis, you might say.
The small ones, no doubt.
As far as the big ones are concerned,
how can we know?
Are their accounts public?
And if they are, do they only reflect reality?
How can you tell?
Also and above all,
which executive or trader ever offered to save their own bank
with the bonuses they lavishly grant themselves each year?
Don’t you remember every year at Christmas,
the astronomical figures we used to hear about in the media:
this or that bank executive getting a bonus of 10 million here, 30 million there?
Strangely enough, since the crisis,
this kind of news has totally disappeared from the media.
It would be very naive to think
that these kinds of practices have stopped
or that these considerable sums of money are not being placed in tax havens.
Since money is our means of exchange,
and since they have taken all the money,
since they buy everything, nothing is left for the common welfare,
since everything can now be bought and sold,
but because there is no more money since almost all of it is in tax havens,
the economy suffocates and suffers from severe monetary anemia,
which is a chronic, fatal disease.
Changing the unjust and iniquitous laws of finance
is not an option or a utopia.
It’s an absolute necessity.
*
Extreme power imbalance
Today,
some banks or multinationals are so big in financial terms
that they become richer than States.
With little or no regulation,
they can therefore establish their pyramidal and autocratic vision
of governance over the world
and thus jeopardize the human rights of nations where they are ‘in force’
and especially the right of peoples to self-determination.
You only have to look at their financial power
to see how enormous the balance of power
in favor of the biggest capitalist entities is:
“The five hundred largest transcontinental capitalist corporations in the world
control 52% of the gross domestic product of the planet.
58% of them are from the United States.
Together they employ only 1.8% of the world’s workforce.
These 500 corporations control more wealth
than the combined assets of the 133 poorest countries in the world.”*
*L’empire de la honte,
Jean ZIEGLER
Fayard, 2005
Only available in French.
You may however catch a glimpse of if by following the link down below
http://www.jp-petit.org/Presse/empire_de_la_honte_eng.htm
Each of these companies can spend millions of dollars each year
to lobby and corrupt states and governments*
and finance ‘thinktanks’ that they pay full big time
to imagine every conceivable technique to manipulate masses**.
*In 2005 alone, Microsoft spent nearly $9 million on lobbying,
and its leaders rewarded politicians on both sides with millions more. […]
**In 2005, ExxonMobil distributed $2.9 million to thirty-nine groups
likely to express doubts about climate change.
Supercapitalism,
The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
Robert Reich,
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
Even though the disaster has already been foretold,
even though everyone, scientists and non-scientists alike,
knows today that that disaster is a reality in the making
that can neither be avoided nor managed
if we do not quickly change the general direction of the world,
by all imaginable and possible means,
the aim of these think-tanks
– a kind of very handsomely paid propaganda machine –
is very clearly to condition us to believe that their vision of the world
is the only possible one…
A vision of the world that obviously only serves themselves.
Why do they buy, why do the banks themselves buy
all the major press, TV and media outlets?
A caste that clings all the more strongly and desperately to a system
as they know it is doomed to collapse.
A caste that clings all the more desperately to its powers and privileges
as they all know that this system based on stupid and wicked predation
is sooner or later doomed to disappear.
Very high is the price to be paid for any species or system
that refuses or is unable to evolve.
*
Ariadne’s thread
This predicted disaster,
which is already being felt throughout the world,
is due in particular to the system of money creation,
the thread of Ariadne, in a way, of this long chapter.
Since the global banking system is hypertrophied,
all it takes is for one of them to falter
and the entire banking, financial, economic, social and planetary system
is threatened.
And who has to bail them out when the whole system is in danger?
Who saved them in 2008?
We, the people, of course.
Were we really given a choice?
Not only do we give them all our money to help them
when they endanger society as a whole,
but when these huge financial behemoths are doing well,
they seriously abuse their power.
Having usurped
the sovereign power of peoples to rule themselves and live free,
they participate in the plundering of the world and its destruction.
They plunder humanity, enslave it, they exploit and divide us,
they do not hesitate to destroy everything, the planet, the ecosystems, humanity and themselves…
The question that is intrinsically vital is therefore the following:
Would we now have the choice and the power to stop saving the banks,
to simply let them collapse, fail and simply disappear
when it inevitably happens again,
since nothing, absolutely nothing since 2008 has changed?
Would we have the choice to do without them, right now,
by issuing democratic sovereign currencies
operating on different scales
within a community, a region, a nation, on a continent or in the world,
distinct in particular by their spatial scope and objectives,
as underlined by the very illustrious Bernard Lietaer*?
*The Future of Money,
Bernard Lietaer, Century London, 2001
Today,
money is being created to plunder and destroy everything.
In tomorrow’s world,
money will be created to bear fruit.
Or tomorrow won’t be.
*
Interests and frantic race for growth
We limit ourselves to the illusory urgency of the short term,
we have no sense or vision,
we’re getting ourselves headlong into the systemic race for profit,
into the senseless and anarchic pseudo-development
because we have to pay off the interest on the debt.
The example is well known,
and yet so relevant and enlightening
it’s hard not to say it again:
Imagine that I lend you the only dollar that exists.
Perhaps you could spend it and then somehow get it back to pay me off.
But if I charged you an additional five percent interest, or five cents,
so you could never give me those nickels
for the simple reason that they don’t exist.
State, company or individual,
in order to pay off the interest on the debt,
we’re all after some money that just doesn’t exist.
In a world where money would be wisely administered and distributed
in order to properly irrigate the entire economy,
to pay back a little more than we borrowed
is justified.
On the other hand,
in a world where inequalities are astronomical and growing exponentially,
in a world where money creation is in the hands of private banks
whose sole purpose is to maximize profits,
the system of interest rates on debt
makes it impossible for money to circulate properly
through all economic actors,
thus resulting in the chronic inability
of a substantial number of people, states and companies
to repay.
Hence the competition to death that is rife in this world.
Hence the need for infinite growth.
*
Economic outgrowth.
What is the point of infinite growth
in a world whose resources are not unlimited
but whose basic needs are not infinite either?
As soon as the members
of a family, a household, an organization, a nation, the world
are free and succeed in living together,
in letting their talents and creativity blossom,
however human all this may be,
in a balance between spiritual and material stability,
then what is the point of constantly increasing
the exponential growth of their possessions and wealth?
What is the point of increasing the growth of our possessions,
especially when they are often superfluous,
too often excessive and disproportionate,
at least for a minority, often futile and useless,
stemming at best from a system
that leads us towards a dark and uncertain future,
which in fact leads us nowhere,
or at worst leads us straight to the precipice of self-destruction?
If on the face of it,
infinite growth in a finite world is impossible,
sustained and prolonged growth
in a ‘developed’ country is even less sustainable,
neither from a purely material, physical, economic and ecological point of view,
nor from a spiritual and metaphysical point of view
where, exacerbating our propensity to desire,
to the detriment of authentic and balanced fulfilment,
consumerism exacerbates our readiness to get frustrated,
to lose control and to lose it all.
Moreover,
not only is the growth rate based on an index, GDP,
which, as we have seen, only measures monetary exchanges,
and thus, most importantly,
gives us a statistically distorted statistical prism of global performance
in terms of human development
and destruction of natural, institutional and social ‘capital’,
but it is also measured in percentage terms:
3% growth in one year is not equal to
but greater than the 3% of the previous year.
Indeed, 3% of 1,000,000,000 in year 1 is 30,000,000.
But 3% in year 2 is 30,900,000
because it is no longer based on the 1,000,000,000 of year 1
but on the 1,030,000,000 of year 2.
In year 3 it will be 31 827 000 based on the 1 060 900 000 of year 2.
Year 4 will be based on 1,092,727 to end up with 32,781,810.
And so on every year.
In other words,
it is not just infinite growth
that we are constantly running after, but exponential growth,
which is absurd beyond anything imaginable.
This system demands more and more,
incessantly, inexorably, ruthlessly more.*
* Of course, this is intrinsically linked to the system of monetary creation and management
that nations have abdicated in favour of the private vested interests of banking institutions
that are now so huge and powerful that the failure of one of them
is likely to bring about the downfall of no less than the global economy.
Yet a desirable growth rate
for a land that already enjoys the benefits
of the universal rule of law and relative prosperity
arising from sound and efficient management of the economy
should and could be aligned with the degree of sustainability and happy renewability
of the land and the nation of men, women and children.
In order not to fall into ‘stagnation’,
we can hope that scientific progress will be a liberating force
at the service of human beings
rather than an oppressive force
at the service of the powerful, and the powerful only.
In the former case,
a kind of growth could be justified,
if only it could be redefined in terms of well-being and liberation,
in terms of real added value,
rather than in terms of monetary, speculative
or even outright slavery-like profits.
Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics,
estimates a healthy growth rate for the United States
in the aftermath of the Great Depression of 2007-2008
at 1%*.
*Joseph Stiglitz,
The Price of Inequality,
W.W. Norton & Company, 2012
Insofar as we believe that growth can be the solution to all our ills,
while it is itself which, excessive and misdirected,
is the source of our biggest problems,
our obsession with materialistic economic-financial growth
is symptomatic of a global societal schizophrenia.
Indeed,
because it is uncontrolled,
left in the hands of the markets and the short term,
it is the root cause
not only of the major economic and financial, political and social problems
of the 21st century
(speculation, stock market crashes, offshoring, unemployment, inequalities,
slavery and impoverishment of 99% of humanity…),
it also becomes all the more clearly excessive in the extreme
when it proves to be the root cause of our energy and ecological problems.
Carried along by its own momentum,
growth takes us with it in a competitive, consumerist and productivist dynamic
that is both excessive and superfluous, destructive and harmful,
like a chronic disease
whose viruses are frustration, greed, selfishness, pride, resentment, malice,
will to harm, ignorance, suffering and hopelessness,
which
– as it has happened too many times in the past,
but never with such great power, our power of destruction never having been as immense as it is now –
will eventually bring about the greatest cataclysms,
the greatest horrors and the greatest inhumanities of all times combined.
Inescapable is the point
beyond which growth becomes the origin of its own degeneration.
A humanity that must grow ever more and ever faster
necessarily grows exponentially.
The crazy and inhuman race of the capitalist productivist model
based on every man for himself and inequality
can therefore only get worse and worse, faster and faster
and have costs that are not only quantifiable and financial,
but also and above all completely out of all measure and proportion
in terms of democratic, social, human and environmental costs.
What grows fast grows old fast,
and what grows poorly and grows fast grows worse the faster it grows.
It is easy to observe that the smaller organisms are,
the more hyperactive they are and the faster their heartbeat,
the shorter their life expectancy, the faster they die.
What is true for an organism,
a structure of matter, the structure of life or of the universe
is also true for life in society, for the lives of men, women and children:
Any organism that harms its host
necessarily ends up harming itself,
faster and faster still.
This is true for an organization, an individual, a land,
a territory, a community, a state, a nation, a continent, a world.
The more the growth becomes a malignant excrescence,
the less it can be contained, controlled, healed.
If the range of our sight is limited to a few months, a few years at most,
then is our vision similar to that of very small animals?
There is a point of equilibrium
before degeneration when growth cannot carry on any longer
where maturity consists in the capacity to self-regenerate,
where survival depends on our ability to adapt
to our environment, to others, to ourselves, to all other forms of life.
If, according to Einstein,
space, matter and the speed of the elements transform time,
and conversely, if time modifies space,
then we would do well to adapt to our own spatiotemporal scale,
both as humans and on Earth,
because we are inextricably linked to it.
The cosmic age is immense
compared to the space-time scales of humankind,
and if, as most mathematicians, physicists and astrophysicists say,
time probably had no beginning,
then what happens to time at the ends of space?
Will it only have an end?
The future in this sense is probably infinite and time eternal…
However,
between the finite and the infinite,
between the ‘non-start’ and the ‘non-end’,
between being and nothingness,
between the infinitely large and the infinitely small,
multiple spatiotemporal balances coexist
on multidimensional, interrelated, interlocking, entangled,
extremely complex and subtle scales
and subject us, all that lives and is alive,
to fragility, disease, death, the invincible ephemeral, and relativity.
As opposed to growth at all costs,
whose added value all too often proves destructive and therefore negative,
there is a balance to be found
between increasing the real value of everything we do and produce,
the sustainability of life on earth and the satisfaction of humanity.
When you are fully developed and happy,
when you feel fulfilled by life,
what else do you need?
Harmony is a Promised Land.
Will we be able to get there in time?
*
Cosmic Guests
Like any decent guest,
we must have consideration for the ones who welcome us into their home.
The Earth is our hostess
and we are all invited to sail on our beautiful, small planet
within immeasurable, infinite space time dimensions.
A hyper-reality that Humanity will only ever be able to touch
with its heart and mind?
*
Speed and inertia.
Like in a speeding car,
we, the human race, cannot hope to continue
at this unbridled pace of development
without running the risk of fatally crashing into hurdles
that we will not have been able to avoid
because we will not have seen them coming,
because the crash will come too fast, too soon.
All of us dragged into the systemic race for profit,
can’t we slow down to take some distance and think,
adjust our vision to have time to react and influence the course of events?
In order to be able to move forward
without running too much risk,
without risking getting stuck or going off course,
losing all sense of direction,
and sooner or later running into an obstacle,
there is a reasonable and reasoned speed, or rhythm,
which allows, when it proves indispensable, to veer off course.
By seeing better and further,
by seeing more clearly through space and time,
only a civilization
which has reached a rational and appropriate cruising speed
can avoid and prevent the dangers facing it,
because it can see them coming.
Only a world civilization
based on moderate, wise, targeted and efficient development
can therefore adapt to the changes linked to history and evolution,
without throwing fuel on the fire and provoking even greater cataclysms,
without suffering the full impact
of unbridled, voracious, greedy global economic and financial development based on victory or failure only, success or precariousness only,
like a schizophrenic and neurotic system,
completely unbalanced, an unequal and tyrannical, ultra-competitive system
at the service of a minority
that is itself drawn into this historical dynamic
that causes them to completely lose their footing
as well as any form of reason or rationality,
any notion of collective destiny.
Only a humanity
that is moving towards an optimal, appropriate pace of development,
neither too fast nor too slow,
can meet its upcoming challenges without great difficulty.
Technological innovation at any price and at any speed,
innovation for innovation’s sake,
made urgent and necessary by the race for profit
rather than by fundamental need,
offers only partial and biased solutions,
at best insufficient, at worst dangerous,
like GMOs for instance, or any form of manipulation of living things
which are all the more risky as innovation is dictated by greed.
Even if none of them is bad in and of itself
and scientific progress is,
when wisely developed and implemented,
a source of endless wonder and definite advancement for humanity,
in this highly competitive capitalist context,
put together, all too often all our innovations
only exacerbate our problems
by exacerbating the problems of pollution, the balance of power,
domination and unreasonableness.
It cannot be clearer and more visible
that we are very good at innovation
in terms of packaging, rhetorical, commercial and advertising embellishments,
or at following the movement instilled by collective dynamics,
but really bad, or in any case, very underperforming
in terms of planetary and structural challenges,
in the humanistic sense of these words.
The capacity of the system to transform itself
for the common good and the happiness of humanity
is proportionally inverse to our excesses in terms of greed and inhumanity,
and, above a certain threshold, proportionally inverse to our speeding.
In other words,
the inertia of the system is directly proportional to our excesses.
Indeed,
does the system not ask us to produce more and more, faster and faster,
while at the same time its slowness and inefficiency in transforming itself
to meet today’s major challenges is legendarily, historically pitiful?
The question is not so much
whether we prefer all our gadgets
to both our material and spiritual well-being.
The question is whether we, as individuals and as a species,
prefer to be free or to be slaves,
to be balanced or unbalanced,
to be wise or to be crazy.
The cure for madness is the principle of reality.
Wisdom is to adjust one’s speed to the space-time circumstances.
*
Today’s wisdom, foresight and justice, or the lack of them,
forge tomorrow’s world.
*
* * *
*
The law of supply and demand
*
Price and value
In addition to the issues of money, taxation and the sharing of work and wealth,
one of the debates raging these days is whether we should let the markets decide on the prices of goods
– and by extension, on life in society –
in other words, whether we should or can influence,
directly or indirectly, in one way or another,
the setting of prices.
The question could be summed up as follows:
Is it possible to find a way to set prices
so that they both reflect the real cost and value of production for humanity as a whole
and induce behaviour that is beneficial to humanity as a whole?
This leads to the following question:
is it possible for the cost of a good or service
to be equal to its utility and real value to society?
Is there a way of setting prices
that is as fair as possible for society as a whole?
In other words,
if the price of a resource must initially at least cover its operating costs,
can and should the price of a resource
reflect its usefulness and real value to humanity?
*
The law of supply and demand
Today,
it is more or less the law of supply and demand that sets prices.
Pricing by the law of supply and demand
consists of two main mechanisms:
1. Fixation by the relationship between need and scarcity of the product.
The rarer a product is, and the greater the need,
the more expensive it is.
And conversely,
the more abundant it is, and the less need there is,
the cheaper it is.
2. Competitive pricing
between different suppliers who all aspire to be as competitive as possible,
which has the effect of driving prices down.
At a certain time and on a certain scale,
confined within a framework defined by certain spatio-temporal dimensions,
the law of supply and demand
may well have been relevant as a tool for spontaneous price fixing,
– although I doubt that it worked and will ever work
without any sustained citizen and institutional vigilance –
in the international historical context of the 21st century and beyond,
it is clear that this law is showing its limits.
Above all,
compared to the humility and/or extreme poverty of the vast majority of humanity,
the concentration of astronomical and gigantic sums of money
in the hands of an ultra-small part of the population
combined with the money creation usurped by the big private banks
literally distorts the game of supply and demand:
Titanic inequalities
radically put the relationships of power out of balance,
all the more so in a world dominated by money
where, contrary to ancient times, all forms of solidarity are disappearing
in favour of commodification, monetarisation and financialisation
in the extreme.
In other words,
since the richest have all the money or almost all the money,
and therefore the power that goes with it,
the rest of humanity becomes their slave.
I remind you that on January 1, 2017,
8 people own as much as the poorest half of humanity.*
* https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world
Indeed,
it is clear that today the price of resources does not reflect their values.
They are either undervalued or overvalued.
Indeed,
and this will become clearer and clearer as we study the issue further,
prices reflect the imbalances
between the ultra-rich and powerful of all nationalities on the one hand,
and the rest of humanity on the other…
First of all, and somewhat mockingly,
we can note that, notwithstanding their competitive pricing,
in many respects prices today are set
less in relation to the costs of the product or service in question
than in relation to the ability and willingness of consumers to afford them.
The proof of this is the super-rich
who are willing to pay thousands of euros for a single night in a hotel,
or rather in a palace, as they say.
On a more serious note,
it is now well known that through investments or disinvestments
made at the cost of millions of dollars per micro-second,
a trader or a computer can influence the price of rice
or any other commodity essential to the survival of entire populations,
and thus condemn hundreds of thousands,
if not millions of men, women and children to starvation or even death
without their being able to do anything about it.
Who could say nowadays
that the law of supply and demand serves the common interest,
and not the interests of the rich and influential elites?
*
Race to the bottom
Moreover,
if according to the law of supply and demand,
the price of a resource is determined by its scarcity or abundance,
then it is inevitable and quite observable that in a context of austerity (or not)
where competition and poverty
are either already widespread or becoming so,
herd behavior,
– which consists in producing and selling what seems to have already worked
in order to take as little risk as possible –
crystallizes and causes an overabundance
not only of standardized products but also of patterns of conduct,
which of course makes things even worse.*
* This would not be so much of a problem in itself
if the products in question were eco-responsible,
if they were no longer programmed for premature obsolescence
and if they did not pollute the planet in every way.
The inevitable fall in prices that follows
in turn causes downward pressure on labour costs and wages,
which is seriously problematic for workers and farmers in particular,
and for the world in general.
Incidentally,
the generalized fall in prices is not so much in question here
as the levelling down of both prices and the standard of living
of the majority of the world’s population,
a phenomenon known as deflation
which, in pure economic terms, is at least as serious as hyperinflation.
More and more people
can buy less and less food or products apart from the cheapest,
which then creates a downward spiral
where all these elements reinforce each other:
Risk-taking becomes more and more risky,
prices have to fall even further
and the risk of bankruptcy grows in inverse proportion;
the cost of labour and wages have to fall accordingly;
the quality of things produced as well as the way they are produced
have to decline too as a result;
standardization of society,
waste, superfluity and pollution get worse and worse,
poverty and inequality run deeper and deeper.
Moreover,
it goes without saying
that when markets or investors invest in a particular company,
it is to profit from it.
In the sense that when the value of a company’s shares falls,
the profits of all investors fall with it,
as a result, not only does herd behavior take precedence over individual will,
but the will to grow also becomes maximal, short-sighted, eternal and systematized,
and the markets greedy, blind and irrational.
There is no end to this infernal spiral,
apart from total economic, social, ecological and political disaster.
Deflation is worse than inflation:
Everyone is fighting for increasingly scarce money.
And everything is going down:
Prices, wages, quality, freedom, democracy, humanity…
And investors now are only investing in companies
that are part of this ecocidal and enslaving, humanicidal logic.
We cannot say this enough:
The consequences of the apparent success or benefits of mimetic behavior
conditioned by economic dynamics
dominated by ultra-competition, ultra-cupidity and ultra-precariousness
are necessarily counterproductive, destructive, self-destructive for everyone,
without exception.
When there is not enough money in the system
because the vast majority of the available money
is in the hands of a tiny minority,
as far as humanity is concerned,
no virtuous economic dynamic can be set up,
neither efficiently nor sustainably.
