Rejecting the Myth of More

In a recent interview with Design Decode Magazine, philosopher of design and author of the book, The New Designer, Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change, Manuel Lima talks about:

the concept of myths – those ideas that needed deconstruction and demystification, as they often hinder standards from realizing their full potential…acknowledging these myths and then systematically deconstructing them as a strategy to engage with a discipline that might not immediately recognize its vast potential for impact.

Our potential for impact is the power of fiduciary money supplied to enterprise with care, and caring, through equity paybacks, to shape the right enterprises in the right way for shaping the right technologies for shaping the right choices for shaping the right economy for shaping a cohesive society that is united in hope for a dignified future quality of life, for some, directly, that will also be, of necessity, hope for a dignified future quality of life for us all, consequently.

Our discipline is retirement.

Specifically, financing retirement.

Even more specifically, financing retirement through actuarial science.

It is a discipline whose vast potential is being hindered by our mystical ideas about Markets and Money, grounded in the myth that more is always better.

A myth is a kernel of truth wrapped up in a whole lot of nonsense.

The kernel of truth in the Myth of More is that quantities of money are necessary to quality of life.

Money is a legal instrument and social construct through which society directs individual insight and initiative towards some activities, and away from others, to shape the world in which we live, and that we each use to shape our own personal and individual place within that world that we all shape together, through institutions of agency, authority and accountability;

• as our uniquely human way of being in an artificial world that we make for ourselves in which to live, through our technologies, out of the world of Nature into which we all are born;
• as a mutual aid society for sharing an abundance of technology solutions to the everyday problems of everyday people living our best lives, every day;
• through networks of connections for enterprise and exchange;
• that forms a safe and dignified house for humanity
• Within built environments of Urban, Rural, Curated and Left-Alone landscapes;
• Along the creative edge of a constantly changing Human-Nature partnership that is interactive, and not extractive
• Choosing new beginnings from time to time, and over time, to fit the changing times
• Innovatively, through Civil Society
• Predistributively, through Finance
• Distributively, through Enterprise; and
• Redistributively, through Government.

The nonsense is that larger quantities are sufficient to a better quality.

Money is necessary. But more may not always be sufficient for better. It depends Where does that more come from?? What is its cost? Who pays that cost? What are the consequences?

Caring for the consequences is the essence of prudent stewardship.? Prudent stewardship is essential to a dignified retirement.

Markets are not designed for stewardship.?

Pensions are.

An inquiring mind who has become a new friend to our inquiry presents this question:

Most of us don’t think about pensions, even if we have them.? Should we?? If so, why?

A short answer is maybe this. We should all care about pensions because they control money with the mission, the duty and the scale to provide forever financing to forever activities to shape the right enterprises to shape the right technologies to shape the right choices to shape the right economy for shaping a cohesive society and keeping it ongoing in shared hope for a dignified future quality of life for some, directly, that will also be, of necessity, hope for a dignified future quality of life that we all can share.

A longer answer brings us to

[Manual Lima's] notion of acknowledging these myths and then systematically deconstructing

Acknowledging myths is never easy, and systematically deconstructing them requires a commitment of time and effort, "a willing suspension of disbelief", and space in the imagination to follow the question wherever it leads.

To create that space of suspension in the imagination, we have to step away from the technicalities, and travel back in time, to the moment of invention for the Workplace Pension, as a Mid-Century Modern social innovation, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of social collapse during the Great Depression that gave birth to the Second World War, as a pillar of the new post-War American Dream of a house in the suburbs, a car in the drive and a good job, with a good pension.

The pension is a critical component in the post-War American Dream of a house in the suburb, a car in the drive, and a good job, with a good pension.

That "good pension" that comes with "a good job" and buys a house in the suburbs and puts a car in the drive, is a promise of personal wealth and social status, of standing strong in a good society, united by a shared hope for a dignified future quality of life, for some, directly, and for us all, consequently.

It is a promise built on mathematics, on science and the law:? actuarial science and the law of large numbers; applying the mathematics of probabilities according to the science of statistics to harness the lawful power of institutional agency and authority, accountable to our own, shared common sense, as sensible people who each has a voice in articulating what it is that we all think makes sense.

It is the science we have lost, for being human in the world in the 21st Century

But not so much lost, as stolen from us, replaced in a bait-and-switch, with a mutual fund, and the false promise that more for an elite few will always mean better for the rest of us, a bait-and-switch that is, in fact, the root cause of our undoing, as humanity, in the opening decades of the Third Millennium.

This is the false promise that if we all work hard to increase Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the simple numerical increase in transaction volumes in the economy, measured in prices paid in money and completely undifferentiated for quality or fairness, then the net present value (NPV) of cash flows flowing through corporations, from which corporate share prices are ultimately derived, will also go up, and the Net Asset Value (NAV) of our mutual fund portfolios will also go up, and the Assets Under Management (AUM) by market professionals will also go up, and the fees and profits taken out of the markets (and our shared savings) by market professionals will also go up - and magically and mysteriously, somehow, in a way that is never actually explained in any clear and compelling way, we will all somehow be better off.

