The Impact Economy

There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

— Leo Tolstoy

In early March, 1776 a new virus emerged from a coastal town in Scotland, swept into Europe and from there across the rest of the world, becoming a global pandemic and upending economies. The virus, which initially infected the brain but ended up having profound systemic effects upon its victims, left a wake of unimaginable turmoil in its path. Millions died of a variety of symptoms — some from a blackening of the lung, others from cerebral hemorrhage, still others from a gradual paralysis. Other victims, who did not die, were driven mad and new institutions had to be created to house and treat them. Later, after they passed, autopsies were done on their brains, which found unusual calloused threads that wove like the Amazon throughout the tissues and that, the experts conjectured, interrupted the natural blood flow between the hemispheres. Many afflicted by the virus survived and recovered sufficiently to have outwardly normal lives. They worked, got married and had families. Disconcertingly, however, their offspring often demonstrated obsessive, occasionally violent and self-destructive behaviors. And, even more strangely, this same behavior, in over sixty percent of cases, was passed onto the next generation as well. Autopsies on the grandchildren of the original victims, in fact, revealed that they, too, had dark regions threaded through their brains.?

Another extraordinary element to this new virus was that once it had infected the human populations, it adapted well enough to jump to other species, with devastating impacts. In the latter stages of the pandemic, it is conservatively estimated by scientists that at least 477 entire species — 158 fish, 146 amphibians, 80 birds, 69 mammals and 24 reptiles — went extinct due to the virus, as contrasted with 9 species that would normally have been expected to go extinct under natural conditions. Scientists add that these numbers are an absolute floor and that the real numbers could well be exponentially higher.

Kirkaldy, Scotland is not the kind of place you might expect a global pandemic to have its origins. Located a dozen miles north of Edinburgh, Kirkaldy — which means “place of the hard fort” — was a manufacturing and ship-building town. There was, however, one place, one street, one house in fact, in the town of Kirkaldy that turned out to be ripe breeding ground for the new virus. The house was on High Street. It is no longer there as it was torn down in 1834 and replaced with a nondescript four-story structure that still stands today. But in the months leading up to March 1776, in that house, in a particular room in that house, the virus that killed millions, destroyed a significant amount of biodiversity, and profoundly impacted subsequent generations emerged from the brain cavity of a single human. A man.?

The man’s name was Adam Smith....

Read the full article in Impact Entrepreneur Magazine.