The less money there is in the system,
the greater the pressure to acquire as much as possible,
which obviously only makes the situation worse.*
*That is why it would be unjust to condemn without appeal
the most well-to-do, who are also ‘victims’
of themselves and of a psycho-socio-historical dynamic
of which few of us, and few of them, are aware.
This does not mean, of course, that we should not tackle
the sources of these extremely serious problems.
Thus,
there is no reason to think that humanity will change anything decisive
or will engage in a different and salutary path
without somehow restoring the equilibrium,
however relative and humanly possible its objectives may be,
by repossessing at least part of the wealth
monopolized by the elite of the ultra-rich
as well as the prerogative of monetary creation and management
by virtue of the inalienable, irreducible, incompressible and indispensable right
of the perpetuation of the human species.
As a consequence,
the balance of power between supply and demand
must not be the only element that determines and decides
the value of essential things that are useful to everyone,
because this confrontation encourages greedy, disembodied, dehumanized
and, in this sense, necessarily blind, stupid and narrow-minded behaviour.
Isn’t the person who has nothing
necessarily at the mercy of the person who has everything?
Mostly,
since it is in the very nature of the economic actor
whose primary objective is the maximization of profits
to seek to control the price of things
and therefore the law of supply and demand,
the theory of the perfect market
according to which the calculating and greedy mechanics
of the larger systemic economic market
automatically and perfectly would find the right balance between supply and demand
so as to set the right price on things
and thus work for the well-being of the greatest number
is an illusion, an intrinsic aberration, a practical impossibility.
From this point of view,
the law of supply and demand
is at best a very imperfectly effective tool or index for balancing prices
and adjusting the real value and function of things
with regard to society and the general interest.
It is at worst a decoy
to justify the exploitation of man by man, injustice, poverty and inequality,
and in the worst case scenario slavery and authoritarianism.
The situation in which we find ourselves
is all the more irrational and absurd
since, in theory, the law of the market predicts that the scarcer a resource is,
the more demand increases in relation to supply, the more its price rises,
and that, conversely, the more abundant a resource is in relation to demand,
the more its price falls.
But nowadays, in our society,
that’s not even the case:
Indeed,
the gaping inequalities
distort the supposedly subtle and efficient balance of supply and demand
in favor of the wealthiest minority
at the expense of the rest of the population:
Since in an unequal system
there will always be people who can afford to buy certain commodities
such as land and real estate for example,
which in terms of investment, we know are ‘sound investments’,
and which, let’s not forget, were at the root of the financial cataclysm of 2007-2008,
fewer and fewer people can become owners or afford products, whether vital or not,
which have become objects of speculation, capitalisation and/or accumulation
and whose prices therefore do not fall or do not fall sufficiently
in comparison with the economic and financial realities
of the majority of the population and society,
contrary to the very logic of the law of supply and demand.
The proof is the number of homeless people
compared to the number of empty houses!
The worst thing is that, in addition to empty housing,
in every major city in the world, the price per square meter is skyrocketing.
The nonsense is staggering.
Injustice is foul.
Outrage should be at its peak.
Thus,
the greatest supporters of neoliberalism and economic ‘laissez-faire’
betray their own words and theories?
Who is surprised by this?
We are not even talking here about the huge sums of money
spent on luxury products that are futile to say the least,
but whose real costs with respect to the protection of the biosphere,
the Earth and the rights of humans and living things
are huge.
If the majority of the population has little or no money,
how is it possible to create a society
that is economically, monetarily, financially
and therefore socially and politically dynamic and healthy?
It is impossible.
Deregulated and left to its own devices,
without any reasoned, fair and institutional control,
the law of the market is a disembodied dynamic
which does not see and does not think,
which has neither heart nor soul,
and is motivated only by the lure of profit.
It is an intrinsically blind and ruthless money-making machine,
at best corrupting the system, institutions, companies and people,
at worst criminal.
Should we let a blind and illusory law,
the soulless and heartless “invisible hand”, with no wisdom or intelligence,
dictate humanity’s destiny?
This blind idolatry of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market
has led us into such a situation
that we could call it, had we been believers,
the hand of the devil,
certainly.
Should we really let the law of supply and demand,
the market law par excellence,
dictate our lives and our destinies
to the point where we end up with such discrepancies, such imbalances
between the cost, value, utility, benefit and price of things?
Or is there a way to change this law when that would prove beneficial?
The point is not to reject this law of supply and demand
and arbitrarily start setting prices, as in the Soviet Union,
but only to ask whether it is possible to wisely address
all the problems it entails.
We will show that the answer is clear,
that the answer lies not so much in the relevance of ideas isolated from each other
but in the relevance of systemic dynamics.
Indeed,
when dynamics are systemic and universal,
their consequences are gigantic.
Flowers, fruits and vegetables live off bees,
just as bees live off the flowers of fruits and vegetables.
The combination of these life forms
creates a dynamic with cascading consequences:
Without them,
no civilization would be possible.
Without them,
we might not even have appeared on the surface of the Earth.
Just because bees are patient workers only at the first level of production
does not mean that they should be forgotten and sacrificed
on the sacrosanct altar of financial profit and the law of the market,
simply because they are fragile and defenceless.
We still have the chance to consume fruit and vegetables
as a result of their indispensable work.
In exchange for their gigantic, free, non-chargeable work
of feeding us, of feeding a good part of humanity,
it is with all our gratitude that we should pay them back,
not with our indifference and carelessness, or even our malfeasance.
Market shortcomings must be brought under control.
The only way to properly, wisely and consciously master the markets
without being arbitrary and once again falling into error,
is to understand the heart of the system in order to change it in depth.
Transforming our perception of the world and the economic sphere,
taking back the reins of monetary creation,
taking back the reins of monetary management (of finance), and investments,
reducing inequalities, making tax havens obsolete, and enhancing, embellishing democracy,
are the keys to the inevitable, vital and inexorable metamorphosis of the species,
and above all, to its survival.
*
Nothing will stop us
If the basis of the law of supply and demand
is that the scarcer a resource is, the more expensive it is,
the more profitable it becomes to exploit it,
the more the person, whether legal or private, who has possession of it,
or the patents to exploit it, and the power to sell it,
will want to exploit it in order to make as much profit as possible.
That is obvious.
Today this rule lies at the heart of our market society,
presides over life in society and,
as much as it forges our inter-economic relations in an absurd frenzy,
freezes our hearts and souls
in a hyper-negative and even cursed dynamic,
as in a super bad delirium.
We are all affected,
we are all condemned by this systemic and negative dynamic,
like an infernal spiral that drags us all down,
always faster and always more irresistibly,
as if towards a black hole,
towards the bottom, the absurd and the terrible outcome.
Unsparingly,
this drift erected as a planetary system
reigns supreme over the entire world.
Thus,
if humanity remains subject to this diktat of the markets,
it is easy and terrible to observe and predict
that we will exploit all the resources of our Earth,
to the last drop, to the exhaustion of all our resources,
to the last hope, to mass extinction.
Indeed,
the closer we will get to the depletion and total disappearance of a resource,
such as oil for example, the more expensive that resource will be,
and therefore a source of profit.
No matter how much they may clothe their speeches
with all the possible ecological virtues,
the inexorability of this sad dynamic is all the more certain
since inequalities are such that on the one hand,
there will always be people, legal or private, rich enough to get them,
and on the other hand people, legal or private, poor enough
to participate in their exploitation,
because, as a simple question of survival for them and their families,
in the short term at least, this dynamic system, or systemic dynamic,
leaves them no choice but to do so.
Just look at the poachers in Africa who,
in order to sell rhino horns to Asia,
for so-called therapeutic virtues related to male virility and so on,
are hunting this animal
– even though the rhino is now on the verge of extinction.
And despite this, they continue to do so,
because the rarer a resource is, the more expensive it is…
This animal,
which, contrary to appearances, is so kind and gentle and likeable,
is tortured and mutilated:
his horn, even his mouth, are cut off and left to die in great pain.
The dynamic that this implies is a total nightmare
that will soon be, that already is, an undeniable reality.
If nothing is done,
we will fish, hunt, exploit and consume all species, all resources
to the last drop and the last specimen,
to the point of irreparable and irreversible extinction.
Let us also think of the sharks
whose fins are cut off and whose bodies are thrown overboard, still alive,
and which are condemned to certain death in the agony of asphyxiation.
If, on the other hand,
according to the law of supply and demand,
the more endangered a species is, the rarer it is,
the rarer it is, the more expensive it is,
the more we can pride ourselves on being able to pay for it,
to afford it, to offer it to our guests,
the more reasons we have, out of economic necessity,
to want to hunt this species
in order to sell it at the highest price.
Just to get their fins,
not only are we condemning sharks to a painful and inevitable death,
and of course, endangering their species in general,
but we are also threatening the whole balance of marine species in general.
All the more so
as these practices do not only concern sharks or only marine species,
super sadly, but obviously all species and resources of the entire planet,
minerals, oil and everything else,
oil which not only is becoming scarce and expensive,
but which is also the main cause of climate change…
Since everything is ruled by money,
you always have to earn more money to live.
Almost nothing is not ruled by money anymore.
That’s awful to say.
Even though we know full well that we will not last much longer,
it is this veneration of the markets, this adoration of the money god
by the completely senseless world oligarchy
that forces the world system, the humanity system,
to exhaust if not all of them,
in any case the most directly vital resources of the Earth system
in order to make cheap shit
we wouldn’t even need if we weren’t in a world ruled by ultra greed
and the ultra competitiveness that goes with it,
an evil, suicidal, murderous, criminal ideology…
All of us caught in the downward spiral,
whether we sell energy, chemicals or plastics, meat or fish,
all we want is to capture and sell, no matter what the cost,
as much as possible and as quickly as possible.
To make money.
Because everywhere in the world, more and more,
all and sundry, we are subjected to the ever more alienating,
ever more ruthless and intolerant,
ever more rubbish and evil diktat of money,
without which even the most basic rights are systematically denied us,
without which we no longer even have the right to live.
There is no other way to put it.
We are in a financial dictatorship.
It is ultra-clear.
So what is the alternative to ultra-competitiveness?
It’s like asking a smoker who has been diagnosed with cancer
and who would like to live a little longer:
the only way would be to do the opposite:
Quit smoking.
Since ultra-competitiveness is the problem,
the cure for ultra-competitiveness is the solution.
The only cure for dictatorship and tyranny
is tolerance, justice and democracy.
The only cure for chaos is harmony.
The only cure for division and confrontation
is union, dialogue and understanding.
The only remedy for imbalances and inequalities
is balance and solidarity.
The only cure for instability
is stability.
The only cure for insanity and violence
is wisdom and intelligence.
The only cure for the nightmare of war
is the union of the Earth.
To give up on our vanities, our follies of grandeur,
our absurd and so childish thirst for total power
is the beginning of change.
How can we take pride
in consuming a scarce or endangered species
simply because we have the money
to pay for this ultra-rare, ultra expensive and supposedly ultra-refined food,
especially ultra-refined because it is ultra expensive, isn’t it?
The rich pay hundreds of euros for a vulgar bottle of coke
in some ultra-prized palaces.
They don’t care.
They have the money to buy power.
They can afford everything.
We talked earlier about deflation.
But deflation is only a reality for the 99%.
For the 1%, it’s hyperinflation we must talk about.
Let’s call a spade a spade.
Their hyperinflation is largely financed by Quantitative Easing,
the money machine used by central banks,
particularly in the US and Europe,
which goes directly into the pockets of the big private banks,
and therefore the ultra-rich.
See the prices they are willing to pay for anything.
No need for figures:
Everybody knows that they sometimes dump millions of dollars into a party.
Millions of dollars for a fucking party.
Seriously?
It is the rule of money
imposed by people who do not want to lose a crumb of it in any way whatsoever
and who cling to a system that is bound to disappear
and for which the price they pay
depends not so much on the quality of what they buy
as on the symbol of power that this money bestows on them,
or at least that they think it bestows on them
by wasting all this money
while the vast majority of human beings are dying not to have any.
Since everything is ruled by money,
the simplest and most natural instincts of survival,
the simplest and most natural human instincts
such as the gift of the word and of intelligence, generosity, charity and humanism
are scorned and discouraged.
Since it endangers the world establishment’s 1%,
wisdom is seen as a threat, an enemy to be silenced.
Knowing how to give up this childish
but illusory and ephemeral semblance of power,
knowing with wisdom
when to give up a catch or the exploitation of a resource,
knowing how to give up the money it would bring in the short term
is already changing the course of events,
because all lives and all species are precious:
The great whole feeds them
and in return they feed and balance the great whole.
All lives, all species have their legitimate and divine place
within the great planetary and cosmic whole.
Therefore,
to work for life and for the living
is to work for a salvation
that extends far beyond ourselves and thus uplifts ourselves.
To change ourselves is to change history.
From the perspective of history,
it is moving from insignificance to heroism.
If God is the creator of life and the living, including humanity,
changing is, in the eyes of the Divinity, whoever He or She may be,
being an authentic and memorable hero,
even if forever unknown or anonymous.
To realize that continuing to let the law of the market decide everything,
absolutely everything on Earth
leads us straight to disaster
equals embodying the only possible future:
the survival of the species.
There is a limit beyond which the soothing force of trade,
the “gentle commerce”, as Montesquieu called it,
ceases to operate.
There is an urgent, urgent need to balance all this.
Since the physical and economic
as well as the metaphysical, psycho-affective, social and political dimensions
are paramount and decisive for the realization of the well-being of all,
there is a limit beyond which the law of the market can no longer be decisive, let alone sovereign,
without transforming the social and personal space into a dead-end arena
where the fierce, cold and ruthless struggle of the strongest
is the law everywhere on Earth,
in all earthly and social dimensions,
even in the innermost reaches of humanity’s psyche.
When the arena becomes the whole earth, there is nowhere else to go.
The earth itself becomes an open-air prison.
When the arena becomes the whole earth,
even the so-called ephemeral ‘winners’,
blinded by the illusion of their own vanity,
by definition doomed to escape them forever and ever,
are trapped in this evil and malevolent dynamic
that extends over the whole earth.
Is it because greed has become universal and planetary
that some have even bought territories on the moon?
Is it because they decently hope to be able to emigrate to the moon?
Do they really believe that they could survive there for a long time?
Or on Mars?
Let us be realistic.
The same way we are programmed
to speak a language, to make sense and meaningful sentences,
we are programmed for love and generosity.
Generosity of heart, mind and soul is intrinsically human.
As freedom is intrinsically free,
no one can control the free nature of generosity and benevolence.
Not choosing the path of generosity and greatness of mind
is choosing the inhuman,
it is choosing what is not meant for us.
For all of us who are human,
it is dying as individuals and as a species.
And yet,
if they could, the proponents of this system,
made by and for the extremely richer 1% of humanity,
would render love and generosity lucrative.
The good news is
that we can all touch the immense, ineffable and unspeakable
nature of generosity and intelligence,
all of us, without exception, even the 1%.
Indeed,
because benevolence and generosity are intrinsically human,
no special qualities are required to be benevolent and generous.
The second good news
is that we no longer have a choice
and we will get what we deserve.
If we make the right choice to recognize each other in this world,
not only will we be saved,
but we will also be happy, or at least fulfilled.
All of us have every reason to recognize ourselves in humanity,
it is as simple as that.
To think ourselves as a world,
to launch a great debate in the world on the Internet
with the following question and objective:
Since we are all inseparably connected to each other by the Earth,
what form do we want to give to the world, to this world, to this Earth,
which is the same for everyone?
The question is simple:
Chaos or harmony?
Death or life?
This is the global debate
that must be launched throughout the world
by those who know that the solution lies in the union of solidarity
of the peoples and nations of planet Earth.
Let a non-negligible portion of humans all around our planet
participate in spreading the following simple message:
Just believe in harmony
and harmony will be.
Just believe in union,
and union will be.
Believing in it, in complete freedom, without any obligation
in the four corners of the world, is to show the way.
In every sense of the word,
the way is universal.
Harmonization is the path that all Gods, all Goddesses,
give us, show us, offer us.
It is the only thing to know.
Only the harmony of the world can save us.
This is the new prophet.
Nothing else can save us,
but nothing else can make us happier, more fulfilled,
and change our lives for much more good and much less bad.
Because nothing and no one
can stop the common knowledge of humanity,
except its own self-destruction,
from a human point of view,
this knowledge is both inescapable and invincible.
All it takes is to believe in the universal
to eventually develop immense gifts.
Since everything is perception,
our greatest obstacles are only chimeras, pure collective mental illusions.
Free yourselves from them.
Free yourselves
from your prejudices and from all those dogmas
that you are so falsely proud to repeat
without ever really, sincerely, deeply, 100% thinking about or reflecting on.
Free yourselves
and then you will automatically be heroes and heroines.
For you will have brought down the greatest of all walls:
fear and ignorance.
You may not have the money and the higher status you dream of so much,
but you will embody courage, wisdom and freedom.
What is the point of having a status, be it hero or heroine,
if deep down inside we are neither heroes nor heroines?
On the contrary,
anyone who is truly heroic
does not need to have the status that goes with it.
There’s the difference.
There are no technical, technological, economic, financial or political obstacles
standing in the way of this new path
that cannot be overcome.
Since everything is perception,
there is nothing to do but see.
The mutual recognition of peoples in each other,
only the recognition of the world in itself
is the only way.
The path that leads across borders and across oceans
is just wonderful, out of all proportion
to what humankind has ever known before.
*
Systemic schizophrenia.
If systemic and systematic profit maximization is the rule,
if the value of money is primarily a matter of individual and subjective perception,
then all our supposedly scientific and intractable
economic, monetary and financial measures
are necessarily biased and tend to reflect nothing more than our greed.
Blind greed which,
because it is incapable of seeing and recognizing
the orders of magnitude imposed by the incompressible reality,
nevertheless tries with all its might, in a narrow-minded and stupid way,
to make us believe that there can be a future and a possible place on Earth
for a species that destroys both its environment and itself.
If, on the one hand,
the value of money created out of nothing
is measured by the perception we have of money,
if in addition, this perception is set up as a system,
and if, on top of that, this money exists only because we are in debt,
then the value of money not only swells, as a bubble swells,
but also twists in a kind of strange bipolarity, schizophrenic
and as evil as possible:
For the vast majority,
where poverty dominates, money is in short supply,
so money becomes “expensive”, very expensive, more and more expensive,
poverty sets in and takes over…
And on the other hand,
there are the elites,
for whom a million dollars compared to 100 million
or even billions of dollars
is a drop in the ocean of lucre
where becoming as rich as possible
to secure a future that is uncertain and ephemeral by nature
reinforces the systemic dynamic and becomes the norm.
Necessarily,
in this world of extreme inequality,
money loses its value for some,
and its scarcity intensifies
until it becomes a matter of life or death,
intolerable and absurd for everyone else.
It is a matter of perception,
of subjective and predictable perception.
Between extreme and indecent wealth on the one hand,
and poverty, uprooting, slavery and total despair on the other,
money today takes on proportions
that are as extreme and bipolar as they are schizophrenic and violent.
Today,
these extreme inequalities are presented and imposed
as the foundation of the global and planetary system.
A system
that encourages not only the greatest imbalances for the greatest profits,
but in addition, from the richest to the poorest,
generalized insanity.
*
To have or not to have
In a world that shows no mercy for those who have nothing,
the compulsive desire to accumulate material or monetary wealth
originates first of all in the fear of lacking and finding oneself with nothing.
Then comes the will to forge an identity
by identifying with the power that this wealth brings and represents.
“There’s class warfare, all right,
but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
said Mr. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html
*
When the law of the market
shorts out common sense and solidarity.
In order to prevent anyone from benefiting
for free from the food they throw away,
in order to prevent people in need
who are so hungry and whose distress is such
that they have to scavenge,
until recently (2015) in France,
the supermarkets used to pour bleach* on the contents of their dustbins.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/05/law-france-supermarkets-food-waste/394481/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/is-frances-groundbreaking-food-waste-law-working
Was it so,
and is it still so in many countries all over the world
for the sole and good reason that, if a large number of needy people
stopped giving them what little money they have
that could harm their turnover?
You find that revolting? And stupid?
Of course,
the stated and ‘legal’ reason behind this behaviour
is that a person (or their relatives in case of death)
who has eaten a food product
that is past its use-by date risks becoming ill or worse
could sue and throw some of the managers of the store in question in jail,
and thus tarnish their image.
It is, however, common knowledge
that many retailers do not hesitate to repackage their products
and change their labels
in order to sell what is no longer legally saleable
and therefore objectively dangerous,
especially since they do so most often with fish or meat
which are far more harmful to health
than any other product not containing any animal flesh.
It is also well known that
as soon as they do not look satisfactory,
all ‘fresh’ fruit or vegetables are thrown in the trash,
even though they are still fit for consumption,
so this first argument does not stand up to scrutiny.
In short,
we will avoid bothering our reader even more by dwelling on this debate
whose primary goal is to protect the interests of mass distribution
by diverting the attention of citizens and society
from the primordial, humanistic and life-saving issues.
The question is not so much who is right or wrong,
or even to seek to protect one interest at the expense of another…
The basic question is
either to aim for ultra-competitiveness for the benefit of a minority,
or to favour harmony, balance and solidarity for the benefit of the majority.
Isn’t the fact here that we forbid any human being
to take the risk of feeding himself or herself when,
if he or she did not, they and their children would starve to death?
How absurd is that?
These ultra-regulatory policies for the underprivileged
and lax or protective policies for the privileged is, needless to say,
typical of the way our society functions,
typical of our deregulated market economy
based on scarcity, inequality and the resulting imbalance of power relations.
It is true
that another symptom of this chronic schizophrenic dysfunction
of lax regulations on the one hand
and highly coercive regulations on the other
are those currently applied to ownership and patenting,
particularly of knowledge or seeds
which used to be provided free of charge by nature
and which farmers and workers on Earth
are now prohibited from having or using
for the sole purpose of protecting the economic interests of the agri-food industries,
large GMO seed companies such as Monsanto
and other petrochemical consortiums
that produce pesticides for agriculture on a very large scale.
