Perceptual Agility, Money and the Market

To see the world differently than one has grown accustomed to requires a certain perceptual agility and is a key characteristic of our wild resiliency. That we cannot solve today’s problems, created out of our own successes, through the same thinking with which we created them, is now something of a mantra. To actually have the mental flexibility and agility of seeing the world differently however is more challenging that repeating the mantra; it is to shift out of our domestic resiliency and into our wild resiliency.
Take our current market and financial challenges. That the clothes have fallen off the emperor and we all get to briefly at least see what a illusionary human creation the money game is… is an upside of a crashing market. That real people with real dreams get hurt, loose their homes and can’t afford to send their children to college or even go hungry, all from our collectively “buying in” to this illusion of meaning, is also real.
That most proposals presented as solutions to our circumstance are but attempts to prop up and  sustain the existing failing structure is certainly natural. That is what we always do, and it is what the power structures would have us do: those in position of power and privilege naturally seek to preserve their status. What would a proposal look like however that revisioned the constructed economic system into one more humanely oriented? One that is more friendly to the earth and all her children?
We will surly require the perceptual agility of acknowledging that the system is truly broken if we are to take advantage of our circumstance and move toward a natural systems market: natural capitalism. Below is a brief excerpt from Rinaldo Brutoco, founder and president of the World Business Academy, from a post at Intent: Saving the US Economy Through Trickle Up Economics.

STATUS: The federal bailout plan (or “rescue plan” as it now is being called) did not solve any underlying fundamental weakness in the economy. All it did was buy us time, band-aid the bleeding if you will, so that we can rapidly address what is really wrong. Unless we use that expensively purchased time to change the fundamentals that created the meltdown in the first place, adding new layers of federal debt on top of layers of existing private and public debt will only further damage the economy. This is something the markets will soon discover if they don’t already appreciate it.

The bad news: The economy as we have known it since World War II is so fundamentally broken that it can not be fixed by fine tuning it in its present form regardless of the level of government financial intervention. The good news: Once we develop a dramatically different approach to the economy (“trickle-up economics”), we will create a level of wealth in the U.S., and ultimately abroad, that will be at least 100 times greater than the level of economic wealth created since World War II under the old economic system.

THE FIX: An economic recovery will require the country to recognize that the financial crisis cannot be solved without changing the underlying culture of debt and replacing “trickle-down economics” with “trickle-up economics.” …

Mr. Brutoco then continues with his fourteen point plan before concluding:

The current economic crisis is actually a blessing. No amount of tinkering with the existing “trickle-down” approach to the economy could ever create the wealth necessary to re-build U.S. society. Because the culture of speculation has made us near-bankrupt, we have no other choice but to embrace a more sane culture of equity, savings, and liquidity based on the creation of real goods and services. There really is no other choice left to us.

We must remember Winston Churchill’s war-time observation, “The Americans can always be counted upon to do the right thing – after they have exhausted all other alternatives.” The current crisis makes it abundantly clear that we have exhausted all other alternatives. It is now time to embrace some old-fashioned Common ¢ents.

It is our Love of Life that can carry us through these challenges. One of which is to re-envision our relationship with money itself. Lynn Twist and Thomas Berry both offer us perspectives on this: Money: a Transformative Agent!