Our lived experience is to the contrary. Instead of getting more that is better for all from this social narrative of the economy as the production and distribution of good and services in the markets for allocating scarcity through price, what we are actually getting is:

• more that is better for fewer and fewer (Wealth and Power Concentration), leaving less that is less for the rest (Poverty Expansion and Power Dissipation) and cavalcade of social failings cascading through:
• short-termism;
• market elitism;
• corporate gigantism;
• financial system instability;
• social safety net insecurity;
• cultural and ecological unsustainability;
• Dark Money capture of politics and public discourse;
• political divisiveness degenerating towards violence;
• failure of accountability for the exercise of power true to purpose for the institutions of

We have fallen into The Matrix, trapped in a protection racket that replaces reality with an illusion: the illusion that more will always be better; that if we each and all work hard to produce and consume more, then the Almighty Markets will be able to give us more, and that the more that The Markets give us will always, of necessity, be better; and that we each, as freely self-determining market participants, will each be free to freely determine for ourselves our own personal and individual fair share of that more that will always be better.

If the share you get is not better for you, well, that’s your own damned fault: you didn’t choose well. Really?

We are not so much trapped in a Matrix of computer simulation,? as in a Market for extraction through oppression rationalized by a Myth of More, and its corollary Myth of Self-Determination. A post-apocalyptic Thunderdome of winner-take-all.

The truth is, we are all in this together, and if we do not all stand together in prudent stewardship, we will each fall, individually, in catastrophic consequences of our own unreckoning recklessness.

The cause of this crisis in social cohesiveness is the Prudent Investor, who pushed out the Prudent Person from interpreting fiduciary duties of care (prudence) and caring (loyalty) for pension (and also endowments) fiduciaries, replacing actuarial science with a mutual fund.

What we gave up when we accepted a mutual fund in place of actuarial science was accountability, and control over our institutions of agency for exercising authority over the choice of where the money can, should and will be made to go to shape the enterprises that shape the technologies that shape the choices that are put on offer from which we can choose, to shape the society in which we live, and our shared future.

What we gave up is control of the money.

We have to take that control back.? Not directly, but through effective accountability.

Our way back is to rediscover the pension as a mutual aid society for using actuarial science to average the actual cost of delivering social cohesion through shared hope, sustained through shared effort, for a dignified future quality of life, for some of us, directly, that will also be, of necessity, the social cohesion of shared hope for a dignified future quality of life for us all, consequently.

And to discover the power of pensions to negotiate with enterprise of any size, anywhere in the real economy, for equity paybacks to a fiduciary cost of money, plus opportunistic upside, from enterprise cash flows prioritized by contact for:

1. Suitability, of the core technology to its times;
2. Longevity, of the social contract between the enterprise to be supplied with money and popular choice in the price-for-performance, based on availability and ability to pay, commercial markets for stuff (the physical, or real, economy); and
3. Fairness across all six vectors of enterprise cash flow: fairness to suppliers (Fair Trade); fairness to communities (Fair Engagement); fairness to Nature and Society (Fair Reckoning); fairness to workers (Fair Working); fairness to customers and competitors (Fair Dealing); and fairness to the savers whose savings are the ulitmate source of the money supplied to enterprise through its financiers (Fair Sharing).

To teach ourselves to see the possibilities:

• for choosing new beginnings, from time to time, and over time, to fit the changing times,
• as our uniquely human way of being, together and apart, in an artificial world that we make for ourselves in which to live, through our technologies, out of the world of Nature into which we all are born,
• as a mutual aid society for sharing an adaptively evolving abundance of technology solutions to the everyday problems of everyday people;e living our best lives, under the circumstances, every day;
• through networks of connections for enterprise and exchange;
• energized by money through finance;
• as a safe and dignified house for humanity;
• within a built environment of Urban, Rural, Curated and Left-Alone landscapes;
• along the creative edge of an ever-changing, evergreen Human-Nature partnership that is interactive, and not extractive,
• innovatively, through institutions of Civil Society, and the language of inquiry for insight and new learning about how the world about us works, and how we can take the world about us as we find it, and change it to be more a way we choose to make it;
• predistributively, through institutions of Finance, and the language of money;
• distributively, through institutions of Enterprise, and the language of stuff; and
• redistributively, through institutions of Government and the language of boundaries that separate and unite us through shared social norms enforced by rule of law.

And to reassert our right and our responsibility to hold our institutions of finance, including our institutions of retirement finance, accountable for their institutional exercise of institutional power true to their institutional purpose; and especially to hold our pension fiduciaries accountable to our shared common sense of care (prudence) and caring (loyalty), as reasonable people who care enough to take the time and make the effort to acquire knowledge and experience relevant to the changing choices of our changing times.