Needless to say,
the sole purpose of these unfair laws
is to protect the big fish and the big corporations
to the detriment of small individuals, producers or companies.
Thus,
even when there is total availability of the resource on the supply side
and an immense and compelling need on the demand side,
when supermarkets try to get rid of products they consider useless,
solidarity is of course shorted out.
From an environmental point of view,
the logic of these supermarkets
that it is better to fill the bins and increase waste
than to help starving people fill their stomachs
is an aberration.
As far as GMO crops are concerned,
to legalize genetic modification on a massive scale is a risk we take.
So be it.
That’s another matter, that’s another debate.
However,
prohibiting any independence
from the big agro-food and ‘seed’ industries by privatization,
by the deprivation of the right to use seeds provided free of charge by nature,
by the delegalization of the free possession of plants and seeds,
by taking away from nature, from life, its everlasting renewal
and its status as a public good,
with the aim of favouring the production and consumption of GMOs to the extreme
is an aberration from every point of view,
at best a complete and total, absolute and irrevocable error of judgement,
at worst insanity with consequences worthy of your worst nightmares.
When the gift and the selfless act are denied to such an extent,
we are reaching the height of preposterousness.
All the more so
when we consider that those who most need the gifts of nature
are the great majority of humanity, indeed humanity as a whole,
not only today, but also tomorrow and the day after tomorrow,
until the end of time.
And yet
we know that fundamental rights such as eating and drinking
denied to those who need them
are for them a vital, indispensable, and crucial need.
Truth be told,
for each and every one of us, whether rich or poor,
the respect, or lack thereof, of human rights
is decisive for the quality of our life and our destiny,
to such an extent that,
having never really experienced the true rule of law,
we cannot even be aware of it.
And conversely,
because we have never been fully aware of it,
because we have never been able to fully experience it,
we therefore too often judge it to be too utopian and unrealistic,
precisely because our greatest mistake,
our most delusional and demented illusion
is precisely to believe that an unjust and corrupt world
is desirable, just and sustainable.
Because justice and injustice are incompatible,
because the rule of law and the rule of lawlessness are incompatible,
even though the path towards justice and law may not have an end,
even though our quest may be infinite and eternal,
there is no possible confusion or amalgamation:
Either we are heading towards justice and law,
or we are heading towards injustice and lawlessness.
Let’s make the absolute proof:
Let’s imagine that everyone believed that human rights were a pipe dream
and that for ‘pragmatic’, ‘realpolitik’ reasons,
the whole world, all nations, all societies should abandon them,
then there would be no one left to trust,
everyone would become the traitor and, or the enemy of everyone else,
and conversely,
the whole world would become the traitor, the executioner
and, or the enemy of everyone else.
That would be hell on earth.
Conversely,
let’s imagine that everyone thinks
that human rights are inalienable and sacred for each and every one of us,
then instantly and automatically,
the world would be at peace, in harmony with itself.
All of us would be safe, free, and at peace.
If we consider it unjust
to let our loved ones and fellow human beings suffer and die
because they do not have enough money to buy from us
what we have but do not fundamentally need,
then it is natural and legitimate to seek a new relative and fair balance
in the distribution of money and wealth,
through the sober and relative prosperity of each person,
in a new understanding of both our individual and collective rights and needs,
through a new meaning
given to civilization, solidarity, freeness, wealth, money, work, economics and life.
Harmony alone
can trigger new virtuous systemic dynamics
that can at once give birth to, offer and perpetuate
what is most essential, most rare and most expensive:
Freedom, joy, peace, serenity,
our loved ones, life, ourselves.
Because if we cannot respond to the universal challenges awaiting us,
the consequences of our decisions or non-decisions,
of our actions or non-actions
will be such that, sooner or later,
they will affect us all,
in any case the vast majority of us.
In this sense,
the following question is as primordial
as it is fundamental, urgent, inevitable:
Is it fair and legitimate to waste resources and food
while millions or even billions of human beings
are dying of hunger and of not having the minimum subsistence
for the sake of privatisation, competitiveness and property rights?
For the sake of capitalist ideology
and the sacrosanct, all-powerful law of the market?
It is not because domination, violence and war
have been and remain historical empirical realities,
undeniable but unjust and destructive in the strongest senses of these terms
that they should be instituted as the foundation of international law,
that they should corrupt the law
and pervert the whole of society, the whole system,
the whole of humanity in the most irresponsible and illegitimate manner?
That would be absurd, wouldn’t it?
Failure to address the flaws
inherent to markets and the law of supply and demand
is at best akin to being guilty of failing to assist a person in danger,
at worst to committing a crime, if not a genocide.
To encourage poverty, suffering and chaos,
or not to seek to combat them,
not to seek to free ourselves
from the evil grip of institutionalized predation
is a choice that we make, that we have made,
and for which we must assume the ever-growing, systemic and chronic consequences.
We must therefore be able to reorganize the rules
of the monetary-economic-financial game
both directly, by simply taxing the highest incomes at planetary level,
and indirectly but more profoundly
by changing the monetary-economic-financial rules
precisely in order to aim for the fairest possible balances,
in the awareness that if harmony exists, perfect equality is impossible,
everything being a question of scales and relative equilibria.
A loss of income of 500 dollars
is not much for those who earn 30,000 dollars per month
but is immeasurable for those who earn 1,000 dollars per month or less.
Sharing and solidarity are indispensable
not only because they are necessarily positive virtues
that induce necessarily positive logics,
but also because we no longer have the luxury or the time to do otherwise.
Since it modifies the balance of power between the parties
involved in the tension between scarcity and the urgency of need,
to seek a balance between the measured availability of resources on the one hand
and the more or less vital urgency of need on the other
is essential to effectively keep the law of supply and demand under control,
because then, with basic needs assured,
scarcity no longer prevails and the balance of power can be restored.
Indeed,
the more basic needs are shared by a large number of people,
the more balanced, democratic, just and sustainable a society is.
This is the goal of any organized community.
That is the goal of any meaningful policy.
This is all the more conceivable
given that productivity gains in the major Western economies
have increased by more than 200% between 1970 and 2015.*
There is no higher goal for a nation
than to establish harmony within itself,
among all its people and all the organizations that make it up.
Indeed,
the relative balance of resource sharing
is the only way to overcome systemic predation:
Since no one is caught by necessity or fear of want,
no one in their right mind will jump at their neighbor’s throat
to take what they have.
As adults, we must get organized together
to face the future and reality together.
And to stop letting blind and self-deluding markets
decide the fate of mankind.
Is it because neo-liberals believe that economic planning is a bad thing
and systematically undermine it by associating it with Soviet communism
that we must refrain from trying to change the course of events even a little,
that we must refrain from planning,
with wisdom, reason and pragmatism, the energy transition,
the development of local economies and local distribution networks,
sources of activities and jobs
that could amount to millions for all the concerned areas*,
the development of undeniable remedies for large-scale pollution,
ecocides and greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere
when all these measures could prevent us from all future disasters,
when there are so many signs,
when we know that action is so urgently needed?
* https://fortune.com/2017/01/27/solar-wind-renewable-jobs/
https://www.chooseenergy.com/news/article/report-says-clean-energy-create-65-million-new-jobs/
https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2017/07/does-renewable-energy-create-jobs
The organization of the community or nation for the good of all
cannot be productive in the capitalist sense of the word.
The Nation sets the laws and ensures that the rules are respected
so that the great collective whole functions
as efficiently and harmoniously as possible.
Thus,
every nation has the duty to finance itself* and those who compose it
in as fair and proportionate a manner as possible,
in the awareness that the reasoned organization of the nation
must be useful and profitable to all,
otherwise chaos and lawlessness, the law of the strongest,
the most unjust and the most ruthless,
will prevail.
*When money creation is sovereign,
then taxes exist only to limit inflation,
i.e. the excessive money supply in the economy and thus rising prices,
and not to enslave or impoverish some for the benefit of others.
We shall discuss this in more detail later.
*
Harm put to good use.
Generating harm, pollution, deprivation, depression, fault, disease, conflict,
is, as it were, to take advantage of what economists call
‘negative externalities’.
Not only do they not care
about the costs that industrialists inflict
on society, on the planet and on living things,
since these costs are neither measurable
nor taken into account in their balance sheets,
but they also use what Naomi Klein calls the ‘Shock Doctrine’ *
to sell or make the ‘rabble’ believe what they want.
*The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
Naomi Klein
Knopf Canada, 2007
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
When the market law of profit maximization is the only one to operate,
the excesses can be gigantic and even deadly.
For example, without a framework or ethics,
when I make money on illness, health might become an unhealthy business.
If there are cures and sick people to sell the cures to,
that’s the biggest windfall to make money.
This is of course justified and legitimate,
worthy of respect, honour and admiration
when this profit is not excessive and greed does not take over.
How about drugs, for example,
with dangerous side effects, though,
that are sometimes left on the market for decades?
What about the food industry?
Tobacco? Alcohol? Gambling? Porn?
The automobile industry?
If you had to choose, dear readers,
who among you would want firemen to charge you
such exorbitant amounts as the need you will have for them
when there is a fire in your house or apartment and you are trapped inside?
Indeed,
imagine that the firefighters arrive at your home
while your house is burning,
and that they engage in a commercial negotiation
dictated by the law of supply and demand?
How much would they charge you to save everything you own?
Who would be in a position of strength?
You, completely helpless,
or firefighters who have the material means to put out the fire?
Of course,
with a few billion dollars in your bank account,
that’s not a problem.
But what about you and me?
How much would we be willing to give the fire department
to put out the fire that’s ravaging our entire lives
if their services were subject to market principles?
Everything we have in our bank account?
Would that be enough?
Let’s imagine an even worse scenario:
Let’s imagine that the fire brigade,
now a private organization, a business like any other,
had the perverse idea of getting in touch with arsonists
that they could pay to set your house on fire
so that they, the fire brigade, a privatized capitalist organization,
could charge you the full price
to put out the fire in your house engulfed in flames.
Honor and respect to all firefighters around the world.
Their missions are immense and we are all indebted to them.
Our fiction is absurd.
And yet,
when will the day come when politicians and lobbies make up arguments
in favor of privatizing the firefighter function?
Take hospitals.
Apart from the fact that it is not your house but your body,
or that of a loved one that is being devoured by pain,
the logic is exactly the same.
And the crime is even worse.
And yet,
that’s a fact.
See the United States.
The privatization of hospitals
and the organized demolition of all social protection systems
is another proven and blatant example
of the misuse of progress and knowledge
through money and major systemic and ideological imbalances.
And yet,
God knows that in the face of disease, suffering and degeneration of the body,
the science of remedies is a gift, a divine gift…
Words are too weak to describe how immensely fertile and beneficial
the pharmaceutical secrets of living things are.
How many genuine doctors, nurses, researchers, professionals agree with this?
If they were given the choice
between a system dominated by money and the exploitation of our fellow humans
and a possible liberation from the grip of money,
how many of them would choose not to be authentic and humane?
We have so many discoveries to make.
We have so much at our disposal.
We can do so much.
Sadly,
when the objective is no longer the degree of good health of the population,
but the number of patients to be treated,
the danger becomes systemic and the problem takes on
disastrous, gigantic, civilizational and planetary proportions.
This logic, in the end, is fatal and destructive.
If there is little or no disease in the population,
these industries would lose their outlets.
Without sick people, there’s no profit.
Doctors, and all medical professionals, are wonderful.
They don’t choose this profession for the money,
because this job is a vocation.
Imagine if your doctor or the fireman
had the financial logic of a trader or a banker?
He could give you a loan in exchange for saving your life.
How much do you value your own life?
How much would you be willing to give, divided over a few years,
to save your own skin?
10,000 dollars?
100,000?
1,000,000,000?
Ten million?
More?
How much can you give me?
But please, give it all.
Even what you can’t, and can never have.
Alive but enslaved forever.
Would you like us to privatize the fire brigade?
Condition them on market ideology?
That all doctors, surgeons, nurses and nursing auxiliaries
be subject to the law of the globalized financial market?
We could multiply the examples.
Indeed,
if the hospitals and pharmacology are the medicine of the body,
school is the medicine of the soul, the collective soul, if there is one.
We will talk about it again in the dedicated book.
How about the privatization of the prison system in the USA,
where you are thrown in prison for very little?
In 2013, a man was sentenced to 20 years
for the possession of a half-ounce of marijuana…*
Only because over there,
the private prison lobby has become hyper-powerful…
As you will have understood,
when the fundamentalist capitalists of money-king, of money-god,
take possession of an industry,
it is the logic of profitability at all costs
that dominates all other considerations,
period.
Everyone suffers.
Everyone, without exception, even those who make an immediate,
and I fear, I hope, limited and ephemeral profit from it.
What company, what lobby
doesn’t encourage that which increases its profits?
In an economy where the law of profit reigns supreme,
all industries, all sectors are on the same boat.
This ideology,
which is radical and dangerous, extremist, totalitarian
and, in the eyes of humanity,
unsustainable, alienating, enslaving and even terrorist,
is the work of a dogmatic, mad dogmatic fundamentalism,
as we have rarely seen in the history of humanity.
Is it any wonder
that religious fundamentalisms are becoming more radical?
They are the reaction
as opposed to the fundamentalism of the market madmen,
like the negative of a photograph, like capitalism and communism,
they are the inverse reflection of each other,
one in greedy materialist fanaticism,
the other in a spirituality which, tragically, is taking seriously suicidal turns,
all these two great tendencies going in the same direction:
self-destruction.
Verily,
these two historical currents which are meeting at this very moment,
at the beginning of the third millennium,
express only the same despair:
Greedy ultra-materialism elevated to a supreme value
that doesn’t allow for any other.
We are thrown into a dynamic and systematic vicious circle
that is all the more aberrant
as extreme inequalities obviously reinforce the principle of scarcity
which in turn adds destructive strength and vigor
to the law of supply and demand,
to the law of the financial markets
and the domination of money over the world.
*
All that is sacred in this world
The worst part of all this is, as we have already said,
that the GDP only takes into account monetary exchanges,
while the destruction of life, human or otherwise,
is not accounted for in any way, shape or form
by the GDP or by anything else.
Under such conditions,
it does not matter what the destruction is
as long as the monetary exchange takes place.
Thus,
one of the many reasons why we do not protect the Earth and Humankind
is that pollution and ecological disaster, misfortune and disease
are considered as means to make profit,
and thus to raise the country’s GDP.
*
Capitalism and Militarism
Needless to say,
a nation must have a powerful defense,
that goes without saying.
However,
when the military weapons industries
have as their primary objective a maximized profit;
and when they can sell to all the countries of the world
according to the law of the market,
sometimes to the detriment of the very nation
which these industries come from
is an altogether different matter.
Since war, violence and destruction are,
like any other consumer product,
seen by the capitalist system based on profit at all costs
as a market to be tapped,
war can then also be commodified
and the arms industries of the world have a bright future in store.
In a system dominated by the tyranny of money and profit at all costs,
neither arms sales nor wars will stop.
The anthropologist Mr. David Graeber*
has demonstrated the relationship
between the power of money and militarism,
repressive power and imperialist will.
He demonstrated that the emergence of money throughout history
was linked with the need to create a repressive, predatory and imperialist force,
in other words with armed forces:
« There’s a reason why the wizard
has such a strange capacity to create money out of nothing.
Behind him, there’s a man with a gun.
True, in one sense, he’s been there from the start.
I have already pointed out that modern money is based on government debt,
and that governments borrow money in order to finance wars.
This is just as true today as it was in the age of King Phillip II.
The creation of central banks
represented a permanent institutionalization of that marriage
between the interests of warriors and financiers
that had already begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy
and that eventually became the foundation of financial capitalism. »
*David Graeber,
Debt, The first 5,000 years,
Melville House, 2011.
The power of debt-money, god-money, slavery-money,
and brute force, whose only argument, whose only rhetoric is violence,
can and do feed off each other.
The more inhumane, unjust and illegitimate our actions are,
the less we can argue for them,
the more we have to impose them in one way or another,
by force if necessary, which of course creates a new vicious circle.
Facts and history show us
that when a minority has the power to create money and control money,
then it is tempting for that negligible part of humanity
to foment discord and division,
to finance armies, wars, violence and destruction
in order to consolidate their power and retain their privileges,
and above all, for nothing to change.
“Divide to rule”.
“Divide to conquer”.
If we see today the astronomical military budget of the United States
correlated with the hegemony of the dollar
and the general direction the world is taking,
then it is increasingly likely that we will never get out of this.
It is more and more likely that we will self-destruct.
It is so sad to say, to see, to write, to feel.
There is no chance for peace.
By selling weapons on a massive scale,
we’re giving our own species no chance at all.
It is as if we wanted to curb drug addiction
by flooding the streets and markets
with drugs and narcotics of all kinds.
By manufacturing weapons on an industrial scale, in abundance,
by the millions, perhaps billions, no doubt, so as to sell them,
we are condemning ourselves to conflict, violence, war and division,
and leaving no chance for peace.
Why then is the United States military budget so exorbitant?
Because the markets are dominated, as in the United States,
by powerful capitalist arms industries
whose client is the US government?
Because the dollar is, still, the international currency of reference?
General Eisenhower,
the 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961,
nevertheless shared with us one of his greatest fears
by warning us about the military-industrial complex.
Today, the military-industrial, financial-government complex
has an even greater power than the one he feared so much.
Because what is scarce is expensive,
it is not surprising that capitalists are generally in favour of war,
in order to win contracts to rebuild,
to eliminate competitors, to weaken competition,
to make supply scarce, to raise prices, to enrich themselves,
to increase their wealth, power and privilege.
Because when growth and GDP stagnate,
destroying everything means ensuring easy profits.
Unfortunately, today,
while destruction seems likely,
reconstruction seems impossible.
Our destructive powers are far too great.
It’s terrible, tragic, massively damaging, unprecedented.
The employee of a private paramilitary agency,
tasked with pulling the trigger on American drones to kill fighters,
and eventually, ‘collaterally’ to use the fashionable term,
to murder innocent civilians, children and women
in countries that are enemies of the United States,
is paid $250,000 a year .
$250,000 a year is $20,000 a month.
$250,000 a year doing this job,
right next door to his house, behind a computer screen.
$250,000 a year to shoot human beings up
like some kind of video game???!?!?!
When with that money we could fund
a school, a hospital, the fire department,
alleviate misery and suffering.
It’s a total waste.
The nonsense is absolute.
Probably few people are candidates to make a living
out of killing people, children, mothers and fathers,
brothers and sisters, innocent husbands and wives
thousands of miles away from home behind a screen,
without any bravery.
Is it so high
because the price of giving up one’s dignity and humanity is so immense?
The ultra-militaristic American excesses are very worrying.
One cannot grant such budgets to the army, year after year,
without encouraging the use of force and war,
especially in such an ultra-capitalist context
where the strongest rule the law.
All this in the name of fighting a so-called enemy
that they create by their own actions,
their own political, economic and geostrategic decisions,
year after year, decade after decade?
It would be good for democracy and freedom in the world
if the world had no other master but itself.
It would be good if humanity had no master but itself.
The person or group that is given too much power
is always tempted, above a certain threshold, to abuse it.
Today, the privatization of the army in the USA
is pushing the delusion to the extreme of absurdity and danger.
It is as if the Ministry of Defence of a country
as powerful as the United States
were entrusted to companies
whose only sources of growth and profit are death and destruction;
companies that are not destined
to have the same sense of the common interest
as the Nation, the State and the government,
which the majority of us would like
to be as democratic, just and humane as possible.
Companies that are managed
neither democratically, nor justly, nor humanly,
but rather in a totally authoritarian and often inflexible manner,
for which all too often and systematically treating humans like cattle
and turning the world into a giant slaughterhouse
is not a problem as long as the profitability clause is fulfilled.
Above a certain threshold,
when instability becomes self-intensifying,
financial capitalism finances destructive industries,
because when growth stops,
you have to destroy in order to sell and grow again.
In the field of arms and armies,
the danger is apocalyptic
and the word seems weak despite all its symbolic weight,
so inexpressible are its consequences and suffering.
It is theft,
it is incitement to organised violence and planned destruction.
It is a systematized, planned, institutionalized crime, genocide, humanicide.
Creating conflicts to sell weapons
is tantamount to having firemen set fire to your home
to make you pay as high a price as possible.
Would you choose such a world for yourself and your loved ones
if only you were given the power to choose?
To gain power and even more to stay in it, you need money.
How much money is spent every year
by our leaders, by the rich and powerful,
just to wage war on each other, to stay in power or to conquer it
and make lots of money, in hubris and indecency?
Waging war to keep power, privilege, and money…
This is absolute nonsense!
It’s a mortal sin! It’s a crime against humanity!
This is the sure path to mass madness.
All the signs are there.
The hour of the Apocalypse has struck.
With it, too, the time for reconciliation has come.
Salvation
certainly requires an understanding of the great economic mechanisms,
but salvation is above all a movement of humanity.
A call to something more beautiful than anything we could imagine.
A system that incites, invites and inspires
to the great planetary and systemic dynamic.
Harmony is a dynamic.
Not only is it largely possible,
but above all, it is human, fertile and fruitful.
The Great Evolution,
if it ever takes place, let us pray that it will,
may take whatever form it wishes to take,
but if it is,
it will necessarily be humanistic and humane,
universal and in harmony, fertile and fruitful.
