Regenerative Oikonomics: A New Perspective on the Economic Process 3030956989, 9783030956981

Table of contents :
Contents
Part I: What Went Wrong with Modern Economic Science?
Chapter 1: Introduction: Encounter of the Fifth Kind with an Alien Science
Chapter 2: Is Economics a Science?
References
Chapter 3: About Economists and Theologians
References
Chapter 4: Taking a Phenomenological Approach to Oikonomics: Looking at the World in Living and Holistic Terms
Reference
Part II: What Is the Oikonomy All About?
Chapter 5: Aristotle´s View: Oikonomy as the Art of Living and Living Well
References
Chapter 6: Polanyi´s View: The Different Forms of Oikonomy
References
Chapter 7: The Troubles with Free Markets
References
Part III: Nature´s Oikonomy
Chapter 8: The Ways of Gaia
References
Chapter 9: A Matter of Scale
References
Chapter 10: Learning to See Again
References
Chapter 11: The Evolution of Consciousness
References
Internet Only Reference
Part IV: Human´s Oikonomy
Chapter 12: Humans as Part of Nature´s Oikonomy
References
Chapter 13: Are We in Need of Our Needs?
References
Chapter 14: Money, Cancer, and Finances: Why the Rich Get Rich, and the Poor Stay Poor?
References
Chapter 15: Conclusion: In Freedom and Responsibility
15.1 Going Beyond Markets and Government Control
15.2 The Origin of Wealth
15.3 Consciousness and Freedom
References
References
Internet Only References

Citation preview

Springer Studies in Alternative Economics

Andri Werner Stahel

Regenerative Oikonomics A New Perspective on the Economic Process

Springer Studies in Alternative Economics

This book series offers an outlet for cutting-edge research in alternative, heterodox and pluralist economics. It features scholarly studies on various schools of thought beyond the neo-classical orthodoxy, including Austrian, Post Keynesian, Sraffian, Marxian, Georgist, Institutional-evolutionary, as well as feminist, radical, social, green, and ecological economics. It aims to promote pluralism of economic ideas, methodological approaches, and topics. The series also welcomes works that seek to develop alternative visions of the economy, economic structures and new approaches that aim to serve society, for example by embedding the economy within the ecosystem, or to enrich economic thought by advancing diversity, gender, race, and social equality. All titles in this series are peer-reviewed.

Andri Werner Stahel

Regenerative Oikonomics A New Perspective on the Economic Process

Andri Werner Stahel Associative Economy Institute - ELO Botucatu, São Paulo, Brazil

ISSN 2731-5908 ISSN 2731-5916 (electronic) Springer Studies in Alternative Economics ISBN 978-3-030-95698-1 ISBN 978-3-030-95699-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Part I

What Went Wrong with Modern Economic Science?

1

Introduction: Encounter of the Fifth Kind with an Alien Science . .

3

2

Is Economics a Science? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

3

About Economists and Theologians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

4

Taking a Phenomenological Approach to Oikonomics: Looking at the World in Living and Holistic Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53

Part II

What Is the Oikonomy All About?

5

Aristotle’s View: Oikonomy as the Art of Living and Living Well . .

65

6

Polanyi’s View: The Different Forms of Oikonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . .

71

7

The Troubles with Free Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

Part III

Nature’s Oikonomy

8

The Ways of Gaia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

9

A Matter of Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

10

Learning to See Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

11

The Evolution of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

Part IV

Human’s Oikonomy

12

Humans as Part of Nature’s Oikonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

13

Are We in Need of Our Needs? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

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Contents

14

Money, Cancer, and Finances: Why the Rich Get Rich, and the Poor Stay Poor? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

15

Conclusion: In Freedom and Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

Part I

What Went Wrong with Modern Economic Science?

Chapter 1

Introduction: Encounter of the Fifth Kind with an Alien Science

By finishing school, having to decide my future career, I was torn between wildly different options. It ranged from astrophysics, being as I was fascinated staring at the night sky and just wondering about the sheer magnitude, immensity and power of cosmic events which brought our world and us to being, to designing homes as an architect or exploring the inner complexities of our consciousness, feelings and thoughts as a psychologist. In short, as it happens to many who do not feel a clear vocation, I was short of answers once confronted with the first important question I had to answer by myself. Or, maybe, I had too many. At that time, one of my best friends and classmates going through the same process came up with economics. It immediately struck a chord in me: on the one hand, not as abstract and removed from our human world and reality as I was afraid astrophysics could be. On the other, economics was not as close to our individual human experience and emotions as psychology, which I did not feel comfortable with. At the same time, it seemed to leave the doors open to different future paths, from more academic and reflective, which were my stronger inclinations, to more applied and ‘useful’ ones. Indeed, economics seemed to me to keep open different career options and possibilities in the future, thus allowing me to postpone all these decisions. In any case, it gave my youthful idealistic dreams the needed fuel: having big, sometimes megalomaniac dreams of changing the world, it just seemed fitting to me to spend some time studying and trying to understand the economy once, as the saying goes, ‘economy rules the world’. Thus, my youthful logic went, by understanding how the economy works, I would know how to change the world better. But big was my deception once entering the actual study of economics. Little of what we studied seemed to relate to the real world and give me a better clue on how to fix it eventually. Moreover, by considering the economic process in purely mathematical and reductionist ways, I was being led to believe that instead of looking and studying the world in practical terms, carefully observing and understanding it as it unfolds before our eyes, what we had to do was to look at some highly simplified and idealised models of reality instead. Indeed, economics was portrayed the same way I had learned about Newtonian physics back in school. It © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_1

