THE INTEGRITY PAPERS UIU Group http://www.ceptualinstitute.com
International Society for the Systems Sciences
ISSS-TORONTO July 15~23, 2000
Paper for the Special Integration Group:
Systems Application to Business and Industry Eco-Gnomics :
Supply and demand in the real Gaian world
James N Rose
Ceptual Institute
1271 Bronco Circle
Minden NV 89423
integrity@ceptualinstitute.com
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Abstract
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~Humanity is more noble than given credit for and has the potential to be more then merely being capable of repeating the law of "eat and/or be eaten". We need to recover a self image of ourselves in order to re-design our socio-economic systems and our new level of universal identity.
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The Paper
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The 18th century theorists who outlined the dynamics of economic systems for people to follow and understand were for the most part 'simplists'. They employed the scientific principle of reductionism to seek out the easiest to understand patterns of market performance, and then put those patterns into words we recognize and identify with. Ownership. Power. Wealth. Need. Utility. Distribution. Give .. and Take. The struggle to accomplish 'exchange' and the craft to do it in beneficial ways. With those benefits accruing sometimes mutually and sometimes preferentially.
The world has reaped both positive and negative whirlwinds from those ideas and principles. Through trade and tirade, we've built our many societies based on the several ways of making commerce and reward accessible to people .. the few, the many. We haven't had an easy time of it because economics isn't just some theoretical nicety or a recreational pass-time. At its core, it is survival.
Humanity engages in mutual behaviors in order to survive. And since we are far from being individual isolationists .. capable of depending on our independent skills and competence to draw nourishment from the environment and the land, farmed or husbandryed to stay alive, and to provide for ourselves and family and friends .. we are unavoidably co-dependent creatures, committed to being part of far-reaching and complicated involvements.
As we reach the starting cusp of the 21st century it is especially important that we clarify our perceptions of ourselves and our world again. Why is that? Because the old 'rules' of our economic 'us' have gotten us into uncharted waters, where most are adrift, and only the savvy few seem to be reaping 'excellent' rewards.
Oh, the world for the most part is making life better for the majority of lives evaluated at any moment. In snapshot considerations, health is better, education and safety are available to more people, and the general benefits of economic integration are the rule, not the exception - whether due to design of the hierarchic top or by the daily efforts of vast hosts of workaday laborers including middle class.
Except - we are not on a guaranteed path. Changes have been instituted - resources arranged in new atypical ways, perceptual decision making characterized by limiting human responses through focussed conditioning, global dynamic energy balances being disproportionately accumulated which may severely feedback into the total system with devastating effects some day.
Except - we are further from a healthy self-image of who and what and where we are within all these irrepressible forces than ever before - which wasn't always the case. Capitalism once enunciated for its members what was expected of its adherents. Communism and Socialism also stood to proclaim in comprehensible terms, why economic organizations should be one way or another, how people were expected to participate, and what they should hope, even expect to gain from devoting themselves to agreed upon economic behaviors.
Today however, competition, entitlements, mutual coordinations - all the expectations and all the efforts - all the commitments to social and communal ideals of personal behavior in incredibly extended and intricate participations and levels of organized 'togetherness' - have leapt beyond the normal control and decision devices of the average citizen. They've even leap frogged the capabilities of upper management and political savants in who's trust we offer over many of our policy making and guidance abilities. And that has created a damned uncomfortable position to be in.
Power is both more vested and more constrained. It is more focused and yet more dis-engaged.
Oh, once in a while there are glimpses of the old simplicities. The older generation still looks to nationalistic icons for stability and identity. Issues arise that are clearly identifiable as good or bad, provocative or calming, traditional or adventurous, comfortable or unsettling, handleable or at least somehow adaptable. Cut and dried events indicating what we must do, how we should act, and some general outcome, which are pretty well fixed and predictable. And by following such models people are only required to go through the motions and do what's called for, with a restored or improved outcome as the result.
But things are not that easy anymore. Life is drifting from those qualities, on personal levels and also on the larger managerial levels where pundits continue to step forth with models and rationalizations of 'how', 'what', 'why'. In the closing decades of the second millenium (starting from the 1950's to date), sense and perspective have been nudged aside in favor of many new-version 'simplistic' models - many having the opposite categorization: complexity. Unfortunately, many of these 'simple' complexity models work only under the most contrived and imposed conditions.
These mathematical schemas based on organization theory and fractal mathematics models seek to monitor - and maneuver in preferred ways - human social systems based on the old saw that 'knowledge (information) is power'. The unspoken hope being that 'insider information' ... used in conjunction with knowing exactly how economic relationships work and what the driving influences probably are - specifically - one can do good for populations at large, and oh, by the way, skim off some hefty personal or corporate profits along the way. Compensation for a job-well-done for the world, the corporation, the friends and supporters ... a nod to 'home-team advantage' you might say. All reasonable and well justified.
But there are problems. Not in the approach. Not in the effort. Not even in the dream - wrapped in whatever self-envisioned nobility, mixed with a sense of profit-making savvy and pride, to boot - could be considered 'misguided'. The problems are that, one, the models keep coming up with flaws and perturbative errors, wreaking havoc in unwanted and unexpected areas, and two, the closed-door secret-backroom decision dens are now struggling to control and limit information spread to the broader-world, while the broader world feels entitled to know what is going on with information that impacts their lives.
Participation and decision making - freedom of choice - free market competitions or syntheses based on the right to make those free choices - the power to guide and self-determine our own, their own, lives - are not about to be squelched because the systems at large rely on few minds, quick responsiveness, and timely adaptive planning.
The arena where all of these issues collide is 'healthy self-image'. We've gotten ourselves into a world - economic and otherwise - where competent human awareness is esteemed on the one hand and totally belittled on the other. With all the grandiose pronouncements of the Rights of Humanity and the Dignity of Humankind, the imagery doesn't match the performance. The simple clarity of 'every life is important' doesn't match the increasingly prominent shift to the wilderness~wildlife dynamic of 'every life must fight for it's own survival'. The more 'civilized' we become, the more visceral we apparently have to behave. As long as its cloaked in some sort of social decorum or civility.
The larger marketplace, where the entities and personages are corporations, there, power struggles, competition, conniving and so forth are the rules of survival. Natural selection performs as eminently well there as it does in the forest, jungle, or oceans. And though there are 'laws' in the books of nations to cope with some of the negative behaviors there, nobody seems to have an over-riding sense of: Human potential is better qualified than merely being capable of repeating the law of 'eat and/or be eaten'.
We've advanced in tricks techniques, gadgets and performances on the one hand, while slipping further and further away from what we can do, what we can be, what we hopefully are on the other hand, as ennobled creatures of life. We're clawing our way into back into the gutter of survival techniques, thinking that we're advancing somewhere, and with as much as we achieve, there may be a time when calamity will strike and much will be lost. All because we lost a mutually-positive self-image of ourselves along the way, and have yet to satisfactorily re-instate it. Oh, the words and essential recognitions are still with us, but they aren't believed in much anymore, and they've paled to cliches.
This has nothing to do with spiritual beliefs or similar images of ourselves. What I'm referring to is our practical life. The who and how and where of social placements, the feeling of individual potential, as in "I am an empathetic member of" something. By choice, by default, by happenstance, by dream, or by desire, the status-ground of human value is not the same anymore. We’re building a complicated new civilization, but we are drifting into insensate meanings for doing it.
The intricacy of the world has outstripped the cognitive competence of all but a few individuals. It's development is running on shear momentum at the moment, and also on the ability of some individuals to be at the many helms, being hungry enough to play the predator/competitor game for themselves and their organizations. There are overt and obvious goings-on, and there are covert quietly planned goings-on. And all while the everyday and noisome world - goes on.
We live in a convoluted world where agendas impact agendas. People and organizations make plans and 6 billion people and untold billions of animals and plantlife are recipients of the fall-out. All, 'because'.
Because humanity doesn't have a philosophy of itself anymore. A practical image which includes human contact and behavior, a holistic imagery that includes the dignity of people and groups, even alternate species both fauna and flora, one that stands as a measure of our economic portion of life and responsibility and entitlement. We just - don't know - how the gaianly integrated ecologic and economic systems really work and who we are, what we are, being involved in them.
The fancy economic math models are self-deluding toys, falling back in line with the imaginary premise that organic life is a clockwork that we just have to figure out and then contrive and play with. But what does that premise mean, actually? It means that every human life is a piece of replaceable function-filling equipment, for which 'dignity' is a word that has no relevance, 'purpose' no sense, except for .. communal productivity. The themes of our lives and the performances of our lives have been stretched and dissected and nearly eviscerated in the rush to Build More Civilization.
Now, I don't decry 'Civilization Building'. No, what I do proclaim is that humanity needs to rise in it's competent wisdom and have a new and clear image of its economic/ecologic self. Every person. Every group. We need a new gnomen - the deep understanding. An eco-gnomics.
2.
We just don't live in a school-simple world of 'supply and demand'. Oh, there is still 'supply and demand', but it's involved and very intricate, and the effective power to accomplish things comes from the presence of two additional process-sources that arise when supply and demand situations exist.
One process is the power to 'create effective wealth' .. done by an accounting notion where debt and credit multiply the amount of 'basic wealth'. This is achieved according to how many times a debt or credit is re-assigned - or - more accurately - how many people or organizations 'co-own' a given wealth or asset at any one moment. It is basically 'purchasing power based on the right to claim ownership' rather than on absolute proof of full and clear title or ownership.
A product of that process is 'excess-wealth', relative to any current state of an economy. Any one claim, sufficiently documented or accepted, becomes effective of its own accord in regard to 'future working power' and 'future working states'. It is wealth that isn't crucial to keeping an economy's current status quo safe and functioning, even though it can play some crucial role in what the economy can become and grow into.
Economic pundits refer to it at times, typically in regard to individuals and families. It’s identified as 'disposable income'. In government and political venues it's called 'surplus' ... which is typically expected to fund needed social sectors or be refunded to a tax paying segment of the population. It is known in the business sector also though, where it's historically been treated as a sacrosanct debt owed to investors - asset wealth indebted to bond and preferred stock holders or lien holders.
In a clear word, it is "wealth by trust", which is generated along side of the more conventional form: 'profit in excess of cost' (that which is accumulated, or, returned as dividend on basic stock principle investments). It is the world recognizing that Joe is $100.00 wealthy because he can collect on the $100 dollars from whoever owes it to him, and Fred and Xavier are $100 dollars wealthy since they each have $50 dollars in their banks, of the money Joe loaned them. The $100 shows up in the economy as $200 of revenue generating "wealth".
When someone or some group can claim sufficient-title to an economic-work-asset, each claim can be used to leverage or secure other transactions or cause the enactment of work or service production. The wealth is undeniably real, but it is based on contingent and sufficient title to the wealth or assets. It can be used as disposable income at the corporate and political levels of entities/lifeforms, and it is as trust worthy as the intent to repay a promissory debt in full.
In the overall picture of economic process, the dependability on wealth per se rests in the wise allocations - re-allocations actually - of any excess wealth. 'Wise allocations' means placing it where collateral systems are healthily supported and encouraged, and where the functional health of all involved and diverse parts of the system are supported ... kept active and involved. Very much the same as the natural environment re-cycles and re-sources its assets and nutrients through many forms of life and locations.
The importance for human dignity is that its absolutely crucial for the quality of human life that these intricately involved flows and constant re-distributions of wealth be done in total support of each living potential ; not just of the supra-organism called international-trade, but also of human membership, at and in all its levels and locations, and of the total life space that people exist in as well.
That includes the biological and botanical lifespheres of the planet, and the mineral, atmospheric and temperate parts involved. In the rush and capacity to 'create wealth' we squander part of it in a way that evolutionary nature never does - and so we aren't fully in-step with being a healthy positively adapting species. Nature re-utilizes all of its assets by gaianly re-distributing it to other systems. Nature also maintains the value of its assets and wealth by cooperatively co-integrating assets into plural simultaneous uses. But, humanity hasn't followed that practice. We trash much of what we produce and mess the environmental spaces we're resident in, rather than re-distribute and maintain with needed sufficiency.
One of the first ways to secure the value of human life is to personally and societally act in re-distributive ways, making a lifestyle of recycling normal and routine, not extraordinary in effort or in cost. We have to determine ways to enable wealth retention, which means minimizing waste and heat-sink loss ... allowing the fewest amount of assets to fall into disuse. And we need to look to re-invigorating sectors by sharing what may have been unproductive someplace else. And with all this, we focus on re-dignifying People.
Human society depends on one feature that isn't always accentuated as we go about doing things and thinking of each other. That feature is the ability to rise to the occasion and fill in for anyone else. The potential to do what someone else is capable of. The potential to comprehend what is involved in any given situation and make decisions. The potential to evaluate and make things happen, to be as responsible for the welfare of others as we are of ourselves. We must come to recognize again that maintaining human dignity means maintaining self-worth, else-worth, value and utility - in the ability to do for and with each other, and to act as repositories of experience and wisdom and memory of human abilities.
It means not being flustered by the fact that there are these other multiple sources of energy-and-wealth - through which we accomplish things for each other and - inevitably - to each other. And that is the new wisdom that I maintained at the beginning of this commentary. Beyond the single event/process of 'supply & demand' are the many interwoven involvements of many supplies and many demands, many needs and many opportunities - all interdependent in smooth flows and priorities of actions, done to accomplish one outcome or another, many accomplishments or many others.
The time we devote and the freed-wealth we bring to bear - on and with and to each other is most significant - equal with and more than dealing with 'one supply ~ one demand' at a time. It’s the latitude which we have for deciding what we want to accomplish in life, over and above having to accomplish in life - especially when our awareness requires that we harness and consider all the many priorities involved at the same time. Free-time, freed-wealth. Extra-time, extra-wealth. Committable time, committable wealth.
Taking developing or accessible resources and planning where to spend them is the crux of life - all life - and it's the premiere preoccupation of human beings. We are forever concerned with necessities and embellishments - today's requirements, and the extras - which themselves can grow to become necessities. Humans are engaged in a type of ongoing creativity, not only knowing what has to be done, but what may exploringly be done. Our existence is the constant gauging and engaging of possibilities and potential and creative embellishments.
Science has physiologically classified us as tool makers and after that, pensive considerers, when in fact we are makers of ideas more than makers of tools or viewers after-the-fact. We fabricate in 'possibility spaces' that are more real and more reachable than the physical realms we enact them in.
Life is a constant unceasing process of making decisions, making compromises, and holding firm to ideas - to achieve goals in the face of competition and even in the face of cooperative requests for mutually coveted energy and wealth. We don't live in a 'simplist' world. We never have, never did, and never will. Reasonably, we no longer have the luxury of perceiving simplistically. It's time to rise-to-the-occasion and act as involved decision makers in what the world can become. It means that we must invent new processes of opportunity in the arenas of social action and political expectations and economic companionship and environmental co-existence.
The opening cusp of the 21st century of the Common Era finds us poised to coordinate economic/social powers that were, and transform them into the economic/social powers that should be. Every person - from birth - should have the right to experience opportunities and stimulations for growth. Every person is entitled to be nurtured in environments where respect and dignity are offered and entitled in self-same acts of intention and concern.
The 'models' we must use are not firm rules nor absolute principles. Thet are a ceptualization: that every person has the ability to live and enact their tendencies and potential, to know what's at stake and what's valuable - in the present here and now, and in the potential future - where what is less meaningful today may be all important tomorrow, and vice versa.
The cepts I'm referring to are 'processes-of-encounter' - meanings which note that systems strive to ensure their survival - using 'continued functioning' as the hallmark of success. As things are done to us, as we do things to others, efforts have anticipated goals as well as unforeseen outcomes. This wonderfully points to the capacity and deep innateness of systems to function sensitively to every facet of organization. Blending and adaptability are the foundation of every system's performance - regardless of sentient premeditated control.
In the pluralistic world we've come to realize ourselves in, instinctive and automatic actions don't guarantee the best benefits or the greatest survival. Which is all the more reason that we have to recognize all the sources of economic power production, not to jump at regulating and hampering that production, and simply to see when its being applied, and how and where. To be part of the monitoring process, and then, through the enaction of political mechanisms and economic devices, making ourselves privy to evaluating efforts as being beneficial or potentially destructive to 'staying vibrant and functional'.
A case in point is the genetically implanted 'lethal gene' being marketed in food crop seeds by several global companies. It's their intention to make farmers or combines buy new food producing seed stock every year.
It may seem all well and good to try and control a product and have a customer base come to purchase from you on a consistent basis, but in this instance its potentially disastrous for all life on the planet. There are no controls or limits on how plants in the wild could cross infect each other genetically. There are transmission vectors that could take this fertility-killing gene and spread it to plants that would suddenly stop reproducing. And in short order all the life forms that depended on those plants and others would lose their life-supporting nourishment. The cascade could be catastrophic ... simply because some people wanted a short term economically locked in 'gain', and didn't have the foresight to recognize the ramifications of what could happen in a world where a bad gene could just run away with being too successful. They couldn't see the implications and they didn't have the systemic insight to weigh the long term dangers to health and life, against the myopic and short termed gains of wealth and power.
The fight against these kinds of genetic mis-manipulations is being waged by people not overwhelmed by the information they receive or clouded by their ability to recognize the flows and blends of power and processes - financial, scientific, political, et cetera. They can look beyond the simple models of supply and demand - which on the surface can make those genetic manipulations look reasonable and worthwhile and innocently beneficial.
We can no longer allow ourselves - any of the world's citizens - to be blinded by the old models and guidelines. The coming Systems Era of human performance needs to see all peoples as competent evaluators of the Common Good. We need the social instruments and communications channels reaching into every sector of decision making, where opportunities and explored options are respected, but we build in the right to say 'no', not just yes.
We have cars that can go 120 mph / 180kph, but for the safety of road travelers, speed limits moderate performance to within safe parameters . Not every skill has to be used to the maximum in order to make it worth while. And no one should feel incapable of handling the information or implications of economic dynamics.
We've grown past the primer stage of global economic performance. It's time to take our social and personal economic commitments and knowledge to the next plateau. We're coming into an era of eco-gnomics - economic/ecological wisdom - "knowing" - of how to read systems performances, to look ahead to what we can expect - for bad or good - and what should be encouraged and what should not. Building a more open future rather than a more confined one.
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