*
Bending the laws of the market
All those who defend the law of the markets
and advocate the obedience of peoples
to the law of money, to the law of the markets,
as well as the acquiescence of any democratic force of expression
to the faithless and lawless rule of almighty greed,
undoubtedly think that it is better for humanity
to submit to economic-financial events
that are by definition uncontrollable and unpredictable,
– in any case as they are currently deregulated -,
fundamentally unjust and terrible,
rather than allowing peoples and humanity the freedom
to consciously, democratically and rationally limit
the economic, financial, climatic and ecological excesses and dangers
whose repercussions are intrinsically, absolutely and irremediably
human and earthly, universal and intimate.
Rather than leaving humans and humankind the freedom
to remedy all current and future injustices and challenges,
the freedom to guide our common destiny
towards what is most humanly desirable and possible,
do they think that it is better for humanity
to continue to bend its back and submit to inhuman laws
rather than to help us free ourselves
from the tyrannical and cursed grip of the law of the markets
that inexorably pushes us all, them and us,
all members of the peoples of the Earth,
towards the precipice of self-extinction?
Whatever their possible areas of application,
wisdom is the mother of all virtues.
In order to create more supply and demand
by creating both more entrepreneurs and consumers,
in order to generate more self-confidence, more moral and material comfort,
and thus to stimulate a healthy economic and social dynamic
in which all the forces of the nation or the world,
individual, public and private institutions
are invited to work in synergy and concert
– for a more serene, more humane future – ,
the relative equilibrium
in the sharing of power and wealth
as well as massive investment promoted by public and democratic forces,
in the primary, universal and rational sense of the term,
are indispensable.
Reason alone can provide a coordinated and coherent overall vision.
Conversely,
markets are by nature and by definition blind
and subject to mass hysteria.
Not only for all the reasons mentioned above,
but also for all the more strictly economic and financial reasons
that can be raised or observed,
more than erroneous, the ultra-neoliberal version of capitalism
is a total contradiction in terms.
Since untruth, lies are repeated all day long
to the point where many of us no longer even believe in the truth,
and even doubt its existence,
not to mention its nature, virtues, benefits and usefulness,
then the truth must be repeated again and again:
Just as blood meets the needs of all parts of the human or non-human body,
the health of the economy
does not depend on the disproportionate wealth of a minority,
nor even on the dazzling speed of monetary exchanges between great fortunes,
but on the number of economic actors
through the hands of whom money circulates,
in order for the whole social body to be well irrigated.
A healthy economy
depends instead on the fluidity of trade between the members of society
so that no one is in such need that he or she dies
while others wallow in opulence, luxury and excess.
A healthy economy
does not depend on injustice and inequality,
but on harmony.
When a minority takes over the majority of the wealth,
money no longer circulates,
period!
This violates a founding and primordial principle of capitalism itself:
For the system to be efficient,
money must flow,
not in a few hands,
but in as many hands as possible.
Because not only material and financial wealth,
but also credit are inaccessible to small and medium-sized people,
to small and medium-sized businesses,
the economic-monetary system is seized up or even blocked.
No one can trust a sick system.
Not even the elites who are defending it tooth and nail.
Thus,
a kind of double parallel economy is set up
where, on the one hand,
the super-rich lend and “exchange” their money to each other
and make it bear fruit through loans, credits, interest rates, stock market shares, etc.,
and whose profits almost systematically end up hidden away in tax havens,
with such extravagance that it makes the weakest dream about it
and the most conscious feel outrage,
and where, on the other hand, the peoples
and representatives of the overwhelming majority of humanity
do their best to barely survive, to work like crazy, or die.
Benefiting no nation, no people,
all this capital is thus lost,
wasted on humanity and the future of humanity,
beyond all control and regulation.
We’re talking about unimaginable, astronomical amounts of money:
If in 2018, the world GDP was some $85,000,000,000*,
an average estimate of the money hidden in tax havens
– which therefore does not benefit any real economy,
and therefore any democratic society
(except, of course, the tax havens in question, if at all) –
is, at the time these lines are written,
between $21,000,000,000 and $37,000,000,000**,
or even beyond,
since no one can be certain, due to confidentiality restrictions.
* https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD
** https://financialsecrecyindex.com/en/
Between a quarter and a third of the world’s GDP is hidden in tax havens …
If in 1970 in the United States,
the world’s leading capitalist power,
persons, whether legal or private,
who earned more than one million dollars were, beyond that million dollars, taxed at 70%*,
I leave it to you to calculate the loss of income
for the well-being of humanity,
if a similar law were applied to the world today.
* https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Income-Tax-Rates.aspx
The world would be rich.
There’s no other word or phrase for it.
The world would be rich!
We’d all be rich.
One percent of the wealth hidden in tax havens
would amount to at least $210 billion…
If we can reasonably admit
that the vast majority of the wealth deposited and hidden in tax havens
comes from people earning more than a million euros or dollars a year,
then it is neither unrealistic nor extravagant
to imagine and picture the answers to our problems,
to the fundamental problems of humanity,
if only 50% of all the money hidden in tax havens
were put at the service of the entire planet
in an agreed effort of international, popular and governmental coordination
for the universal and planetary good.
All the problems, at least the most urgent ones
of the world would be solved
almost instantly.
According to Oxfam, in 2012,
the 100 richest billionaires increased their fortunes by $240 billion,
roughly the resources needed to eradicate world poverty!*
*op. cit
Of course,
we are only talking about the increase in their fortunes in a single year, 365 days,
not all of their fortunes, not everything they own.
According to Oxfam again, in 2018,
26 people owned as much as the 3.8 billion people
who make up the poorest half of humanity.
*
Outlaw
The great lawless, ruthless, merciless and pitiless global economic war
is dragging us all down.
Whether economic, financial, monetary or military,
a war is a war,
and it is necessarily unjust, destructive and illegitimate.
It’s not that hard to understand.
The less money a population earns from the fruits of its labour,
the more it needs to provide itself with something to survive
through alternative ways of working,
and somewhere along the line that’s understandable.
When society does not offer a citizen a job,
a means of survival, a role, an identity,
that citizen must de facto survive outside the margins of society.
Thus,
such a society encourages delinquency and criminality.
The same is true of the poor as well as the rich.
However destructive and deplorable it may be,
the fact that capital from all over the world
takes refuge in the lawless states of tax and financial havens
is easily understandable because, trapped in this ruthless system
which increases poverty and precariousness,
and which in turn encourages both the accumulation of wealth and greed,
no one wants to lose even a part of their wealth.
The dynamic is systemic.
Because illegality now is enacted and defined
by the ruthless and stupid law of wild and predatory neoliberal capitalism,
and because this law is born out of a greedy ideology
which does not care about legitimacy, justice, welfare, sustainability,
we can expect
neither legality, nor justice, nor welfare, nor sustainability from it.
Is it any wonder that delinquency is on the rise?
Is it any wonder that financial crime is on the rise?
Is it any wonder
that black markets in drugs, weapons, scams and prostitution
are thriving and going to launder their dirty hands and money
in whatever tax haven?
By trying to make any form of solidarity utopian,
and any form of human or natural generosity and the will to give illegal,
by trying to reduce to a minimum
any sustainable and solid form of solidarity
between citizens, between nations,
what are the alternatives to poverty, lack of work,
low wages, social dumping, precariousness
for people all over the world?
It is urgent to face the facts:
It is when the population is educated, relatively thriving and prosperous,
or when it can use non-usurious credit,
that it can undertake, innovate and be creative, or even just consume,
thus generating returns on investment and benefitting the whole society,
not when it is lying in poverty!
Our global systemic functioning
has become totally counterproductive.
Who is not convinced of this?
*
“As long as there is poverty in this world,
no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, “The American Dream” speech, 1961.
Is it because inequalities,
privileges, the rule of money, tax evasion and tax havens exist
that our experts and leaders are constantly trying to persuade and convince us
by all possible and imaginable means
that poverty, injustice, inequality and greed are indispensable to society,
that we can in no way govern
without necessarily dominating, controlling, subduing, and pillaging,
without subjecting us all to precariousness, fear, unhappiness,
without making people and the world slaves
to poverty, money, credit, work, materialistic illusion,
and to the current system and established power?
Systemic drift further reinforced by general movement
of falling or frozen real incomes and wages
and the impoverishment of the vast majority of the world’s population.
In the great unbridled race for profit,
in a situation that has become so absurd,
do the rich and powerful consider
that widespread poverty and the most extreme systemic imbalances
are a windfall for maximum profit?
Sadly, they do.
Sadly for change,
for well-being, for human and emotional relationships,
sadly for love,
living in illusion is extremely disturbing, distressing,
and perpetuates the curse.
Sadly,
the rich and ruling elites are convinced
that reducing their gains in favour of the general good
would condemn them to such a life of misery
that they do not even dare to imagine any alternative,
that they can no longer see it, or even consider it,
whereas the Great Universal Humanist Revolution
would bring better things to all people across oceans and borders, rich or poor,
and would constitute a genuinely human and serene wealth,
a wealth that is priceless and immeasurable.
Sadly,
the elites are convinced and persuade many of us
that the general interest is synonymous with the most total destitution,
the most serious degradation, the most mortal sin.
It’s a delusion, a madness, a disease.
Indeed,
in the super-rich’s mind,
the general interest is mentally constructed inversely
to the disproportionate and erroneous perception
of their astronomical wealth.
They can no longer see
that individual interest and the collective interest
are neither opposed nor incompatible,
so much so that they have managed to convince us,
or at least more than one of us,
that aiming for the greatest possible equality,
the greatest possible justice, the greatest possible balance,
the greatest possible harmony
are total heresies liable at best to discredit, even life imprisonment,
if not worse, torture or death penalty.
Thus,
in this logic of economic warfare, profit maximization,
of every man for himself and of generalized blindness,
the discredit thrown on the common interest and generosity,
on struggles against injustice and inequality,
allows the super-rich, the banks, large corporations,
which have an even greater interest in seeing wages fall
as they have more employees and/or financial participation,
to take advantage of the international situation of general impoverishment
in order to exploit and enslave the world’s citizen population.
Hence the desire to impose austerity on people
not just in a few isolated countries but on peoples all over the world.
Because they generate more and more
problematic, divisive and conflictual situations,
because they are born out of and spread into other wars,
ever more futile, costly and problematic,
obviously the short-term over-enrichment of the ultra-rich
is a destructive illusion in both the short and long term.
A delusion which is demented and criminal to boot.
If the logic imposed by the elites
is beneficial to them in the short term,
this logic of growing inequalities cannot hold in the long term.
If only because neither finance nor society
can exist without any bonds of trust,
even seen through the prism and criteria of capitalism,
a society based on inequality is, from every point of view, a total nonsense.
Let trust disappear
within the society-finance-money-popular-authority macrocosm,
and everything will fester.
Clearly,
we’re experiencing it now.
The malfunctions, excesses and imbalances are such
that the machine will seize up, go into a spin,
that the locomotive into which humanity is hurtling
at 1000 km/h through the 21st century
will derail and fall into the void.
In such a situation
where economic imbalances are so unequal,
unjust, violent, in every way illegitimate,
there are some simple and comprehensive solutions
dictated by equity, justice, wisdom and the general interest
to combat climate change, boost economic demand
and boost employment at the same time:
1. Take back the power to create and manage money;
2. Stimulate wise and significant investments
that create real jobs and real wealth;
3. Tame and regulate tax havens,
in particular by a tax rate that is as universal as possible;
4. Redistribute wealth fairly and equitably;
By doing our best,
in understanding, realism and reconciliation,
to establish planetary rules,
to mitigate all the imbalances and widening inequalities
within the whole of global society,
so that no one lies in widening poverty,
such is the way.
The one and only way.
Eminently democratic
in that they are non-discriminatory, universal,
extremely effective in influencing the law of supply and demand
and improving life in society,
how can we doubt the synergistic, exponential potential
of such acts of humanist justice?
A review of the balance of power
between economic and financial players,
a rational balance between supply and demand,
a strict framework for the market,
a balance between the public and private spheres,
between the powers that be and the citizens,
the establishment of appropriate structures, fair taxation,
a balanced society, a balanced world,
legitimate, fair, sovereign and democratic currencies,
that is what we all want.
Being in agreement with oneself and with others, even relatively,
is incompatible with chaos, imbalances
and planetary, permanent, systemic anarchy.
As soon as we understand this,
then the solutions become self-evident.
They are simple, healthy, just and luminous:
The democratization of society and money,
the domestication of tax havens
through as universal tax rules as possible,
the sharing of wealth, technology and knowledge,
the reduction of income disparities,
social protection, the sharing of work by reducing working hours,
the development of renewable energies,
as much as possible, energy sobriety and independence,
particularly with regard to oil,
the development of agro-ecology,
local distribution networks and circular economies…
…Justice, wisdom, the rule of law, democracy, the general interest,
and global harmonization.
This list may not be exhaustive,
and countless citizens of the world
will undoubtedly know how to detail and explain it.
And if humanity manages to survive
its own past and present follies and excesses,
the future being by nature unquantifiable,
then countless citizens will be able to contribute
to the improvement of the condition of humanity on this earth,
and the number of solutions that could be added to this list
is and will be just as immeasurable.
We keep hearing in the media about a dead end?
On the contrary,
we have before us a new Way, wide open.
Edgar Morin,
undoubtedly one of the greatest Western thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries,
has already sensed it and defined its outlines,
its benefits and its possibilities,
with such intelligence and visionary sensibility.*
*La Voie,
Edgard Morin,
Fayard, 2011
The Way,
Only available in French, unfortunately.
We can act at the level of cities, villages, regions and nations.
Moreover,
if everything is connected and this world is globalized,
then nothing would be more effective and quicker
than working at the global level.
Nothing concrete or technical prevents us from doing so
except our own partial and biased illusions.
The urgency is such that the more time passes,
the more the Earth will remind us of her own scale and magnitude,
and therefore ours,
and will continue to do so with ever greater force and power
if we do not hear her messages and warnings.
To this end,
not only must the rational forces of democracy
regain power over money creation,
financial movements and the budget of the political-social entity
at all scales and in all dimensions,
but also the world must be made whole and one,
at very long last.
*
A middle way,
A new way?
The will
to see ourselves as a world in harmony, interconnected and united
is the guarantee of a resurrected sovereignty and rule of law.
The guarantee that we are moving in the right direction.
The guarantee that among all the decisions we make,
the positive ones will always be more numerous and consistent
than the negative ones.
Considering that the human being is a creature
that knows how to adapt extraordinarily well,
that has already known how to radically transform itself,
this is far from being a utopia.
And even if this utopia remains forever inaccessible,
without utopia, without hope, without hope for a better future,
there is and will never be any possible genuine progress.
At worst,
the great unifying utopia
will have the power to re-enchant the world.
It is already enormous, gigantic even,
because, truth be told, that’s all we need.
To always have the worst that happens in the world
as a point of reference
is to condemn ourselves to go towards the worst.
It’s inevitable.
On the contrary,
seeking to move towards the best,
towards justice, humanism, wisdom, freedom and harmony,
is inevitably tending towards these universal values,
and approaching them, slowly of course,
sometimes meeting obstacles and difficulties,
partly of course, imperfectly certainly,
but surely.
*
* * *
*
Wealth is dynamic.
Just as a chemical operation that combines several elements
leads to a chain reaction or even chain reactions,
the relative coexistence of several socio-economic elements
can lead to broad dynamics,
either positive or negative depending on how they are directed or used,
as effective and powerful as each other,
one way or the other.
At the psycho-socio-economic level,
there are at least four essential elements to make it right,
that cannot, that can no longer be ignored:
– the satisfaction of identified basic material and immaterial needs,
(economic, pragmatic, physical, industrial, economic, social,
metaphysical, spiritual, emotional, philosophical);
– the universal and solidarity-based management of available resources;
– new monetary, financial, economic and tax rules
based on harmony and global equity;
– the free and tolerant education of harmony, universal humanism,
justice, wisdom, hope, trust, joy, charity, sharing and knowledge in general.
If we could make them exist in order to bring them together,
through their simple coexistence, a positive dynamic could be born
with the potential to guide us
on the path to harmony, prosperity and freedom,
so as to cure us from our illness, from our dementia, our insanity
which constantly makes us define ourselves in opposition to others.
Eventually,
we would become aware of the value of our wealth.
*
On motion and paralysis
No one wants to lose their job or risk losing everything
and ending up homeless.
This is all the more acute nowadays
when the bonds of solidarity and generosity
are breaking down and losing ground.
Everything is privatized, the earth itself.
Indeed,
no land is free of private property rights any more,
and everything is sold for money.
From an individual’s point of view,
it’s a nightmare.
Having no money
too often means having no options, no one to turn to, nowhere to go.
Clinging to one’s job
even though it is polluting and destructive
is a systemic dynamic.
The more ultra-capitalist neoliberalism tightens its grip
on the world, on nations and peoples,
the more the loss of one’s job
becomes synonymous with professional and economic death,
at worst family, emotional, physical, irreversible and total loss of life.
When the exclusion machine has excluded the majority of humanity,
will humanity have any other choice but to stand up?
The age of robots is approaching…
Thus,
without social protection,
society is quite simply bound to sink at the same time into inertia,
poverty and extreme competitiveness,
to persist in its ecocidal and humanicidal abuses,
because then we cling to our jobs and to our lives and,
unless they show immense and heroic courage, humanism and self-sacrifice,
employees will obey the commands of their leaders,
even if the orders they may receive are destructive, torturous,
to the point of becoming accomplices to injustice and iniquity,
or even worse.
When one knows
about the authoritarian and despotic forms of corporate governance,
then how can anyone be surprised?
How can anyone be surprised
in an era where giant multinationals and big banks are the law,
that all the nations of the world are sinking into tyranny?
Who is surprised?
No land is free any more, no land belongs to all and to no one,
or so little.
We can no longer go anywhere without being driven out of it by force
because nothing belongs to everyone anymore,
because everything, everything! has been privatized
and everything, everything! is being monetized, commodified,
we humans in the first place.
What recourse can we still hope for when, having lost our jobs,
any form of free generosity or solidarity has disappeared?
Thus,
not offering members of society a chance to live a decent life
even though this economic and social system treats humans as disposable resources,
is akin to sentencing society and even civilization not to transform itself
and thus not to meet the extreme and even ultimate challenges of our time.
This is not a theory.
It is undoubtedly and extremely serious.
Indeed,
even if the actions of their companies are reprehensible
from the point of view of the environment or legality,
when it means being without income,
people cling to their jobs, all the more so in a context of mass unemployment.
Thus,
a social welfare system is not only fair,
it is moreover and above all a necessary condition for a society
to be able to change direction.
In this sense,
it is a salvation to the nation
and, applied to the world, to all of humankind.
Without social protection,
no significant change in society will enable us to change direction
and thus avoid the titanic hazards facing us.
That is clear.
Because almost every one of us
is doing our best to ensure that our jobs last,
even if it means stepping on colleagues, ripping off customers,
pillaging the planet and destroying life.
We therefore defend our company
even if it acts contrary to the general interest
in order to stay afloat.
And yet,
at this stage of evolution,
breaking the social, psychological and historical cycle
that has tied humanity to its own curse since the dawn of time
is largely possible:
We say it again:
According to the UN,
less than $300 billion a year would be enough to eradicate world poverty
and provide all humanity with access to all basic social services.
Thus,
at a time when humanity has never been so productive, so rich
and, paradoxically so inequalitarian,
there is no solution other than a solid and viable system
of financing, training and re-training for the unemployed to help society,
by helping those who make it up
to adjust to the needs and challenges of their time.
Helping the present and future outcasts
from the great machine to make money
to live, train and prepare for tomorrow’s world,
for the jobs and missions of the ecological transition
is not only a charitable and benevolent attitude,
it is first and foremost a condition for the evolution
of the entire industrial and economic system.
*
On the natural prevalence of reason over markets.
Anyone who lives off a sector of the economy
does not want that sector to weaken, disappear or collapse.
This is true in any business and in all sectors of the economy,
and it is quite understandable.
Of course,
when the effects of that sector contribute more to improving the well-being of all than they jeopardize it,
that business is undoubtedly legitimate.
Nevertheless,
if private interests become illegitimate
as soon as they harm the law and the general interest,
then the intervention of the political, democratic and sovereign power
is a more than legitimate duty:
from the point of view of human rights,
it is a sacred prerogative.
Actually,
this is what we call the law.
Let’s take education as an example:
We know that market forces want to take over the education sector
in order to make it a business for economic gain.
Yet giving education to market forces
means giving bankers-accountants-technocrats
the charge of managing our children’s education.
It is giving them the power
to make our children the pawns, the slaves of a system
based, in their own words, on productivism and consumerism,
a system based, in humanistic-existentialist terms, on greed,
exploitation and predation.
It’s like giving a tobacco company
the charge of training doctors.
Giving the reins of our children’s education to the forces of money,
as greedy as we know them to be,
without any training or experience in education,
especially without any idea of the purposes of human life on Earth,
then it is clear that the forces of money will train future humans
to spread cold and calculating greed
in every nook and cranny of our heads and of our planet.
Unless investment is fundamentally selfless,
which in this ultra-capitalist world seems to be a naive thought,
and even if young citizens should be studying both the flaws and virtues of markets,
the money-obsessed market and education
clearly have nothing to do with each other.
Reason must take precedence over economic nonsense.
In order to give the world-ship a desired, desirable and assumed direction,
public and democratic power
must regain the upper hand over private and greedy power,
otherwise reason and wisdom will never regain the upper hand
over the economic chaos of the markets,
which are intrinsically subject to herd behaviour
and therefore incapable of any vision, any wisdom, any order, any reason,
any humanism, any perspective, any sense of direction.
Well-being and harmony must prevail over suffering and chaos.
Or freedom, law, and hope will disappear.
Having excessively regarded ourselves as economic actors,
have we forgotten that we are also and above all human beings
and citizens?
Have we lost any point of reference that can give us a purpose,
that can give meaning to our lives?
Chained to an absurd and counterproductive logic,
in the name of the economic imperative,
we are in the process of jeopardizing all that is priceless:
Life and wisdom, freedom and harmony,
everything that keeps us connected, together…
By definition,
the market economy alone is incapable of grasping, let alone answering,
the question of meaningfulness.
The only market law left to its own devices
as set up by neo-liberal, deregulated, unregulated, deliberately disorganized capitalism,
sows doubt and confusion in our heads and hearts
as much as in the world around us
to the point of obscuring our thoughts, our feelings, our moods,
our hearts, our minds, our environment, our whole universe.
Because in such a global context
where we leave it to the sacrosanct law of supply and demand
to solve all our problems for us,
we are unable to find answers, let alone lasting balance.
Incapable of engendering, let alone sustaining,
a harmony that could make sense,
markets left to their own devices are blind
and incapable to find any other way than chaos.
And yet,
even though no one can be so ignorant as to deny this fact,
markets continue to rule.
Because the deregulation of the globalized economy
has consisted and still consists
in formalizing, institutionalizing the non-regulation of the world,
because the deregulation of the globalized economy consists
in giving free rein to the greed
not only of the rich and powerful
but of the whole human race which is to be ruled by and for money,
in all dimensions,
on all human, environmental, economic and planetary scales,
then it is fair and justified to affirm without the slightest doubt
that markets are a lawless world
in which the wealthiest sets the norm.
The innumerable legal loopholes,
the weak or even non-existent nature of international law
and the law of money
offer them impunity
in order to take the greatest possible advantage of it,
to derive the greatest possible benefit from unfinished globalization
and then use the imbalances, divisions and chaos they themselves have created
to strengthen their predatory power
by imposing even more of their law, the law of the strongest,
on the rest of the world.
Can you imagine a people, a nation,
without a helm, without governance,
without foundation, without purpose, without meaning?
And yet
democracies are being led astray, gutted, diverted from their primary mission.
Because markets have taken control of the big Central Banks
almost everywhere in the world,
even if there are differences between the different States of the world,
markets enslave States and Democracies by lending money to States,
and therefore dictating their interest rates,
markets bring peoples to their knees through debt,
whereas democratic legitimacy requires the opposite:
It is the state alone, as a democratic governance,
that holds the inalienable and paramount legitimacy to create money
and create the best conditions for a flourishing society,
and even to lend it to the markets,
so that the latter can invest it according to the terms decided by the nation,
make a profit from it, and democracy can reap the benefits.
Ever since the big banks and finance got established,
a state that hasn’t had control
over its central bank, its currency and credit system
has always turned to disaster, and to its disadvantage.
We, the people,
cannot depend on the goodwill of the rich who manipulate the markets,
and who now, and increasingly since the 1980s,
in Europe and almost everywhere on Earth,
have been dominating nations and the World.
If we consider that 200 million children die
of undernourishment and malnutrition every year in the world
and thousands of billions of dollars are hidden in tax havens,
if we consider that the planet’s climate is becoming disrupted,
that its resources are being depleted,
if we consider that all future generations will suffer as a result,
– much more than debt, even if partly because of debt –
is it not justified to say that the domination of the world by ‘markets’
has consequences that are just as deleterious and destructive for humanity
as the worst totalitarian, obscurantist and fundamentalist dogmatisms?
No democracy, no humanism, no justice, no harmony can exist
without the benevolent interference of politics in the economic sphere.
Since all values are relative,
could you estimate the value of our Democracy,
our degree of culture, our freedom,
compared to the most remote times of the feudal,
warlike and fanatical Middle Ages?
Leaving the markets the power to decide on useful investments,
on what is right and wrong,
is leaving our primordial decisions,
synonymous with the life or death of the species,
to be taken by a mob that is prey to greed, delusions of grandeur
and panic whenever its interests are no longer served,
a mob that has lost control
and is unaware of the consequences of its actions.
Because everyone thinks that everyone does the same,
and that no one can do otherwise than everyone else
without risking exclusion,
through a shift in benchmarks and reference points,
common behavioural norms get altered, deviated, perverted.
Thus,
whenever circumstances lend themselves to it,
a crowd or a more or less organized group of individuals
can drag themselves into collective deviance
and commit absurd actions with serious or even barbaric and apocalyptic consequences.
It’s called crowd psychology, or herd behavior.*
* https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Herd_behavior
In the case of the belief in the legitimacy and efficiency of markets,
this is extremely serious and fraught with consequences.
In this sense,
the belief in the omnipotence of markets is a superstition
as obscure as all the most barbaric and ruthless obscurantism
of the darkest times in history.
To allow the markets to continue to decide on the fate of humanity
is to abdicate all sovereignty, all future, all hope, to lay down our arms.
The market is a billion-headed hydra, a blind and soulless beast
that must be brought under control at all costs.
Since there is never any meaning without consciousness,
regaining control of the markets pertains to utmost national interest.
*
On vital national interest;
Wars and Revolutions.
The truth is that all revolutions
have the same primary claim, the same ultimate goal:
To free humanity
from the shackles of exploitation, oppression, servitude, slavery, tyranny,
lies, deceit, crime and poverty.
The French and American revolutions in the 18th century,
the Marxist revolutions in the 20th century in Russia, China and elsewhere,
tried to give as many rights and powers as possible to the population,
to liberate peoples and nations from the oppression of the ruling castes,
from the monarcho-aristocracy in France,
from Great Britain in the United States,
from Tsarist slavery in Russia,
or from all forms of oppression and slavery in force
in China, Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America,
in short everywhere in the world,
even though unpreparedness and ignorance
have all too often, regrettably, deflected the original will of the people
and thus the new regime.
We will return briefly
to the historical, psychological, social and economic
differences and similarities of capitalism and sovietism
as they were applied in the 20th century,
and for the first one, still in the 21st century,
systems that, by the way, cannot be confused
with the inspirations of the people who willed them to be.
The State,
in its ideal, primary and original form,
is therefore, by essence and definition,
the emanation of the will of all.
The will of the people is the only founding legitimacy of the State.
Nothing is more powerful than a legitimate State.
The will of the 100%.
It is not only an end, it is a means.
It is even the only means.
Unfortunately,
the 1%, out of fear, greed and ignorance,
seem to be fighting against the common good at all costs.
*
Apocalyptic sights
Do the 1% really believe
they could survive without humanity,
without the 99% who sustain them
and without whom they are nothing, they have nothing,
no power, no products, no food, no technology?
Do they really believe they could throw humanity
into war, on a mass scale, into the garbage can, and be safe?
“He who sows the wind necessarily reaps the whirlwind.”
Being aware that a new war
would inevitably increase the greenhouse effect,
global warming and the runaway global temperatures
in a more insane and intolerable way
than the worst-case disaster scenarios as yet imagined by scientists,
would they be ignorant enough to believe
that robots and technology could allow them to survive
after the cataclysm, the great Apocalypse?
Even if,
while waiting for the robots to replace the peoples,
while waiting for the robots to replace all of us,
if they chose to create a subclass of saved humans to serve them,
the kind of global warming caused by a new war of global dimension
would take away any chance of survival, in any case, as they imagine it,
because inevitably civilization would disappear
and everything that goes with it.
For survivors,
if there were any left,
it would be very, very hard because they would be alone in a world
where the greenhouse effect would be so great
that few species, whether fauna or flora, would be able to adapt;
and for those who would have adapted,
God knows what mutations they would have had to undergo
in a toxic world and an unrecognizable climate.
Could they,
under such circumstances, ever preserve or recover the know-how,
the wisdom, all the necessary energies, the technologies to survive
the way they do today, driven by the very motivations
that today make them destroy this world?
Even with their robots?
Apart from their illusions,
what would there be left for them?
After a world devastated by an unprecedented total war and climate change,
not much more, no doubt.
No more products, no more food, no more structures, no more wealth
since there would be no one left to produce, repair or maintain them,
no one left to ensure the renewal of everything
that keeps the world going,
there is at least an absolute certainty:
whatever they would have left,
certainly, they would have no power left
because there would be no one else left to exercise it on.
Of course, if it came to that,
the 1% would tear each other to pieces
after having exterminated humanity.
Or robotize themselves.
Either way, it would be the end of humanity.
Thus,
if the ultra-capitalist system seems, slowly but surely,
to be leading us, the whole of humanity, towards new wars
more horrible and destructive than anything humanity has ever known,
then salvation from apocalypse and self-destruction
is the opposite of both war and the system:
It has only one name:
Peaceful revolution.
It alone can give a new birth
to common sense, to a common life, to a common future.
It is humanity’s only destiny.
Without it, this is the end.
*
A new Age of Enlightenment?
More than two and a half centuries ago,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau said:
Everything that nature offers is a gift for humanity,
everything belongs to everyone because nothing belongs to anyone,
and vice versa.
Rousseau and the other Enlightenment thinkers triggered revolutions
and paved the way for
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789.
Almost two and a half centuries later,
who are the new enlighteners?
Some are known, some less known, many not at all,
but the truth is that we are plenty.
So many of us are already seeing the world of tomorrow.
So many of us know.
This so precious knowledge
has already traveled around the planet several times.
No one can stop knowledge.
No one will stop evolution.
Since evolution is the transformation through time of all things, of all lives,
no one can survive without transforming themselves to adapt
to conditions that are themselves evolving.
It’s mathematical logic.
It’s Darwin’s theory.
The flowering of ideas
that will save the world is inexorable and magnificent,
like a meadow full of and greens and colorful flowers.
Thomas Picketty, Etienne Chouard, Pierre Rabhi
and his son Gabriel, Vandana Shiva,
Joseph Stieglietz, Edgar Morin, Cenk Uygur,
Bernard Lietaer, Chris Hedges, Bernie Sanders,
Pope Francis, Yanis Varoufakis, Greta Thunberg,
and so many others, more or less anonymous or known,
enrich the world with their work, their reflections, their resistance
to the financial-capitalist diktats which, by killing the economy,
kill free enterprise and freedom.
How can we not also quote the wise Indian, Sadhguru,
who works so hard to enlighten humanity.
Moreover, dead but eternal,
all the wise men, from all times, from all parts of the Earth,
the philosophers of the Enlightenment,
the teachings of Gandhi, Roosevelt, Confucius, Rousseau, Al-Ghazali, Maurice Allais, Marx and Einstein,
and so many, so many others,
the teaching, the experience of History, Science and Knowledge, Widsom, Evolution,
offer us a road to follow, a path to take and listen to.
All indispensable to each other,
so many people have already laid their stones to the edifice,
the most visible and immense
as well as the smallest and most finely chiselled,
this edifice which only lacks its crowning :
The awareness that the planet unites us all,
the awareness that we must take care of the planet,
that we must take care of ourselves.
The way of the Earth
is the voice to which our survival as well as our nature or our identity
compels us.
Answers exist.
So many people, more or less known, or outright anonymous,
but in all senses, indispensable and complementary,
are just waiting for a signal to join the Great Cause, the Great World Cause,
the last cause of history.
All that is missing is the acceptance of the world by the world,
the acceptance by the world that the world cannot do otherwise,
and that this is wonderful news as we have never known any other before.
The Great Revolution will be the moment of birth of humanity as such.
We will work on it as long as we can.
If tomorrow is possible,
the birth of Humanity is due tomorrow.
The Great Peaceful Evolution is inexorable.
It shall be
or there won’t be anyone left to do it.
*
Market hostages
Wisdom and reason must prevail over markets and greed.
It is not a choice, it is not an ideology.
It’s a matter of survival.
*
The market must rule no more.
“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of.
In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
Confucius
“Contentment makes poor men rich,
Discontent makes rich men poor.”
Benjamin Franklin
*
The law of the market carries within itself
the seeds of the unequal balance of power
between those who have and those who have not.
A totally unbalanced balance of power
between those who do not have what they need most, here, now, right now,
and those who have more than what they need,
who have everything they need
but whose excessiveness knows no bounds, decency nor restraint,
whose needs, desires, will for wealth and power are constantly growing,
but who are still afraid of falling, of being overthrown,
afraid for their own future or that of their loved ones or their descendants,
afraid, one day or another, of missing out.
No wonder that in a world civilization
in which all abuses, excesses, absurdities and monstrosities are titanic perils,
and the depletion of resources inevitable,
the ultra-rich dominant oligarchy
seeks only to impose scarcity, austerity and inequality
on as large a part of the population as possible.
Their goal:
not to lose their privileges
and the security these privileges give them.
The flow of capital completely evades the people,
on whom a policy of subjugation and enslavement is imposed
by force, necessity, precariousness and poverty.
If poverty and inequality are the consequence of the laws of the market,
according to which everything that is scarce is expensive
and therefore a source of profit,
according to which everything*,
– in order to satisfy the institutionalized
and systematized greed of vested interests,
which are by their very nature minority interests -,
can be exploited, commodified, sold and monetized,
then not only is resource scarcity spreading and dangerously worsening,
so too are poverty and inequality becoming more widespread as a result,
but on top of that this dynamic is getting even more serious,
more acute, more unbearable, more terrible, inhuman and absurd
as monetary creation and policies are in the hands of the markets and finance,
because then any resource can be knowingly made scarce
and in the first place, money itself.
*Human being, body, organ, service, solidarity, generosity,
mental or physical health, right to pollute, right to produce, right to create,
right to patent and own seed, right to land, right to fertilize, right to kill…
While Aristotle and others pointed out
that money had no value in and of itself,
the resource we value most today is:
money.
Is our faith in money and finance so blind and disconnected
that we probably think that when our planet is barren,
our digitalized treasures and fortunes will shield us
from want and necessity?
Is our own future disconnected
from the future of the world and of humanity?
The more the dominating power of money grows,
the more those who rule by money
can exercise their deadly power to make a fortune
at the expense of the rest of the world.
Fortunately,
because every extreme has an opposite,
this problem is real and present
as much as a future solution is possible.
Indeed,
the more scarcity and poverty decrease,
the more the value of money regains a legitimate and humane measure:
The more money becomes “democratized”, the less rare it is,
the less vital it becomes,
the less indispensable for survival it gets,
and the less the economic balance of power
remains tilted in favour of the richest.
The more a society tends towards equality,
the more the balance of power is reduced,
the more tensions lose their intensity,
the rarer the chances of conflict.
This is both mathematically and metaphysically obvious.
There’s no paradox in that:
Inevitably,
the more human beings through whom money and wealth circulate,
the less desperate the need for money becomes,
the more people and beings can free themselves
from the shackles of money and necessity,
the further society in general moves away from social chaos
and the risk of rebellion or insurrection,
the richer a society becomes.
Without the systemic phenomenon of scarcity
embodied by money as an instrument of domination of impoverished peoples,
the law of supply and demand, the so-called sacrosanct law of the market
would no longer have the same significance, the same importance,
nor would money have the same value and the same predatory effects.
In a society based on the meaning of life and human beings,
in communities based on universal law,
where intelligence, knowledge, technology, natural resources and money are shared
with measure, balance, wisdom and far-sighted prudence,
money can regain a legitimate and relative value, a value useful to all,
and a market economy based on entrepreneurial freedom
within the limits imposed by law
can become truly effective and efficient again.
For this to happen, however,
it is essential that the democratic public authority
regains control over the creation of money
and finds legitimate means that are compatible with a market economy based on the freedom of enterprise
within the limits imposed by the universal human right
to regulate markets, credit, money transfers and investments.
Through international convergence policies,
including banking, financial, fiscal, economic and monetary policies
and strict regulations,
it is absolutely possible, necessary, desirable and realistic
to take back the reins of power
from this globalized, opportunistic and mutually supportive
oligarchy of fortune
which, with the greatest irresponsibility, is governing the world
and is turning the majority of women, children and men of this world
into outcasts, economic slaves or climate refugees,
and is leading humanity straight
towards the greatest pitfalls and challenges of all times.
What is the goal?
What is the meaning of history?
What is the purpose of Humanity?
That the richest 0.0001% own more than half of the planet’s wealth?
Would it be unrealistic, illusory and vain to believe that this system,
which has always proved and is proving to us
that it has led us, is leading us and will continue to lead us
to the greatest economic, financial, military, barbaric, energy, health,
and today climatic, anti-ecological, toxicological, systemic and planetary disasters,
will transform itself if we do not change anything fundamental.
It is absolutely impossible
in a world dominated by the market law
for our problems to be solved by themselves
and for all the immense challenges facing us all as members of humanity
to disappear.
The greater the power of a market economy,
the more immense its consequences,
the more that economy and that market must be controlled.
In a system whose ideology is profit and greed,
the law of supply and demand
induces extreme and excessive systemic behaviour,
with repercussions as manifold as they are excessive,
which makes us go in all directions except the right one,
and which, already costing us a great deal,
is highly likely to cost us much, much more,
not only in financial, economic and monetary terms
if nothing fundamental is changed.
All of us prisoners of this global system,
we can’t expect a miracle.
The market cannot solve by itself the problems it causes.
The law of the market can only be effective if it is controlled.
In the sense that it is based on an empirical observation of circumstances
where scarcity is undeniably the law,
in a society of pseudo-abundance
where paradoxically the most outlandish wastage and luxuries
and the poverty of the majority of families in the world
are systemic and face each other,
it is clear that the very foundations of the law of supply and demand
must be questioned.
The law of the market left to itself cannot work.
Justice, humanism and equity must be injected into it.
Over markets must prevail and preside
wisdom, justice, humanism and equity,
on a global scale.
*
The equilibrium of the parts
creates the harmony of the whole,
and vice versa.
Without balance,
neither order nor harmony is possible.
There can be no balance
when extremes and excesses, inequalities and injustices
are the norm imposed on political, economic and financial powers,
on peoples and society as a whole.
Advocating and institutionalizing non-regulation in the economy
is exactly the same as arguing that disorder and chaos
can be a reliable and legitimate political objective,
which would be highly desirable.
The more numerous its divisions,
the more abyssal its inequalities, the deeper its fractures,
the more intense the suffering of all those
who are part of this society or civilization,
even if we do not always realize it because,
not knowing anything other than this civilization,
having neither a point of comparison nor sufficient distance,
we have lost our points of reference, and are lost.
It is undeniably irretrievably stupid to think
that wisdom can be fundamentally unfair and unequal.
Is it fair to make disproportionate profits
from depriving what is vital to the survival of a human being,
of society, of humanity?
It is inevitable,
social harmony can only be achieved
through a relative balance of all things in relation to each other.
If Einstein’s laws of relativity rule much of the universe,
why should relativity not govern the laws of economy and life on Earth?
Social harmony can only be based on balance:
the balance in the measure and perception of the values
attached to the different kinds of wealth, without neglecting any,
the balance of solidarity and social justice between human beings
through the fair and proportionate distribution of wealth,
the relevance of investments and exchanges,
meaningful work and dignity for all,
the quality of life and human relations.
Moreover,
if these balances were to be established at the same time,
they could nourish a third one:
the balanced management of resources in space and time
and therefore the balance of power.
If, firstly,
the blind power of the markets is leading us towards a dark future,
and if, secondly, we cannot control the imbalances of supply and demand
without investment, solidarity and redistribution of wealth,
human reason must regain the upper hand
and intervene to avoid disasters,
make the decisions that the situation demands,
find out how to manage money,
where to invest, where to redistribute,
what to value, what sectors to develop, etc.
Society needs to find or restore the right balance
between private interests and the common good,
between the private and the public domains,
between what is private and vested interest, which is by definition selfish,
and what is a matter of general will,
of universal, relative and common satisfaction.
By virtue of human rights and humanity,
by virtue of life itself and the survival of all species,
reason and wisdom must regain power
over markets, investors, tax havens, banks and finance,
and prevail over the law of finance and money,
of the richest and most powerful
whose absurdly unjust imbalances and inequalities pose ever greater apocalyptic dangers to the entire planet.
If greed and envy make us commit follies and lead us to despair,
conversely, solidarity is reasonable,
reason is based on solidarity and wisdom on salvation.
Intelligence, wisdom and serenity are intrinsically linked
because solidarity is the foundation of social ties,
and the social fabric affects, for better or for worse, all of our lives.
If solidarity is the foundation of the social bond,
then isn’t solidarity the best guarantee of humankind’s sustainability?
Reason and law must prevail throughout the world.
It is the only way out, the only escape, the only salvation.
Any effort or advance at the national level will be an ant’s step
compared to the giant steps that we could take
if we thought and acted in planetary terms and in solidarity,
respecting balance and humanist justice.
If this is our only salvation, this is our only fight.
More than our one fight,
if it’s our only salvation,
it’s our last fight.
Since each one needs something that he or she does not have
and that others possess or can pass on,
since each one has something that others need,
all men and women have an essential stone to lay
to raise the edifice of the great pacifist unification.
Because each land needs something that other lands do not have,
because each land possesses something that other lands need,
all the lands of the world have an essential stone to lay
to raise the edifice of the great pacifist unification.
Wisdom is not for a few beings.
Wisdom excludes no one.
It is meant for all beings.
It is meant for the whole world.
For the world to change and humanity to become better,
the world must be,
humanity must be born and come into the world.
In order to be born,
humanity must come into the world.
*
The insurrection of Wisdom is a Liberation.
A poor people is a people easy to manipulate, to control, to exploit
until one day, reaching that point of no return where,
becoming aware of the fundamental injustice
which they have been the victims of,
the truth is revealed, their anger, their legitimacy awakens,
their passion for justice and dignity ignites
and ignites their will, their soul, their free will,
illuminates their land and why not,
irradiates the world and the collective psyche,
the entire terrestrial and planetary sphere,
with new inspiration.
If by tacit agreement and with sufficiently deep and unifying roots,
a people spontaneously decides, almost without premeditation,
to get rid of a system, a regime,
it means that injustices, human rights abuses,
attacks on the general interest, the people and the nation
practiced or encouraged by that system or regime have been such
that the burning indignation of a rising people
is as legitimate and invincible as is,
if one admits the existence of a God or a Divinity,
divine justice.
For no God, no Divinity can favor the prevalence of a few persons
to the point of endangering all men, all women, all children,
all human beings as a whole.
More than spiritual and metaphysical,
this is a certainty proven by humanity’s
past, present and future experience and reality.
How long will our system last
before the poisonous fruits of egocentricity, greed and ignorance
drive humanity into a new bloodthirsty insanity?
Only the saving insurrection of consciences at the planetary level
can allow humanity to transcend itself
and to carry out a peaceful revolution,
a revolution that can transform it without disfiguring it,
without mutilating it, without torturing it.
Justice and equity
are more than the rights of peoples and all human beings.
Universal justice is an unfailing duty
from which no government, whichever it may be,
can evade without renouncing, effectively, its legitimacy.
Structural equity is not a utopia.
It is our last resort, our only exit.
The search for human and universal justice is not a choice,
but an absolute necessity.
All over the world, barricades are being erected,
peoples are thundering, and sometimes bloody confrontations take place.
Which is the better alternative?
That the great metamorphosis be peaceful and universal,
rational, justified, chosen and assumed?
Or that a multitude of insurrections, a multitude of struggles,
doomed to fail
because they are disorganized, isolated,
without a concrete unifying project,
everywhere repressed, sometimes in violence and bloodshed,
continue to rage on and on and on, endlessly?
*
Milestones
Just as at the wheel of a vehicle
when we look away towards a fixed point for too long,
consciously or unconsciously,
never ceasing to take the worst of humanity
as a point of reference and comparison,
– such as torture or slavery,
whether real or economic, physical or emotional and psychological,
the wages of poor Asian workers, the condition of certain African countries,
or the “obscure” European Middle Ages –
in order to discourage any desire for a better world
is tantamount to condemning ourselves to drift in a direction we do not choose.
Having the worst
as a global and universal ideological point of reference
is tantamount to condemning ourselves to the worst.
Instead,
focusing on the better, choosing the better as a reference point
is setting the better as your goal.
The better and not the best,
I insist on this difference,
the perfectionist utopia being by itself destructive
because impossible.
Let there be no mistake about it:
The fact that perfection is forever unattainable is wonderful news,
because then the perfectibility of the human being is infinite
and offers us, in the more or less long term,
reasons for immense hope.
Because it is fundamentally human,
the better is simple and easy to understand.
This piece of writing humbly tries to give you
all the arguments to convince you.
So many free and spontaneous experiences,
so many works and human beings abound
in this desirable and possible better.
From this priceless knowledge
will be born what will save humans and humanity.
Why is it that we hear from the media, from all our institutions,
from all those who direct us and control our destinies,
only the worst, past, present and future?
Because our references,
embodied in an ideology based on inequality, domination and slavery
through scarcity and ultra-competitiveness,
are focused on the worst,
we normalize the worst,
which has the effect of giving shape
to a decadent and monstrous civilization
where domination, debt, disorder and poverty reign.
Rather than the beautiful and the wonderful…
In the Middle Ages, in the USSR, or in the least developed countries,
living conditions are or have been so much worse
that no one has any right to complain, they continually tell us.
And while we should rejoice in the advances and progress
achieved since the dawn of time by humankind,
we know that the oligarchs’ rhetoric
and blind people repeating their regressive rhetoric
have no other purpose than to make sure
that the populations accept laws and decisions
which are perhaps not the worst we could have imagined
but which sometimes come very close:
So that those in power
and who enjoy the privileges of wealth and power
can better control, dominate, enslave, exploit populations
that both sustain them and are their greatest threat,
and thus continue to reign and enjoy their ephemeral and anxious lives as privileged people.
Is humanity a species traumatized by itself?
That’s for sure.
That’ s also another discussion.
Another certainty is that, at the present time,
humanity’s better self
is neither our point of reference nor our common goal.
Yesterday, today or tomorrow,
more than anything else in the world,
our existence depends on our points of reference.
We must aim for the betterment of humanity
or we will never achieve it.
That’s for sure.
The best of human beings is universal and united.
The better part of being human
will never be ultra-selfish and ultra-inegalitarian.
From the point of view of humanity and humans,
the universal is not only a right to be conquered,
that’s also their definition.
Uncharted territory of a new magnitude for the entire species,
a new space to live better, to be better,
the universal is the very raison d’être of being human
and for humankind to be.
*
The parts and the whole are one.
Because a state of lawlessness exists in the world,
because the world is the last land to be explored, the last nation to be built,
because we are at this stage of globalization
where justice must be everywhere
or will probably soon no longer be anywhere on Earth,
because it is also undoubtedly the best, if not the only way
to regenerate national democracies, industries and local economies,
humanist and solidarity-based global harmonization
is not only the most natural and legitimate right of humanity,
it is also the most effective and pragmatic way forward.
Thinking of the world as a whole
is realizing that it is interconnected, and therefore, indivisible.
If the world is indivisible,
then the world must necessarily be supportive with itself.
To organize it as a unified and interconnected whole
means giving the world a chance to go beyond the race for profit,
to transcend it, and to transform itself.
There are states of grace
that only the earthly and universal dimension can forge and welcome.
Create global laws
that regulate all the destructive and unequal excesses of the markets
and force them to respect human rights and dignity at the global level,
and the world is saved.
The history or evolution of Humanity on Earth is calling on us
to transcend our individual self-centeredness and identity
through universal consciousness and solidarity.
Not to answer it
is necessarily to condemn ourselves.
That does not mean being radical, fundamentalist or communist.
On the contrary,
that means moderation, wisdom, balance
between everything that is, and everything that can be.
That is why a rule of law based on wisdom, balance and harmony
must be established on a worldwide scale.
*
To stop going adrift,
To know where to go.
A system that is going adrift
cannot stop going adrift of its own accord
if a human and intelligent will does not show it
a more reasonable and better adapted, fairer and more beautiful way.
Letting the markets decide the fate of humanity, or rather the lack of it,
is letting them make us take the risk of going straight to the precipice.
No ambiguity is possible:
The less sovereign the general will,
the more tyranny dominates, oppresses and represses.
The more evil and destructive
a power, an organization, a person, a governance is,
the more illegitimate it is.
Conversely,
the more a power, an organization, a person, a governance
is beneficent, creative and fertile,
the more it is perennial, the more it is just, the more it is legitimate.
A planetary vision of humanity
not only makes this relatively simple for us to understand and visualize:
Beyond the vain verbal and rhetorical sparring
designed to deceive peoples in order to divide and dominate them,
a humanistic and universal vision reveals in the clearest possible way answers to the questions of
for whom, for what and how.
No one is asked to believe.
But it is up to all to see.
*
* * *
*
The People organized in Union.
The State and the Nation.
*
War of ideologies.
*
“Totalitarianism
is not the concentration of all the powers in the hands of the state,
it is the phenomenon of a party
that has all the power and takes power over the state;
it is not the state that is totalitarian,
it is the party that uses it, its police and the rest.”*
*Au péril des idées, Les grandes questions de notre temps, dialogue,
Edgar Morin, Tariq Ramadan,
Entretiens avec Claude-Henry du Bord,
Archipoche, 2014
*
The democratic, free and collective decision
to manage ourselves with wisdom and reason
in order to find peaceful balances between the forces at work,
in particular and above all between Democracy, the rule of law,
the general interest, public affairs and politics
as a meaning given to freedom and power
at the service of the citizen on the one hand
and private, commercial and/or productive or creative forces on the other
whose purpose could no longer be only individualism,
profit and personal enrichment,
is possible without having to proceed with the collectivization of land,
the Stalinization of the state, the “sovietization” of society,
the total nationalization of the economy,
the Bolshevization of politics, or worse,
the establishment of forced labour in the gulags
as the pillars of the economy.
Many have said it before:
The opposition between communism and capitalism killed the debate,
for whose benefit or what purpose?
That’s a good question.
In a triumphant capitalist world,
all the defenders of capitalism have so much wanted us to believe
that no alternative to capitalism and greed
can be reasonable, wise, sensible or moderate
that we sincerely believe that nothing ideal or utopian
can ever exist, be built or even dreamt of.
“There is no alternative!”
This is Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase,
echoed by all those who want nothing to change.
No alternative to poverty?
No alternative to slavery?
No alternative to division and insanity?
No alternative to feudalism, exclusion and militarism?
No alternative to ultimate failure?
No alternative to the Apocalypse?
Our thinking today is conditioned to such an extent
that we consider it sensible
to allow all imaginable and possible excesses, abuses and imbalances of a system
where the balance of power
is increasingly and radically in favour of super-rich
economic and financial markets
whose sole purpose, whose only logical end
is the exponential aggravation of this dynamic of systemic imbalances
that are intrinsically unequal and extremely inegalitarian,
disproportionate and more dangerous than ever…
Balance and imbalance are two contradictory things, are they not?
Whatever their causes and natures,
whether they’re communists or capitalists,
liberal or liberticidal, allegedly humanist or humanicidal,
how to confuse the balance of forces
and extreme and extremist imbalances?
Contrary to widespread assumptions,
both the so-called ultra-liberal capitalist regimes
and the Soviet-style authoritarian communist regimes
(not necessarily to be confused with earlier Marxist thinking)
share common features:
– the establishment of an elite,
– a predatory view of wealth and property,
– great inequalities of power, wealth and privilege,
– the exploitation, impoverishment and enslavement of a population,
– constant rivalries that lead to over-productivity.
Indeed,
in constant threat and eternal competition
with the United States and Western Europe,
in order to protect the power and privileges of party members
so that they could defend themselves
against any enemy, real or not, foreign or dissenting, internal or external,
all the forces and resources of Soviet-type economies
were dedicated to the heavy industries
that fueled military power above all else.
And on both sides of the ‘iron curtain’,
the arms race and nuclear terror was unrestrained,
exacerbating the structural excesses.
From the point of view of our reasoning,
two major defects are inherent to communism as it was established,
as opposed to capitalism, in the 20th century:
1. claiming to embody the general good
without being tolerant, democratic, supportive and caring,
(basically, the Tsar and his court were ousted
to be replaced by another subjugating tyranny).
and 2. a materialist vision of the economy
that was overly accounting and production-oriented,
basing its power on the military-industrial complex.
In other words,
it was a sort of economic utopia
that denied any spiritual, affective, superior, intelligent, creative,
democratic and, dare we say it, ‘liberal’, even wise and transcendent
dimension of the human-individual-citizen.
In this sense,
the economy of the then Soviet communism
shares at least one essential characteristic
with the financial and money-dominated market economy
of contemporary global capitalism:
Humans serve the economy
far more than the economy serves humans.
Or, to put it another way,
the economy is put at the service of a competitive elite
instead of serving the general interest.
“In theory,
a non-capitalist system can be entirely made up of private companies!
Conversely,
a fully nationalized economy can be nothing more than state capitalism,
in which a ruling class shares effective ownership of the means of production
and exploits workers and society to maximize its own profits.
The Soviet Union constituted such a state capitalism.”*
*Jacques Généreux explique l’économie à tout le monde,
Jacques Généreux, Seuil, 2014.
Indeed,
because Soviet communist ‘culture’,
in competition with capitalist civilization from its very conception,
has, in contrast to it,
‘aped’ capitalism.
Unfortunately for the Russian people,
rich of such a deep and beautiful culture,
unfortunately for the world, born out of capitalism,
Sovietism embraced the main metaphysical lines of it.
To be more exact, it embraced its prejudices:
This can no doubt be debated,
but from our socio-philosophical-economical-historical point of view,
as opposed to capitalism, as opposed to the reign of private greed,
in the face of the fierce competition from the West,
the Soviet-style communist ideology almost naturally adopted
the productivist and competitivist (Stakhanovist) frameworks
imposed by a regime born from the exploitation of the Other,
and where, in its most radical and extreme version,
all forms of otherness,
whether human, animal, biological, vegetable, mineral, or energetic,
got denied, blotted out,
erased from political-ideological-economic considerations.
In other words,
Soviet-style communism was a misguided drift
in which the military-industrial complex
and the party monopolized all the resources,
resources that could have been better allocated to the people,
that should have been better allocated to the people,
had the international context been more favourable and peaceful.
Today, in the United States,
Americans do not have a universal welfare system.
And yet,
how many hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on the military?
Above all, an additional common point,
whether communist or capitalist,
regimes have so far retained the same types of monetary policies and monopolies
which, as we will see in more detail later,
are based on the scarcity of money,
the domination of a privileged oligarchy over the majority of the population,
and the race for growth and short-sighted productivism.*
*Rethinking Money,
Bernard Lietaer et Jacqui Dunne,
Bernett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, 2013,
p.26, 27, 28
In the context of the Cold War,
cold yet bloody, a kind of world war
whose ideological outcome still seems, basically, uncertain,
money, power and privileges
have been and still are, within both types of regimes,
instruments of domination.
From the point of view of this functioning,
the ins and outs of these two systems coincide.
Like the negative of a photograph,
although Soviet-style regimes were the opposite of capitalism,
both have the same fundamental characteristics:
The use of productive force
as a priority and primordial element of power
as a decision-making, greedy
and therefore necessarily predatory and authoritarian force
at the heart of civilization at the service of an elite
that could nevertheless find justification in the eyes of their respective populations
in the total and absolute rejection of each other.
In the sense that they are both fundamentally elitist,
extremist in their confrontation, antagonism and mutual exclusion,
these two types of regimes have been a reflection of each other.*
* Especially then Soviet-style socialism and today’s capitalism.
Indeed, when the two blocs were still fighting,
the then undiscredited Marxist utopian ideology
made it possible to limit the excesses of capitalism,
among other historical particularisms,
thanks to the hope it aroused among the populations of the Western bloc
and thus to the resistance it inspired.
The proof is in the ease
with which China manages to bring together the worst of the two systems
in terms of exploitation, muzzling and, or manipulation
of the free and democratic expression of the population
for the benefit of an elitist oligarchy…
If, on the one hand,
in a fundamentalist radical capitalist regime,
the creative forces of a nation are dominated by ultra-rich private forces, the 1%,
whose power is multiplied so many times over today
by scientific and technological progress
that they monopolize the largest share of capital and financial resources,
in Soviet-type regimes, on the other hand,
these forces were monopolized by an authoritarian and ultra-centralized state,
driven by an immense greed for power,
based on the rejection of all forms of private property,
and on the confiscation of all means of production,
which it had seized to the detriment and the greatest misfortune of the people,
then, from an eco-humanist point of view,
these two systems, these two ideologies rest on common foundations,
almost equally harmful on both sides
for the people and the people’s children.
Inequalities in the distribution of wealth, power and control
between a 1% minority and privileged elite on the one hand,
– who do everything they can to ensure that nothing ever changes
and enslave the people and folks,
in a case more readily using domination
through fear, torture, geographical deportation, and forced labour,
and in the other by the commodification, the ‘monetization’
of any form of life or relationship in society,
by fear, economic deportation, exclusion and extreme poverty –
and the 99% of the population on the other hand,
are as fundamental, immense, fatal and unacceptable
in the communist world of then
as they are today in the globalized capitalist civilization.
Whether capitalist or Soviet,
an economic policy of austerity is a deliberate choice of power
that only serves to justify the appropriation of wealth
by a minority at the expense of the majority.
Even in a purely capitalist, or pro-market context,
when they are too strong,
inequalities are not only harmful to the less fortunate,
they are also the source of all concerns and precariousness
among an increasingly important part of the middle classes,
and even among the upper and oligarchic classes
because when an economy idles or grinds to a halt,
their numbers will inevitably, sooner or later, diminish,
entrepreneurial freedom will atrophy,
freedom itself will disappear.
With the growing precariousness of humanity and the world,
the civilization they lead is doomed to become precarious.
Hence the aggravation of fundamentally distorted, perverse and illusory dynamics.
While Soviet-style regimes
perpetrated poverty, inefficiency, frustration, suffering, resentment and dissent
which will be their constant threat and ultimately cause their collapse from 1989 to 91,
let us be careful that the growing inequalities imposed on the peoples of the world
do not create too much poverty, frustration, suffering, resentment.
Even from a purely capitalist point of view,
budgetary austerity and inequality,
poverty wages and every man for himself in times of crisis
are absurdities:
Without revenue, there is no demand.
Without demand, there is no supply.
Without supply, there is no sale.
Without sales, there is no revenue,
no income, no investments, no growth.
It’s a downward spiral.
And if the total rejection of entrepreneurial freedom,
the freedom to provide for one’s own needs and,
in reasonable and legitimate proportions, the freedom to get rich,
is a fundamental error
that was undoubtedly fatal to the communist regimes,
the rejection of any form of utopia of solidarity
between all peoples and all beings
in a social and humanist vision of the economy
is transforming the global capitalist system
into a planetary monster
just as despotic and nightmarish, but in another form,
as the Stalinist-inspired nightmare.
If Marxist utopia turned into a Stalinist-style nightmare,
it was through an ideological rejection of reality,
of the incompressible will and right of human beings to live free,
to live free out of the fruit of their intelligence, their work and their benevolence
through a rejection of all forms of comfort and ease,
through a rejection of all forms of material or spiritual rights,
and therefore of any form of capitalism or free entrepreneurship*
founded on the right to a minimum of property, wealth and money,
while remaining hypocritical in the sense that Soviet-Stalinist society
was also systemically an inegalitarian, elitist and authoritarian society.
* Freedom of enterprise and capitalism are indeed not the same thing.
The definition of capitalism is the accumulation of capital.
The definition of entrepreneurial freedom
is the fundamental right to create an organization
in order to live off the fruits of one’s talents and work.
We shall discuss this further later on.
Out of dogmatic and forced intolerance
towards any form of capitalism, free enterprise, market and mercantilism,
even within a reasonable framework,
Soviet-style power effectively imposed austerity on its peoples
in order not to share the available wealth.
In the same way, but in the opposite direction,
by an absolute and total, blind and insane rejection
of any form of democratic, solidarity-based, universal public sector,
with a fundamentally non-profit-making aim and universal inspiration,
we must be concerned that there is no longer, or almost no longer, any counterbalance
to the power of the fundamentally greedy and profit-oriented private sector,
as insatiable and inegalitarian
as its systemic desire for eternal growth
is illusory and futile.
The best proof is that in 2016,
a billionaire was elected to the presidency of the United States
thanks to his anti-establishment rhetoric,
but once in power he appoints secretaries of state
from Goldman Sachs, anti-ecologists and other ultra-conservatives,
in other words, fanatics of the system
who put in place measures that do not serve the population at all
but which give more and more power and money to the rich and powerful,
to all those who have an interest in ensuring not that nothing changes,
but instead, that all the excesses of the system get worse and worse.
Although capitalism induces and imposes slavery and obedience
through mental manipulation, dependency, fear, debt and poverty
rather than through brute force, repression and torture, (or does it?)
inequalities and privileges give rise to poverty and misery,
all totalitarian and bloodthirsty excesses,
regardless of the type of regime or society
in which we find ourselves, or to which we refer.
In the sense that they both have forms of oligarchic authoritarianism
with ideologies as inflexible and dangerous as each other,
one embodied by the dictator and the party line,
the other by the omnipotence of the markets
and the oligarchy of the super-rich,
communism as it was established in the 20th century
has without any shadow of a doubt
more common features with today’s capitalism
than the change in society proposed today
by the opponents of the absolutist reign of money has with communism.
Which is exactly why they want us to believe the contrary.
If it is absolutely undeniable that the communist utopia
has resulted in a macabre, terrible and inhuman dystopia,
it is clear that capitalism too is pouring into extremes and imbalances.
You do not even need figures to convince you of this,
just look at the inequalities and the number of people
who today are dying of cold, hunger, thirst, war,
mental and physical torture, infectious diseases, viruses and scourges
that are rampant throughout the world.
Would Capitalism succumb to the same fundamental causes as Communism?
Systemic inequality, authoritarian elitism
and stupid, mean, blind, destructive productivism,
destroying its own people who gave it birth and legitimacy,
destroying itself?
Yes, that is a fact, an absolute certainty.
Laugh and belittle while you can.
When the hour has struck, you will cry or bleed.
You too will die.
Thus,
the ideologies of communism and capitalism
must no longer split humanity and the world in two.
In the awareness of the consequences of our actions,
humanity must share the best of both and find something else.
A third way is possible.
A middle way is possible.
*
Equilibria.
On reason and the market.
In the first half of the twentieth century,
two major experiments bore fruit and mitigated the effects of major crises
at the beginning of the twentieth century.
They were carried out in the USA and in the URRS (Soviet Russia):
In 1921, with the New Economic Policy (NEP),
Lenin introduced a pinch of capitalism
in the collectivist and nationalized Soviet economy
through the restoration of certain property rights
in order to allow the living and creative forces of the nation to express themselves
and to live off their talents and skills
in a market that was tolerated
in a way that was undoubtedly too limited,
but whose consequences were positive, real and proven.*
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouvelle_politique_%C3%A9conomique
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy#Results
In 1933, following the stock market collapse of 1929,
it was Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States
that introduced a pinch of Socialism in an American society
where, in theory, the dominant ideology, the doctrine
advocated only market rule just like today.
It is because the imbalances are extreme that they are destructive,
destruction being only the means for the imbalances to disappear
and for a certain equilibrium to be restored.
In any case,
it is only when opposites balance each other
that they can give life.
See the animal realm, of which we are a part,
see the Earth, see the Universe.
It is out of the balance of opposites
that everything is born.
In order for their charges to neutralize each other, they must coexist.
For their charges to neutralize each other, they have to unite.
With historical hindsight,
we can say that it was during the New Deal in the United States
and the NEP in the USSR
that the economies of the two countries were undoubtedly the most efficient
and best able to create beneficial and productive dynamics.
These two experiences of rapprochement in practice
in their own way bore fruit
and helped to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression in the United States
and those of the great shortages
during the counter-revolutionary wars in Soviet Russia.
Unfortunately,
the NEP was abolished just after Lenin’s death in 1924.
Even if they will last longer, until the Reagan era,
the positive effects of F. D. Roosevelt and his New Deal
are now largely over.
Meanwhile, in the 1930s,
in order to face the Great Depression,
Western Europe, and especially Germany, fell into the trap of austerity
and deflation, poverty, inequality, the law of markets and greed.*
*Hyperinflation was over by 1925,
eight years before Hitler and the Nazis came to power.
Some people say that hyperinflation was the cause of Nazism.
It was in fact one of the multiple consequences
of the defeat of 1918 and the Economic Crisis,
but only indirectly of the hyper-inflationary episode in Germany.
Yet the people remain, to this day, wrongly traumatized.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_de_la_r%C3%A9publique_de_Weimar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
As a matter of fact, it was deflation that plagued the German economy from 1930 to 1932,
when in July the Nazis obtained 37.3% of the vote and in November 33.1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic#Decline_.281930.E2.80.931933.29
Then, as we know it,
Europe descended into hell and the Second World War.
Consequently,
a system of free enterprise and international trade
can and must be envisaged, designed and balanced
with a collective, sovereign and multidimensional vision
of the economy and the currency,
extending from local to global, global to local,
local to local, global to global scales,
in order for universal harmony to be possible.
Conversely,
the law of the market,
which allows only the most fortunate to reign unchallenged,
is a ticking time bomb.
*
To balance out supply and demand,
To tame prices and markets.
Moscow’s bad investments during the Soviet era,
almost all of which were concentrated on heavy industry and armaments,
resulted in the scarcity of basic necessities, growing deficits, black markets,
discontent and dissent.
Faced with such a situation,
the authorities saw fit to arbitrarily set prices
in order to keep them as low as possible and contain public discontent,
which would ultimately contribute to the collapse of the entire system,
both in economic and political terms.
It is of course clear that a Soviet-style situation
where prices remain low but commodities are scarce,
deficits are huge, and black markets are legion is catastrophic,
and it is probably neither realistic nor desirable
to set prices beyond what is reasonable,
nor to stifle the market.
The lesson of all this is simple:
The law of supply and demand, as what sets prices,
is a source of valuable information about the state of the market
that cannot be ignored.
Indeed,
to ignore them
would be equivalent for a climate scientist
to want to analyze global warming
but without taking temperatures into account.
Not a chance.
No credit would of course be given to this so-called scientist.
However,
the law of supply and demand is a balance of power
between those who have and those who do not,
between those who need to buy and those who need to sell.
Consequently,
because it is indeed the result of a balance of power,
the law of supply and demand is based on information
that is at best limited, changing and short-sighted,
at worst asymmetrical and truncated, rigged.
It is therefore a question of taking it into account,
but in no way of elevating it to the rank of reliable and, above all,
decisive information that would prevail over any other.
Besides,
if the law of supply and demand
can only have a very limited, one-sided and partial vision
of the present economic reality,
it can even less have an overall vision
of the economic, financial, social, environmental and geopolitical realities
whose present and future consequences increase as time passes by.
As we said,
the scarcer a resource becomes and the more necessary it is,
the more expensive it is.
If it is truly indispensable,
then there is no theoretical ceiling to its price.
It can be infinite.
This is all the more worrying
because the staggering inequalities,
the monopolization of all resources and means of production by a few
and the increased scientific-technological power of humanity
make obsolete all the points of equilibrium and reference
that could, or would have been found only a few decades ago
in terms of the balance of power and their consequences.
Thus,
when the price of a resource rises beyond what citizens can afford,
then it is in the public interest for the nation to take the full measure of it and invest in that resource,
either indirectly, through incentives to the private sector,
or directly, so that supply and demand can be rebalanced
and prices become moderate and fair for all parties.
Also,
since, as we said, prices set by the law of supply and demand
are only piecemeal information about a country’s economic reality,
it is not up to the markets to decide
what the path of a country, a nation, a world should be.
A glaring example is housing in most Western countries.
Prices are prohibitively high for two interrelated reasons:
1. Housing scarcity;
2. Those who have capital are speculating on it.
In the light of this observation,
two measures must accordingly be taken:
Limit speculation.
Invest in housing construction.
And if that were not enough,
then serious consideration should also be given
to enforcing the availability of year-round unoccupied housing.
Mastering the law of the market
without falling into the trap
of narrow-minded and inefficient authoritarianism
would be so simple.
Not only is it up to collective reason
to define the objectives and wishes of the nation,
but its decisions must have the force of law,
and failure to do so
must not be without consequences for any economic actor,
be it in the public or private sector.
*
Sovereign investments
Almost word for word,
we’ve already said this:
It is noteworthy and remarkable that profitable companies
that produce quality products or services
and thus ensure their long-term survival
too often close down under the pretext
that they are not sufficiently productive and profitable,
because their shareholders mainly want more and more,
and therefore go to places where labour is exploited at will,
where people are paid like slaves,
and where there is no respect
for human health, life or the environment.
In other words,
it turns out that in a given area, in Europe for example,
we have the means of production, infrastructure and logistics,
the know-how and the highly competent human ‘resources’
to manufacture and produce high quality products or services,
products or services that sell because people need them,
that sell so well that the company that produces them makes a profit.
So, it turns out
that we have everything we need to produce quality products or services
that are not only necessary for the people who consume them,
but also to support employees and employers.
It turns out
that we have everything we need to run a healthy and ‘normal’ economy,
but the only missing thing
is the most artificial, symbolic and arbitrary thing that can be,
the easiest thing to create and produce whether it’s on scraps of paper,
or just by typing on a computer keyboard:
Money!
In the light of this ineffable reality,
what is the dogma
that would prohibit the sovereign nation from becoming an economic actor
by buying back this production tool
at the demonstrated net surplus value and profitability
if it deemed it to be in the best interest of its people
when its owner has disposed of it through such an excess of greed
that it could almost be qualified as a betrayal
not only of its employees but also of the nation?
I ask you the question.
Sovereignty,
local production, short distribution channels, jobs, competitiveness,
autonomy, state finances:
Winners,
we would be winners in every respect.
*
Politics and economics,
The primacy of reason.
Since reason precedes all action,
and moreover all sensible political action,
then it goes without saying
that as long as the economy is not subordinated to politics,
in the noblest sense of the word,
economic efficiency and wisdom will remain illusions,
errors in which we will persist
so much so that if we do not change
some of the fundamental aberrations of the system,
we will have to face the greatest disaster
that humanity has ever had to endure.
*
« Everything is politics »
By definition,
a political regime is universal in its consequences and ramifications.
One way or another, to varying degrees,
more deeply than we are willing to admit or are aware of,
it affects everyone, with no exception.
Whatever form it takes or whatever name it is given,
in a tyranny, all members of society become tyrants or slaves,
the irony being that, perhaps without fully realizing it,
all become victims and slaves,
with some choosing to become executioners as well.
In today’s capitalist society,
it is the consumer who shoots him or herself in the foot as a worker,
because by preferring the lowest prices
to the detriment of all other considerations,
they are dragging wages, all wages, down.
And who moreover shoots him or herself in the foot as a human being,
because by preferring the lowest prices
to the detriment of all other considerations,
they favour companies that not only harm the environment,
but also their own health.
Thus,
everyone, without exception,
feels the negative and, or positive consequences thereof.
Indeed,
while no one is exempt from the negative effects of a system or regime,
no one is exempt from its positive effects.
That is why it is vital to invest
in democracy, wisdom, justice and humanity.
That is why it is inevitable to invest
in knowledge, education and intelligence, in research,
in wisdom and the sharing of wisdom.
That is why it is vital to invest in the future and in people.
*
The future is now
If our children are our own future,
if our children are the future of the Nation, and of the world as it is now,
what is our children’s future?
No one doubts the crucial importance
of investing in the future and the education of our children.
No one, after a few moments of reflection,
can doubt that their benefits would be immeasurable.
It is not only what can be exchanged for money that is profitable.
There are advances that cannot be put into money,
but in which it is absolutely necessary to invest
because they are beneficial to society as a whole.
The future, by definition, is not limited to the short term.
While as a human being or an investor,
I have the right to want to manage my life and my business
in the short and even very short term,
as a species, we have a duty to be wise and far-sighted.
Contrary to preconceived ideas
according to which the long term is inaccessible because too far away,
the benefits of investing in the future
not only tend naturally towards the universal
and propagate exponentially over time,
they are also immediate,
and their consequences are also felt in the present,
in the here and now.
To manage the present well is to manage the future well.
To manage the future well is to manage the present well.
We cannot manage one without managing the other.
And even if, despite all the arguments I am trying to make here,
you were still uncertain as to their merits,
then I remind you that anything is better than the death of the species
and the greatest nightmare in history.
The benefits of solidarity and universal wisdom
are forever beyond quantification.
Because today’s citizens
are the result of the education they received yesterday,
the positive or negative consequences of education on a society
are, in fact, constant, incessant,
because they operate in a kind of parallel temporality,
a “higher” temporality that goes beyond time
because they are always tangible and real
in the past, the present and the future at the same time.
In the sense that the education we give them
will make them what we already are, for better or worse,
are we already the future of our children?
If we are our children’s future,
is the future now?
It is a fatal mistake
to oppose the short term to the medium and long term,
because inevitably, a society that invests in the long term,
since it invests in reason and rationality,
also invests in the present.
Citizens must be sufficiently awake, trained, informed
on the widest scales of space and time references
to be able to make informed decisions
that will strengthen justice, welfare and democracy.
Because none can exist without the other,
because the individual cannot exist without the community,
because the intimate sphere and the universal sphere are one and the same
with constant, strange and subtle interactions,
the psychic, cognitive and emotional balances
are as precious as the collective, political, economic, social balances
among others.
And the individual is at least as important, valuable and sacred
as the community or society.
For,
if we admit that Humanity is on Earth for any reason,
or that it is invested with any mission,
even if only that of saving itself and just continuing to live,
what meaning would there be
if society were to function
at the price of the sacrifice
of the individuals that make it up?
It would sacrifice itself.
What would be the point of founding a society
that would sacrifice the very people who founded it?
The original raison d’être of any society or nation
is to improve the lot of those who participate in it.
Human beings need each other to realize, to fulfill the potential
that exists in each and everyone.
All children and all human beings
need understanding and comprehension, help and mutual aid,
to live up to themselves and find a reason to live.
These are both the conditions and the objectives
of politics and the rule of law,
here and now, always and everywhere.
In that sense,
they are their foundations.
Investing in Democracy,
in social harmony, in education, in free cooperation,
respect, intelligence, tolerance and non-violence
in the greatest humanly possible justice and equality,
promoting all institutions, organizations, structures, enterprises, associations,
all citizens working towards this end
would not cost much to a world united in relative harmony
compared to the sums and resources we waste
in struggle and division, in lawsuits and corruption.*
*Every day or so, the news abounds
with new episodes of corruption, tax evasion, bribes or whatever,
the amounts of which are, strictly speaking, astronomical.
You have the order of magnitude,
so there is no point in drowning you out with figures.
*
The future is now.
That which has no price.
How much value do you place on improving the lot of humanity as a whole?
And if precisely because they are unquantifiable,
no one can prove by A+B
that the benefits of universal cooperation will be immense,
no one can mathematically prove the opposite either,
but at least we will have tried to save the world.
Because we’re sinking into a race to the bottom,
the lowest wages, the lowest prices, the lowest quality,
the lowest health or environmental standards, the lowest social services,
the lowest ethical and moral standards;
because the world is in competition with itself;
because the world is at war with itself;
because in reality,
today’s globalized capitalism
is a ruthless, total world war that doesn’t say its name,
a war of ultra-capitalism against ultra-capitalism itself;
therefore,
giving birth to a civilization in harmony,
in particular by taking back the power of monetary creation
from big private banks
by the peoples of the whole world,
investing in life and the future, in wisdom and education,
in the blossoming and liberation of humanity,
is the only alternative to the mad race for profit,
to ruthless universal competition, to the confrontation of all against all,
to division, to loneliness, to isolation, to suffering and to self-destruction.
The purpose of existence
is neither to produce nor to sell nor to consume cars or televisions
by the hundreds of thousands, by the tens of millions,
in ever more unsustainably gigantic proportions.
The purpose of all life
is to live and to live with dignity,
in consciousness and in harmony
with oneself, with others, with the world, with life.
Because knowledge is an unquantifiable source of wealth,
because life is an unquantifiable gift,
because the intrinsic values of wisdom, education, freedom
generosity, solidarity, clemency, intelligence and charity
are real and sources of immense and priceless riches,
they must be fostered, encouraged, taught and developed.
Because the sovereignty
of the world over itself, of humanity over itself,
requires all of us to be aware of it,
only a healthy and humane education
can help not only to ensure
that the hold of money on society
and on the collective psyche of the modern world
is finally loosened,
but also, and above all,
that we move in the only desirable and possible right direction:
Collective and universal salvation.
*
An aside at this point is in order.
Let us not lose sight of the fact
that the aim of all the reflections in this chapter
is that the priority economic reform to be carried out,
in any case if we have in mind the salvation
not only of the nation but also and above all of humanity,
is the great monetary reform:
to take back the power of money creation
from the big private ultra-profit-making banks.
We will explain the current monetary system,
its chronic and systemic abuses
at the root of a contemporary world on the verge of explosion,
and will reveal the conclusions and solutions
that must already appear to you between the lines,
as if through a semi-transparent veil,
which little by little reveals more and more clearly
the solutions that impose themselves,
even though you may also have already labelled
the unknown author of these lines as a communist or utopian.
The many digressions
that punctuate this section are however necessary,
because not knowing something
is usually not knowing that you don’t know it.
Because lies and manipulation are raging in today’s world,
it is essential to shed light on a large number of problems
in order to be able to draw absolutely vital and indispensable conclusions.
We would therefore kindly ask you
not to label, judge and reject reflections and other discursive detours
without having really thought about them.
In the same way,
it’s only when we don’t understand something
that we find this thing difficult and complicated.
But once we have figured it out,
everything seems simple and easy.
Check with your own experiences
and you will see that what is said here is true.
As soon as the light shines on a problem,
as soon as we have seen and understood,
we can never forget, and everything seems so simple
that we find it difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of the person
who does not have our knowledge or experience.
Let us never forget that, from tiny to infinity,
clarity and simplicity often require a vision
that is at once sharp, precise, broad and nuanced.
*
Welfare State and Liberty
In a genuine democracy,
the State is the embodiment of Law and Freedom.
In a genuine Democracy,
the State is the embodiment of the People and the Nation.
These are not just words.
They are realities.
To be more exact, a multidimensional reality.
When one loses freedom,
one loses everything that goes with it.
When one loses freedom, nothing is possible.
Loving, acting, doing, thinking, moving, feeling,
nothing is possible anymore.
When you gain freedom, you gain everything.
Everything becomes possible again.
When you get your freedom, you get your life back.
The freer we are,
the more alive we feel, the more alive we are.
In that sense,
freedom is sacred.*
*Freedom not to be confused with compulsive desires
to do what one wants without any consideration
for their consequences on other people and oneself.
If it exists,
when we achieve freedom,
it is the spirit that we touch,
it is the spirit that we discover,
which reveals something intrinsically divine.
Isn’t being free the only way to be oneself?
To be or not to be?
For human beings,
that has never been a more pressing question.
*
Save nations
from the markets.
Like a burst of light
upon the inhuman and monstrous horror of tyranny,
the state became Welfare when the Second World War ended.
If, at the beginning of this third millennium,
the ideology, the dominant current of thought,
seeks to weaken and impoverish the State,
it is Freedom that they impoverish and weaken.
If Democracy is the sole guarantor
of everyone’s freedom, rights and welfare,
it is all of us whom they impoverish and seek to weaken.
For if only freedom liberates,
and if Democracy in its authentic form is the power of all over all,
then only Democracy
is the guarantor of our freedom and therefore of our security.
If authentic Democracy
is the regime that tends towards the universal,
then authentic democracy
is the only regime that tends towards the divine.
By mocking, denouncing, stifling or killing Democracy,
they are plundering, violating, destroying and murdering freedom.
If genuine Democracy is the power of all over all,
only genuine Democracy can ensure the common good,
safeguard the interest of each and every one,
and the harmony of both the whole and the parts.
We keep saying that.
Thus,
only a genuine, universal and sovereign Democracy
is effective and efficient enough
to save Man from himself.
If democracy is synonymous with security, freedom and universality,
then only a genuine, universal and sovereign democracy
must govern our political decisions.
If genuine democracy is sovereign and universal,
then it governs both politics and economics,
and its decisions must be respected by all without exception
as a common will guided by common interest.
If harmony is the goal of a real democracy,
then it is its task to manage markets
by pursuing balances between control and freedom,
between deliberation and sustainability,
between management and cooperation,
between wisdom and salvation.
To this day,
we are told that a strong public sector is heretical.
We are constantly being told
that taxing the richest is pure blasphemy.
They even try to convince us
that privatizing education, health, the army and security institutions
is not pure inegalitarian, absurd and perverse madness,
which bears in itself all the rotten fruits of injustice and corruption.
Do you understand what is written here?
Why does the majority of those who govern us
want the nation to be as weak as possible?
In order for the forces of money to take over everything?
The answer is obvious:
Undoubtedly
in order for the wealthiest of our declining civilization
to be able to exploit the world and humanity
through disinformation, propaganda, division, confusion,
at the lowest possible cost and for maximum profit,
pollute the former and enslave the latter,
and destroy everything in their path,
with monstrous voracity in that it can never, ever be sated,
quite the contrary, because greed always wants more,
even more than more, exponentially and infinitely.
Therein lies one of the psychophysical reasons for the curse of growth.
The material reason being, as we have said and will say again,
the usurpation of the power of money creation by the private banking sector.
However sensible and scientifically correct it may be,
any challenge to this unstable and dangerous system
is systematically refuted and condemned
because anything that isn’t the dogma is heresy.
By creating heresies, blasphemies and curses,
they create a totalitarian dogma,
all the more extreme as their system has harmful and disastrous effects
on the world, the earth and humanity.
Who would dare to deny this?
No wonder that by creating such a totalitarian and destructive dogma
other such totalitarian and destructive dogmas emerge…
Greed, lies and manipulation,
the triumph of financial capitalism,
the tyranny of banks and large multinationals,
the submission to markets, the undivided reign of money-king,
the ideology of corrupting and corrupt neo-liberalism
is elevated to the rank of an accursed religion,
accursed because destructive of life itself.
How not to see it?
How not to know it?
If the absolute power of a minority over a majority
is the definition of totalitarianism,
then the current system is a tyranny.
Tyrannical,
it is getting increasingly so.
Truth be told,
tyranny imposes its diktat on the whole world.
Tyranny grows like a monster that will destroy everything,
including you, including the markets themselves.
For markets themselves to exist, they must be functional.
To do that, they need balances.
There has to be relative equality.
Otherwise, they can’t last.
They can’t.
The more sustainable investments are,
the less volatile, unstable and fragile the markets are.
The more sustainable investments are,
the less volatile, unstable and fragile markets are,
and the more reliable they are,
the more serene and confident investors are in the future.
When investments are sustainable and fruitful,
it is freedom, freedom to live and to live free that is earned.
All this goes without saying.
Please see the significance of these words,
these lines, these thoughts, these visions.
To grasp the scheme of things,
to feel the magnitude of everything,
this is all we need, or most of it.
*
Choose
Only a genuine, universal, sovereign and enlightened Democracy
can guide the nation or society, the people, the tribe,
the family, the individual,
humanity.
Only reason can guide itself,
and go towards the light,
where it is good for it to go,
where it wants to go.
*
The nation’s raison d’être.
Because to be in harmony,
a society must create the conditions
in which harmony can develop and flourish,
because systemic, global solidarity is the only alternative
to systemic, global poverty,
because the benefits of social wisdom and justice
are, strictly speaking, invaluable,
and because life is priceless,
basic human needs
– shelter, food, clothing, access to clean water, health care, education, knowledge, culture and information –
are inalienable rights.
Thus,
every citizen, every human being, every people,
must be able to assert its natural right
to demand from its governance
that its basic needs be the number one priority
of the government and the Nation,
that their financial costs be as fair and accessible as possible,
and that every citizen, every human being, every people
be able to benefit from the means and freedom
to organize themselves to this end,
with respect for all and in harmony
with the rest of the community and the world.
The will of men to organize themselves to master all their shortcomings,
to work for the interest of all and to live as humanely as possible,
as harmoniously as possible, as freely as possible,
is at the origin of any human society.
It is its root, its foundation, its raison d’être.
If it is no longer so,
it is because it has been usurped, misused, diverted, corrupted and betrayed.
If it is no longer so,
then we are prisoners of a tyranny.
Since the common interest is the purpose of the nation and its governance,
since the common interest is the purpose of genuine politics,
then the purpose of finance and economics must be the same.
The interests of a ruling class
cannot be at the expense of the rest of society,
let alone the whole world,
without a cost
even more outrageous and disproportionate than their profits.
No matter how great our efforts to do so,
we will never be able to measure or calculate the cost
of all the suffering, all the poverty, all the loss of profit for humanity
as a result of global and total dumping,
as a result of the great war of all against all.
Fiscal dumping, social dumping, environmental dumping,
political dumping, wage dumping…
it would seem that dumping
is the guideline for all contemporary global capitalist policies.
The Cambridge dictionary definition of the word ‘dumping’ is as follows:
“the act of getting rid of something that is not wanted.”*
* http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dumping
Would the world, the earth and humanity
not be wanted by the elites?
The welfare of citizens is the raison d’être of the State,
it is the raison d’être of Democracy,
it is the purpose of the Nation and of its governance.
Because the general interest is at the origin of the State,
its governance must dedicate all its strength and energy
to the general interest
without ever unfairly and unduly favouring any particular interest,
because when a particular interest,
a person or a group of people,
is overly favoured,
it will naturally tend to take advantage of it,
to take advantage of the fact that the balance of power tilts in its favour,
and exploit the rest of the community.
Similarly,
when the interest of the state, or the government
that is supposed to represent the general will
is no longer in harmony with that of the nation as a whole,
then its laws become unjust,
the state apparatus and its governance illegitimate,
chaos, conflicts, the risk of wars, civil wars and tyrannies increase
unfortunately with a certain lightning speed.
When the democratic state disappears,
the rule of law disappears with it.
There is no more law
except that of the strongest, the richest or the most powerful.
Take away democracy,
and the result is either chaos or tyranny.
Either way,
it’s the law of the strongest and, or the richest that prevails.
Truly,
the general interest is easy to define:
Politically speaking,
it is all that remains to be considered
when all private interests that use power for their own benefit
have ceased to be privileged.
Money, banks, finance and companies, mainly multinationals,
were not created to create a dominant super-rich class,
but to serve society.
The primary reasons why money was created
are to facilitate exchanges between human beings,
to avoid disagreements that lead to conflicts over the price of things,
to establish the power and control of states over the economy
and to lessen or circumvent the devastating effects
of widespread indebtedness.
If, on the contrary,
due to the exponential increase in inequalities,
money is for the vast majority of individuals a rarefied ‘good’,
then not only does it lose its primary function,
but its real function becomes contrary to its original purpose:
money becomes an instrument of domination, slavery,
even physical or mental torture.
That is why a society relinquishes democracy,
that is why a people relinquishes its sovereignty
when it is deprived of the power to create and manage money and credit.
In other words,
no nation is sovereign
without the power to create and manage its own currency.
*
On the strength and resilience, purpose and usefulness
of the public economy.
All serious and humane economists
agree that a public and well thought-out economy
not only provides public services useful to all and sundry,
not only balances markets between supply and demand,
but also ensures that a balanced economic cycle
is sustained between periods of growth and recession,
and therefore maintains jobs, relative prosperity
and all that goes with it.
In other words,
it provides resilience to the overall national economy
by not being directly exposed to the ups and downs of the markets.
By ensuring the sustainability of monetary exchanges of goods and services,
the public economy is both the source and the fruit
of stronger national solidarity
which enables the entire economy to avoid total collapse.
Because the public sector economy, the rule of law, legislation,
all forms of subsidies were still robust enough
to preserve activities and jobs, a lot of jobs,
and therefore the demand that goes with them,
they acted in 2007-08 as a buffer, a mattress, a cushion
in the face of a private economy, managed by banks and finance,
which had totally and miserably collapsed.
Without this state-generated public sector economy,
more than a country’s economy
would have been devastated by a lack of credit to private businesses,
bankruptcies and job losses would have been much worse.
Without the state system,
banks themselves could not have been saved,
as there would have been no entity powerful enough to bail them out.
2007, 2008,
who doesn’t remember?
Of course,
the bailout of the banking system
caused government debts to skyrocket.
One crisis led to another crisis.
But this is another problem we will come back to.
The rationale for a public sector is therefore manifold:
Public utility.
Sovereignty over strategic industries.
The balance of power
with regard to the law of the strongest of the markets.
The buffer effect
to absorb shocks and mitigate recession cycles.
A public economy, based on solidarity and citizenship
acts as a base, a solid base because it is well anchored in the earth,
which could support a solid building because solidly rooted in equilibrium.
Building to a system
whose pillars are universal will, freedom, wisdom and sovereignty.
A legal and juridical framework
which balances and reconciles the public sector and private free enterprise
in a competitive playing field intended to be framed and restrained
is necessarily strong, protective, innovative, efficient, resilient.
Is not one of the missions of the nation state
to succeed in balancing the balance of power
between the members of the nation
so that the members of the nation do not attack each other?
It is when power relations are balanced
that their negative and destructive effects fade away.
When a legal framework is built
in which it is recognized that the more balanced the balance of power,
the more the balance of power diminishes
and the more conflicts are neutralized,
then the more the nation’s forces can cooperate, work together
and be fruitful of beneficial things.
It is so simple to understand.
The more the balance of power is out of balance,
the more destructive the consequences.
When a legal framework is built
in which no form of monopoly or tyranny
that destroys freedom is legal, acceptable or desirable,
in which the balance of power is to be as balanced as possible,
then harmony, hope and justice become possible again.
Because everything that works towards harmony
is a cure for the apocalypse,
the Nations of the World and the World
must be able to invest in all the structures
that can be used to perpetuate it:
education, justice, health prevention and health, agriculture, industry,
economic efficiency, environmental management, resource management,
the fair sharing of wealth, inventiveness, professional dynamism,
the sincere enthusiasm of citizens,
with wisdom and sobriety,
without concern for immediate profits or financial manipulation
but in the hope, quantifiable or not, of unimaginable profits,
and a harmony far more achievable, efficient, effective and possible
than can be imagined.
*
On general interest and the sustainability of the nation
Of course,
the State does not have a monopoly on solidarity
and any organization may pool funds or energies
in order to protect its members from any life accident
or to provide them with necessary services
provided that justice presides over their operation
and that compensation to beneficiaries
and profits for organizations and, or shareholders
are proportionate.
However,
I refer you to Michael Moore’s documentary “Sicko”
on health insurance in the United States
which clearly demonstrates the excesses and abuses of a system
in which the private market holds a monopoly or quasi-monopoly in one sector:
American insurance companies pocket the monthly levies from its members,
make a huge profit, and do everything in their power
– and very often succeed in doing so -,
so as not to compensate them when they get sick,
which, needless to say, is completely unfair, to say the least.
Public authority is meaningless
if it cannot intervene and invest in efficient public services
which could thus pursue its missions of general interest
in the promotion of the rule of law, justice, democracy and humanism,
in all sectors essential to social harmony
such as education, health, energy, housing, transport, infrastructure,
communications, currency and banking, law and order
in order to protect itself
from the erratic and increasingly cataclysmic fluctuations of the markets.
For the simple reason
that the population cannot do without certain absolutely vital services,
then the privatization of these services
usually results in unjust and inhuman situations.
For the simple reason
that these services are absolutely vital to the population and the nation,
should private companies manage them in a totally irresponsible manner,
their interest being the maximization of profits and not the well-being of all,
public authorities would nevertheless always have to come to their rescue
in the event of their failure,
for indeed, their services cannot be dispensed with.
This is what happened with the banking and monetary system
in the wake of the 2007 crisis.
In addition,
there are some entities that cannot and should not
be privatized or opened up to competition:
These are all areas of strategic interest
that involve national security to any degree
such as the army, the police, the fire department, energy,
strategic transport and communication infrastructures.
It would not occur to anyone
that any nation would offer control of its nuclear park
to private, let alone foreign powers.
It goes without saying:
Not only would the national wealth leave the country
if controlled by a foreign entity,
no doubt to sooner or later end up in a tax haven,
but in the event of tension or conflict,
the nation would right away be brought down on its knees.
*
On the myth of the inefficiency of the state in the economy
We often hear that the state is useless
in managing the affairs of a company.
On the other hand,
we are told that private companies are by nature and by definition
super efficient in managing their operations.
Haven’t you ever dealt with a company
whose service or merchandise left much to be desired?
Let’s be serious and demystify
what is nothing more than propaganda by the business community
to take over the public sector.
Indeed,
the greatest works are at least as much the work of the public
as of the private sector.
High-speed trains are a very good example,
huge energy infrastructures, hydraulic dams, space missions, the Internet etc.
Above all,
if the original purpose of any private enterprise
is to make as much profit as possible as quickly as possible,
even if it means taking big risks,
the original purpose of the state is the common good.
The capitalist corporation sees in the short term;
The state sees in the long term.
In conclusion,
there are sectors in which the primacy of the state over the corporation,
the primacy of reason over markets,
the primacy of the public over the private
is absolutely indispensable
in order to preserve national sovereignty, wisdom, justice
and the general interest.
If this were not the case,
then the state would have failed in its primary mission:
working for the benefit of the entire nation.
*
Conclusion:
Between economic efficiency and national interest:
Achieving balances
Thus,
a conjunction between the public sector and the private sector
where the Democratic Law presides over and frames the markets
is essential to generate the necessary balances
not only for the prosperity of the nation and humanity,
but also for their survival.
Thus,
a strong state is not the sign of a weak market.
Quite the contrary,
a strong state is a guarantee
that the market will not totally collapse when a crisis strikes,
whatever its nature and magnitude and wherever it comes from.
Thus,
a strong state is not in competition with the private sector.
It is its strongest and most loyal partner.
It is its life insurance policy.
Financial storms may hit the markets again,
the foundation of the real economy will remain firmly in place
and civil society will remain largely unaffected.
And the nation’s great ship
will be able to keep its course
in a direction that is not only known but also desirable to all.
Well-regulated and supervised,
the markets can become more orderly
and finally respect the universal rights
of life, human and living beings.
But like children, they must be given clear limits,
because they will not achieve this on their own.
This necessarily implies that the creation and management of money
should no longer be the preserve of private banks,
not only in order to finance highly necessary projects
such as the ecological transition, democracy, education,
prevention of physical and mental illness, etc.,
but also to relaunch the march of progress and well-being,
to build a new, healthy and measured economy
in which activity for all is assured
and where a sound and measured market competition can operate
for the greater good of all:
the Earth, citizens, associations, and businesses, all included
in a healthy system of democratic checks and balances
and an innovative, efficient and resilient public-private balance.
When we understand the mechanisms of a phenomenon, or a problem,
then we have the power to prevent it from getting totally out of control,
all the more so when it is human-made.
Conversely,
let increased greed remain the supreme rule of our world,
let money remain in the hands of a few,
let everything become a commodity,
let living things be monetized,
let multinationals be gigantic machines to produce and sell,
make as much profit as possible,
even if that means polluting and plundering,
let all public-interest enterprises continue to be privatized,
let the staff of the remaining public administrations and services be downsized
or sold to the highest bidder at a price set by markets
that are at best known to be arbitrary and short-sighted,
at worst childish, predatory, blind and crazy,
conditioned by an increasingly unbalanced balance of power
in short, continuing on the slippery slope we are on
is inevitably going nowhere,
it is inevitably renouncing any desirable and known direction,
it is inevitably renouncing any common endeavour, any humanity,
it is irremediably sowing the wind
of all the climatic, environmental, health, financial, economic, political
and military storms.
Selling the nation’s property to the highest bidder
is abdicating its sovereignty,
the sovereignty of the nation and the beings that make it up
to a conscienceless, unscrupulous, visionless, and uncaring finance.
Abandoning the nation’s sovereignty to the forces of money
is weakening the nation, impoverishing the people,
endangering freedom and the inalienable right to live in peace.
The sovereignty of the nation
derives from the legitimacy conferred on it by its people.
The only sovereign worthy of the name
is the people and the common interest.
Only the people’s cause, and human reason, can embody it.
If genuine Democracy only can embody the general will,
then only genuine Democracy can be sovereign
and only genuine Democracy is legitimate.
Any non-democratic form of power is tyrannical.
Any form of power
that is not the embodiment, the emanation of the people
is illegitimate.
No form of power can consider itself sovereign
if it is not legitimate.
Selling off one’s country’s lands or vital infrastructures
is abdicating one’s own country’s sovereignty, independence and freedom.
Selling one’s country
is outright state treason.
Democracy is thus weakened and increasingly vulnerable
to the destructive outbursts of the financial markets,
to the repeated attacks of capitalist tyrants
who are by nature blind, greedy and childish.
Not only the Nation, but all the Children of the Nation
are being sold to institutionalized greed and internationalized predation
through the illegitimacy of the power of money creation by the big private banks
that all over the world create so-called sovereign debts,
in truth infamous, false and manipulative
to the point where money has become our only obsession,
our only point of reference,
our greatest curse.
*
System Recast
In spite of preconceived notions and everything that is said here,
just because a system is imperfect
does not mean that we should not keep the good things in it.
Contrary to what we are led to believe,
financial capitalism and free enterprise are not inextricably linked.
Capitalism
is the accumulation of capital and the maximization of profits.
Free enterprise
is the freedom to undertake and to live off the fruits of one’s labour.
This confusion is a propaganda technique
used by those who profit excessively from this system
to ensure that nothing changes.
Nothing could be further from the truth:
Unbridled capitalism
does not only result in extreme inequalities, monopolies, unfair competition,
pollution, destruction of life, poverty of populations and states.
Unbridled capitalism
is also destructive of companies,
and undoubtedly of the most numerous companies in this world:
human-sized and ethical companies
that don’t engage in any kind of wage, tax, environmental, price and quality dumping
of the final good or service.
What about the opportunities, businesses and jobs
that cannot be created when the immense share of the wealth
is monopolized by a minority with excessive greed and narcissism
simply because the competition is unfair and, or the money’s short,
when banks do not grant credit
due to a lack of confidence in a real economy
where liquidity is in short supply?
All those who excel in an art or field
have the most legitimate and beneficial right
to live off what they love and excel at.
Free enterprise is a natural right.
Free enterprise is a natural right and fertile ground for positive dynamics.
Protecting and nurturing
those who want to live off what they excel at
is not synonymous with predatory and destructive,
suicidal and genocidal profiteering capitalism.
Neither is it not synonymous with communism.
In simple and clear terms,
creators must be free to create
and destructors must be prevented from destroying.
Thus,
contrary to what you may believe, or be led to believe,
it is not so much a radical change of the system that is necessary,
but a recast, an overhaul, a redesign.
We keep freedom of enterprise, and freedom in general,
and we throw away inequalities and everything that causes them,
including tax havens and private money creation.
No people, no nation can be sovereign
without the power to create money.
Even less so in this system of ultra-capitalism
which has completely lost control.
By definition, the power to create money is sovereign.
Only one sovereign is legitimate:
The People.
*
To limit inequality by capping incomes?
The world’s financial wealth is hidden in tax havens,
and yet, with a minimum of research on the Internet
with the Ecosia* or Qwant** search engines
immediately unveils and reveals the gigantic scale of tax evasion
around the world in its entirety.
* Ecosia is a search engine
that not only respects your privacy
but also finances the planting of trees around the world.
75 searches for a tree.
**Qwant is committed through annual audits
to prove that it respects your data and privacy.
Both are European alternatives to Google
that are equally effective and far more ethical.
The paradox is so ironic and cynical
that it would be laughable if it were not so tragic.
Not only from a moral and ethical point of view,
depriving the poor and the underprivileged of this Earth of the little they have
and making all the poorest and most disadvantaged of this Earth
hit rock bottom is a crime,
but mathematics is also irrefutable:
Those who have no money, no wealth, no hope of a better future or a job,
let alone a job that benefits the present and future common interest,
have nothing left to share.
Inequalities can therefore only be reduced from above.
Thus,
in addition to monetary sovereignty,
we must limit inequalities by taxing or capping private incomes
worldwide, either with a harmonized tax rate, or both,
as long as measure, balance and justice prevail.
When it becomes law,
justice is universal and caring.
Like light,
it affects everyone without any discrimination.
Rich or poor,
black or white, social or marginal, ‘conforming’ or different,
when it rises up,
justice shines for everyone,
man, woman, children and everyone alive.
The mega-wealthy will certainly be less rich.
They will remain comfortable, though.
Above all,
as a substitute for the abusive and excessive surplus of money,
they will have gained a wealth of which they are unaware
since they have lost all sense of realities other than purely financial ones:
Serenity, faith in life and in the future, in the economy and in others,
which is invaluable.
First and foremost,
it will have gigantic effects on the majority of humanity,
on all beings that are part of life on earth.
Over and over again,
in the media, in the press, on TV, on the radio and on the Internet,
the supporters of this ultra-capitalist system make us believe
that transforming our materialistic lifestyles
would forever change our lives
by forcing us to make horrible sacrifices.
This is at best an illusion,
at worst a deliberate and criminal lie.
Life and humanity are being monstrously sacrificed on the altar of greed.
Overhauling the system would in no way mean
sacrifices should be made by the people.
On the contrary.
Restoring justice on Earth
can only benefit the vast majority of the population and living species.
This is undeniable, obvious, inevitable and irrefutable.
They are the ones
who will have to reduce their delusions of grandeur.
And to slightly adapt their choices, their allegiances,
and their stingy, greedy, narcissistic, selfish, ultra-consumerist, stupid behavior.
It is they who will have to regain a sense of measure
of wisdom, reason and decency.
Changing the rules of finance and monetary creation
can only open up a new path, full of hope and renewal.
It is simple,
the alternative is the death of the species.
Anything that is not the death of the species
in the most violent and total possible chaos
is desirable and preferable.
To save ourselves from the Apocalypse, from a third world war,
can only be a good thing for the whole world.
In view of the large-scale genocidal nightmare
that is looming and in the making,
the path of life is certainly the answer, the alternative,
the waking dream that can deliver us.
The irony of history is total:
Today utopia is our last chance of survival.
It is all at once mysterious, fascinating and marvelous.
*
Mental Slavery
Do the powers that be of this world seek to daze us,
to daze us with work, to daze us with TV, with lies and rubbish,
to daze us with fanaticism and poverty,
in order to better control us?
It is a proven fact.
It is a reality that is beyond question.
Exactly what they’re doing.
Yes ? No ? You don’t know?
By choosing to dull us
with selfish, presumptuous, capricious and childish,
illusory and counterproductive consumerist materialism,
the ultra-capitalists at the head of the world want to dominate us
by controlling our thinking,
by making us as stupid and narrow-minded as possible,
by dividing us,
so as to keep us in as lonely and desperate a state as possible,
in order for us never to have faith in ourselves
or in our own Earthian species,
– all at once one and many –
in order for us never to awaken the strength of the people of the Earth.
Thought control
can be achieved either by executing or locking up dissenting freethinkers,
or by deadening, numbing, dulling hearts and minds
with work and, or entertainment.
Advertising, media, TV
must stop bombarding us
with their antagonistic and destructive cheap ideas,
which poison our heads and hearts with false desires, false realities,
ideas born from their think-tanks employed full time and paid handsomely
in order to control us by numbing us down with silly things
that bear the mark of the propaganda of a capitalism gone mad and tyrant,
a mad and stupid, clownish and scary tyrant on the world.
By returning to an authentically humane economy,
by ceasing to encourage at all costs
the productivist consumerist materialism
that has no other origin than greed,
by putting an end to the usurpation of monetary creation by the private banks
that today control all the world’s markets,
then, and only then will we be able to stem the explosion
of the most artificial, superfluous and superficial needs,
without either denying or oppressing them.
*
Truth and Justice
When the system becomes an enemy to the species, to all species,
then we must transform the system
or die.
The more we look at past, present and future history,
the more we realize that the achievements of a greedy, unbridled and insane capitalism
are always, in the end, real disasters.
If ever, from the bottom of our hearts and with all our strength,
we have not sought universal truth and justice,
how is it possible to know where universal justice and truth are,
here and now, in the future and in the past?
If we have never looked at Knowledge, History and Destiny
with a minimum of attention and sincerity,
how can we know anything?
How to even pretend to?
Verily,
universal justice and truth are one and the same.
Like justice,
truth is universal, free and sovereign.
And vice versa.
Like God,
it is intrinsically human and humanistic.
It transcends relativity, boundaries and finitude.
Universal truth and justice
enlighten and liberate, strengthen, fulfil and embellish,
where lies and ignorance stun, contaminate, enslave, torture and murder.
Truth is always a liberation.
And vice versa.
Freedom is a light, an enlightenment, an understanding
where lying is a dark, crazy, black prison.
The sovereignty of the human species over itself
is therefore a universal liberation.
And vice versa.
If the law is inalienable and the law is fundamentally just,
then it is a duty to know what law, truth and justice are.
The Law is simple and well-known:
It is contained in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
of the United Nations.
The right of the human being
to be sovereign, responsible for his or her own destiny,
in its interpersonal, ‘multividual’ dimension,
from the intimate to the universal,
is inalienable and sacred.
It is on this law
that the whole foundation of the human community on Earth rests.
In our civilizations,
justice is enforced by law.
Thus,
universal justice and truth
are and must be the number one mission
of any government or political entity,
the number one mission of any free and sovereign nation,
master of its own destiny.
Justice is born out of respect for all that exists.
So is truth.
No ecosystem can be exploited or destroyed for exploitation
unless it can regenerate and continue to fulfil its vital and essential functions
for local populations and species, for life in general,
for the future, for fertility, for abundance.
Between respecting life and living,
systematically destroying, and dying,
a choice must be made.
Such is lucidity.
Such is justice.
Such is the way.
Such is the law.
Above all,
this is the message of all religions or wisdoms.
Truth be told,
it is the Earth that reveals them,
and yourselves.
When universal freedom, justice and truth, wisdom and harmony
are revealed to the consciousness,
universal freedom, justice and truth, wisdom and harmony
illuminate and reveal the consciousness.
Justice is inscribed in the depths of all of us.
As a unique bond.
Justice and truth are revealed
in the union of the intimate and the universal.
Behold.
From the depths of the ages and the end of time,
this is a prayer.
If He exists,
it radiates from the Divine.
For if wisdom is necessarily humane and universal
and we are all human,
then wisdom is universal.
Wisdom, justice and truth are by nature universal.
Human rights are by nature universal.
The Law is universal.
*