Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“It is better to give birth than to try to raise the dead,” Kanyama says of developing blackowned businesses rather than continuing to rely on an economic system that has failed black people. “We don’t see that we can be lifted by any force in the world except ourselves.”
I think we now need utopian thinking more than ever. The mistake people often make with utopia is to see it as a destination, a fixed end point. Instead, utopia is the process of first imagining, and then believing that we can organise the world differently, which empowers us to take steps towards it
The end of growth has been postponed as long as is humanly possible. It’s far past time to come to terms with ecological reality and make a deliberate transition to a post-growth regime.
A flood of recent analysis discusses the abuse of personal information by internet giants such as Facebook and Google. Some of these articles zero in on the basic business models of Facebook, and occasionally Google, as inherently deceptive and unethical. But I have yet to see a proposal for any type of regulation that seems proportional to the social problem created by these new enterprises.
In these tumultuous times, after all, the left urgently needs its brightest and most creative minds to focus on the intractable puzzle that now confronts it: the question of how to break up the vicious cycle of endless compound growth and bring an end to the institutionalized madness of economic reason before it lays waste to all human civilization.
If we then ask which sections of society are concerned about the environment, the answer is largely people in the least developed societies; the indigenous populations – or the remnants of them; tribal societies and first nations in Canada.
This is the thing about ecology, you see: everything is connected. The biomass bone is connected to the biogeochemical bone is connected to the insect bone. And that’s why aggregate material flows are in fact an important indicator of what’s happening to our planet.
An estimated 7 percent of American households don’t have access to bank accounts, according to the most recent survey from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. And a government study at the end of last year found that the U.S. homeless population had risen for the first time since 2010. Given rising inequality, what happens to those on the margins of the economy when cash is no longer king?
Giving money can often be a way of avoiding our feelings of guilt, whereas increasingly people are using these negative emotions as motivator for positive change. Community voluntary action is taking the place of charitable donation as people increasingly allow themselves to respond emotionally to social inequality when they see it around them.
In times of war, we’ve always had conscientious objectors. In times of economic and political befuddlement, can we encourage a corps of conscientious investors?
According to Bardi, small causes can lead to big effects in complex systems. The problem is that modern industrial society, as soon as it goes into a crisis, usually tries to solve the problems it faces by expanding its governance structures – in other words, it is doing a fatal “more of the same” instead to initiate a change.
Dysfunction of the money-system underpins the problems of the world’s multiple converging crises. Discuss. Might that assertion be taking an ideological position, encouraged by the echo chambers of like-minded twitterati? This piece is an attempt to tease out the nature of the underlying connection, and in doing so describe some of the attack surfaces that are available to those bent on change.