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consisted of a series of simplified models of reality whose maths and equations we were asked to solve. Thereby, as for physics, a series of abstract models based on a series of assumptions were presented to us. Notwithstanding, unless for physics dealing with a much simpler reality and much fewer parameters, the models we studied were utterly unrealistic and unobserved in the real world. But we had not to bother about that. We just had to solve the equations or, more quickly, do some graphic representations and look at how the different curves are shaped and intersect. Instead of trying to understand our world as a historical, context-dependent and ever-changing reality, fruit of past choices, power relations and struggles, we had to look at it just as physicists do: from the outside, objectively, only in abstract and quantitative terms and through our exercises in number crunching, reveal its supposedly underlying universal, immutable laws. Economics was presented to me as an exact science created at the Newtonian mechanics’ image and resemblance. Thus, after having avoided astrophysics, I ended up studying a world as removed from my daily experience or even more because of being inexistent. The reality of abstract models applied to an ‘as if’ world. But there were still some exceptions. Having studied in Brazil in the 1980s, we had classes in economic history, history of economic thought, classic political economy’s value theories and Marxists economics and some introductory courses to sociology. But these short incursions into some empirical, historical facts-based descriptions and analysis were disconnected from that which was presented to us as the central core of what sound economics as a science was supposed to be: microeconomic and macroeconomic theory, trade theory, econometrics and plenty classes in mathematics and statistics. Economics was presented to us not as social and historical science but as a mathematical, exact science. Nor was any actual historical fact represented in the models. I still remember that having studied at the University of São Paulo (USP) campus, I could choose two optional courses and the corresponding credits elsewhere. It was an opportunity which I readily took, walking to the neighbouring faculty of philosophy, literature and human sciences to take some courses in contemporary history. Thus, I hoped to compensate for the total lack of it in our economics course, as if the economic process was not a historical process too. To me, it was a life-changing experience. There, I could see how actual history was approached in observational and empirical ways, not just by creating an abstract ‘as if’ model of reality to represent it in mathematical and numerical terms. Nor would historians try to explain history through formula. But, I asked myself, ‘wasn’t the economic process a historically, context-dependent, complex process too?’ Why could we, in economics, simply ignore cultural, political and environmental factors and portray the economic activity as happening in an ahistorical, unchanging world governed by universal laws instead? While history students had to dwell in the study of real-world events that happened in the past, trying to understand how real people took their decisions and how these decisions affected the unwinding of history, we would just deal with imaginary actors, behaving in assumed mechanical ways, thus affecting developments we could precisely predict. It struck me how different their approach to history

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was to mine and how contentious and vivid their debates were. Some were arguing one way; others another. Some were deepening the argument by bringing other dimensions and elements into it; others referring to empirical facts to sustain their point. But all looked at actual historical facts and realities to support their arguments to understand history’s underlying forces and movements. No one would argue or make a point by quoting the outcome of abstract mathematical models of reality. I always thought (and still believe) economics to be a social, historical science. It has to do with how we humans, in historically and culturally specific changing ways, aim to satisfy our fundamental needs. It deals with how we (re)produce and distribute wealth by transforming the resources we find in our environment through labour, according to different social structures, cultural values and technological means. Why were we using such a different method to approach this reality, unlike all other social sciences? At that time, I could not yet find the answers, busy as I was to simply memorise and learn to use the method I was being taught to get approved and receive my diploma. In parallel, hoping to enlarge my perspectives, I decided to engage in a very broad-minded graduate course in public administration at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV in its Brazilian initials). There, I had the privilege of taking classes in psychology, sociology and communication theory and looking at some case studies. Being designed to train future executives of actual public and private companies, public administrators and servants, we had to learn some fundamental skills and understand real-world realities to be effective. Knowing how to solve some equations in an abstract model would certainly not do. I still remember, many years later, when I started to teach as an assistant teacher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB in its Catalan Initials), meeting there another teacher like me. She was in her 30s, having to revalidate her place every couple of years as I had to. Not having thought about it myself, I was surprised to hear how scared she was of losing her job as a teacher in economics, afraid of not having qualifications and skills to work in the real world outside the academy. First, it struck me that someone could think like that. But giving it some thought, I understood her point. Indeed, very little of what we learn and teach as economists prepare us to live and work in the real world—to engage with concrete markets, real human beings and social relations. Looking back now, I can see that very little of what I found in the economics textbooks helped me to understand the world better and do my best to better it as I had hoped for. