A Most Inconvenient Truth
Our problem originates with a process failure.? Our solutions must begin with a process correction.
“The only meaningful policy that will protect the planet is reducing our pollution and consumption.”
Rachel Donald Planet: Critical
The above is the clearest declaration I have been able to find to date of the largely unstated, and therefore almost entirely unexamined, pre-conception at the core of almost all social activism today, that the only solution to all of humanity’s problems is new individual choice made through a recalibrated personal moral compass that is re-made to align with a new social morality of [insert your cause here].
In subscribing to this theory of change through individual choice guided by personal morality, social activism is empowering and perpetuating the very Neoliberalism it so often professes to reject.
The result is widespread cognitive dissonance that exacerbates, rather than ameliorates, discord within society.
The problem here is a powerful - dare I say overwhelming - desire for a social and emotional solution to what is, fundamentally, a technical and legal problem with a corruption of the process of institutional accountability for authenticity and integrity.
There is a sense, the problem is us, individually and morally, but in a larger sense the problem is in our individual unwillingness to engage with the legal technicalities of institutional accountability for social decision making. Faced with the prospect of reasoning through the law, we simply choose to turn away. It's more fun to make a sign, and join a protest!
Protests are emotional. Emotions are exciting.?Exciting is fun.
Process is rational. Rational is boring. Boring is not fun.
Which is a problem.
Because our problem is process.
Specifically, the process through which we, as society, control the flow of money through finance, into enterprise.
Which problem of control is at one and the same time a real sleeper, and disturbingly anxiety-inducing.
Process is boring.
Money is anxiety-inducing.
So how can we activate this anxiety to unleash the emotional energy that transforms boredom into curiosity, and curiosity into social action?
The source of this anxiety is our conflicting emotions around money.
On the one hand, according to the prevailing popular - Neoliberal - narrative, money doesn’t matter; all that really matters in society are individual merit and personal morality. People matter.? Money doesn’t. Money is just a measure of merit. And morality.? ?Money is just a measure of people. A scorecard in the game of life.
What matters is not the measure - money - but what is being measured: merit; and morality.
The primary corollary of this Neoliberal narrative of money as merely a measure of merit and morality is the idea that people who have the most money also have the most merit, and morality; and that, conversely, that people who don't have enough money also suffer from deficiencies of merit and morality.
Very judgmental, and self-aggrandizing, that.
This narrative conflicts with our own personal, lived experience, that money matters very much, and also that patterns of control over money are not causally connected to either merit, or morals.
What is missing in our popularly prevailing narrative of money that causes it to conflict so dramatically with our own personal, lived experience?
This prevailing, anxiety-inducing narrative does not gives us any words for talking about the role that institutions of agency, authority and accountability play in controlling the flow of money.
We do not have a proper story about the proper functioning of these institutions in controlling the flow of money. So, we also do not have a proper story about what happens in society when those institutions do not function properly.
And that is a source of a large part of our anxiety about money: we do not have the words for talking about institutional failures to direct the flow of money correctly.
Since we do not have the words for talking about institutional failures, we are left in a quagmire of conversation trying to figure out what it is that we have done wrong, when we feel we have not done anything wrong. That leads eventually to the position that they are doing something wrong - whoever "they" are who are controlling the flow of money. Without any proper institutional framing, "they" can only be evaluated by the standards of merit and morality, leading inevitably and inexorably to the conclusion that they are bad actor who are acting badly: we need to punish them for their bad actions, and make the stop!
Without a rationale, everything becomes emotional, and quickly degenerates into personal animosity that history repeatedly shows never ends well.
So how can we build a rationale of institutional dysfunction - and rectification - that can keep a fight from breaking out? What are some words that we might use to talk to each other about the institutions that control the flow of money?
These words might show us that money is "a technology that communities use to trade debts" (Michael Mainelli) that is also a legal instrument for effecting transactions between people separated by distances of time, place and social connection ("you don't have to trust the other person, if you can trust their money").
These two phrases, "trade debts" and "effecting transactions" are portals into a new understanding that explains, rather than invalidate, our lived experience of the power of money. Transactions create debts that are memorialized using money. Having money means we are owed a debt. That gives us power to call upon others, to do our bidding. Not having money means we owe debts. That makes us indentured, to do the bidding of others.
This shows us that money is also social power: the power to direct individual insight and initiative towards some activities ("you can make money doing that"), and away from others ("there is no money to be made there").
So money is not so much a measure of merit as it is a measure of participation in transactions as an instrumentality of social power to control, or to be controlled by, others. Having control over money gives the power to make demands upon others: to get them to do things for us, or at our behest. Not having money leaves us without power over others, and susceptible to the exercise of power over us by others.
Which means that money is very, very important to how we live our own best lives, personally and individually. It is also important to how we all live together, in society, through economy.
Money shapes the economy into a network of connections between people for effecting transactions in technology solutions to the everyday problems of everyday people, through enterprise and exchange.
Money can shape the right economy for social cohesion under the circumstances then prevailing. Or it can shape the wrong economy.
But here, again, we encounter anxiety rooted in the absence of vocabulary. We do not have the words for talking about the right economy, or the wrong.
Instead, we have only the Neoliberal language of Growth, that reduces the rich complexity of human transactions in technology solutions to simple numerical increases in transaction volumes measured in prices paid in money, from one period of measurement to the next, where more is always axiomatically asserted to be better.
But it's not always, is it?
What do you think? Do we have the right economy?