ESSAYS on THE NEW ECONOMY #10
Imagining a Community-Driven Future Society with Rock-Solid Principles
In the New Economy, it will be more important your health than your wealth, more valuable the quality of your friendships than the quantity in your bank account, more inspiring to show how curious you are about others than to demonstrate how much you already know. Are you manifesting the New Economy in your life?
What are our Principles?
Pretty much everything I write I’d be open to change if persuaded by others that the opposite is true or if there were a better way to word things, so I guess that’s one starting principle: There is so much we do not yet know, we need others around who care to speak up and ground our principles in rock-solid relationships. Not that the truths as stated would be “rock-solid” themselves but that the relationships, holding up the truths and giving context (that like glue hold the truths together), the relationships themselves are solid and trustworthy. The principles are agreements (subject-to-change) ideally useful for keeping track of what matters.
Principle #1 — Not knowing can be a virtue
Expertise is over-valued, and knowledge multiplies when it’s shared. We don’t ourselves need to have it all figured out. We can rely on others, but let’s be sure that the knowledge we’re sharing with one another is truly useful and the relationships aren’t predominantly locked behind paywalls.
Not knowing is not the same as blissful ignorance. When we don’t know and are curious, we ask others questions and listen closely to answers. When we don’t know, and we admit it out loud to others, then we are less inclined to speak in a way that ends conversations. When we don’t know, then we… also don’t know how to conclude a matter. All of this helps welcome in ambiguity, which reinforces civic health and reduces polarization.
A collective of various foundations in the US united around common cause here and invested in a long list of organizations and communities that support pluralism. (Pluralism is when we allow multiple groups to co-exist without saying which one is right and without giving any one group too much power.) Pluralism increases respect for people different from us, helps others feel they belong, and ultimately helps materialize solutions to highly complex problems.
In addition, violence is reduced when we increase our tolerance for ambiguity. If we can be comfortable not having the answer to all talking points, then we are more likely to be kind.
Principle #2 — A rich network of human relationships can help us create better narratives
Take food production, for example.
Supermarkets and multi-national food corporations sell recognizably branded, cheaper food. In doing so, however, they obscure the means of production. Who grew the food where? How was it grown?
If we don’t know where exactly are the farms or who are the farmers who produced the food we eat, then we lose connection to the people who grew and harvested the food, and we lose visibility on the time it took and the energy that was put in. We begin to lose understanding of what it means to “cultivate the land” because we lose the knowledge of how that is precisely done. Have you ever felt that?
On the other hand, growing a garden, being part of a food co-op or a community-supported agriculture program, visiting a farm, and looking closely at the political actions of farmers can help us reconnect to the people, activities and processes by which our food is produced.
This knowledge is important because, without it, we accelerate divisive politics. When we strengthen the relationships with the people who make our food, we can slow down and even reverse the process of polarization.
Family farmers are often not heard very well by national governments because they are not in city centers, and they do not have the lobbying power of large corporates. Frustrated farmers have become sometimes an engine for “far-right populist” movements. (Look for example at 2023 election results in The Netherlands, where farmer frustrations helped reinforce a political party that acknowledges the needs of the elderly but opposes the welcoming of immigrants.) Farmers in France have organized in protest of a superfluous airport in 2016 and against diesel fuel taxes in 2024. Because mainstream media poorly covered these political movements, and the positions of farmers on the ground do not fit neatly into political categories of left and right (which are to a degree artificially invented by city-based talking heads), it becomes freakishly complicated to understand what is really happening. If the story we’re told by mainstream media is all we know, we can become fearful and angry without understanding.
We need better narratives to make sense of all this, and to find those better narratives we need deeper understanding that can only come from a rich network of intersectionally human relationships. Relationships that cut across class differences, ethnic differences, and differing personalities, people we know in more than one way, with whom we share openly and who trust us, people we see everyday and those we meet only occasionally, all helping us and them make sense of what is happening around us with truer stories than what we’re usually served.
Similarly, when we are speeding past towns where people live and have lived, people for instance who used to work in coal mines or steel manufacturing plants, we’re traveling fast on high-speed trains, planes, or highways, and we are complicit in a kind of un-seeing. The “national economy” (as determined by centralized governments) is said to have moved on, forcing the closure of mines and manufacturing plants, or else raising fuel taxes, and the young people move away in droves to live in big cities, and the aged working class population that remains in the smaller towns are not properly renumerated for their hard work, nor recognized for their physical and psychological needs. With smartphone and internet technology, small towns tend to be increasingly left out of “the conversation” due to lack of adequate wifi / 4G access. We will do better to re-include such “working class” people into the larger conversation, as Ken Loach’s film The Old Oak does very well. Can we find other examples of better narratives? Can we create them?
Citizen University is actively working in the US to support deeper understanding and trust in democratic functioning, (re)training citizens to own their power. To aspire towards a unifying vision of shared power that we are collectively responsible to inform and administer, this is energising. This is a better narrative.
What else can help?
Principle #3 — Balance is movement, staying unstuck
These principles are meant as guiderails for a new economy. The decisions we make privately and professionally about how we live can have a direct impact on the way our economy is reshaped in future.
There are those who believe we’re safer if we stick with what we have: Whatever we studied in college or were interested in when young, we should continue with that into our careers and seek greater and greater financial security. Once we have a certain amount of wealth, we ought to keep the majority for ourselves and our descendants, because that is what makes us feel safer.
There is truth in that philosophy (that career specialization helps create job security, and that financial accumulation can help make certain things possible, like buying a home, that can create some safety).
It’s also true that after a certain point financial accumulation becomes toxic, as well that when we accumulate more or higher-quality possessions than our neighbor, we sometimes fear losing what we have. Safety can feel elusive.
And while career specializiation makes sense for some, other times a non-linear career can bring greater learning and joy to a person’s life. It all depends. So we ought not to get stuck on any one philosophy.
Instead, as a guiding principle, we take movement as inspiration, the movement of dance and of travel and of pendulum swings and of water flowing. A balanced ecosystem and a balanced self are both full of movement. It’s not a tightrope walk or a static thing, it’s being able to keep things in motion and continue learning and practicing.
Success in the new economy is about continuously trying something new or practiced that allows for better balance, amidst external changes (what’s happening to us, expected or unexpected) and internal changes (what we want to be getting better at or want to be moving towards, priorities that may change over time).
This is what I help people do in my coaching, and this is what I have used as a guiding principle in my own life, and it has moved me out of many positions where I felt stuck. There is balance in the ongoing movement.
Principle #4 — Health and happiness can be achieved locally in a diversity of ways, no need for one size fits all
Many would argue that happiness can be found when we are grateful, when we are mindful, when we are compassionate. These attitudes or life stances are within our zones of control. We cannot control what others will choose to think, but we can control ourselves.
That said, sometimes a person is finding their happiness by working very hard in a paid position and pursuing certain financial goals. Sometimes a person is finding their happiness volunteering time to serve others. Sometimes we’re finding happiness eating something delicious or solving a complex problem. There are so many different ways to feel happy and healthy.
The old economy has been built on the principles that one size fits all, that money buys happiness, that businesses are for profit (primarily), and that financial decisions should be made always with further accumulation in mind, that privatization is often the best solution, that expertise (rather than cross-disciplinary knowledge) is most valuable, and that dividing things up into separate pieces is what makes most sense. Some people have been made healthier and happier by these old principles, but not the majority. The majority of people have been left out of the highest benefits of the old economy, and so wealth inequality has increased and political polarization has worsened.
We need new principles, new guidelines to agree on, for where we are going. To reinvent the economy and make it more fair for everyone, we need principles that are clear enough to understand and flexible enough to incorporate a variety of different approaches.
If we allow that health and happiness can be found in a variety of ways, and we support each person pursuing those goals with an adaptive system that truly has taken all of this in mind, then we will move closer to agreement and alignment.
What do you think? Would you agree? What else is missing that we can agree on and helps guide our way towards a new (more balanced) economy?
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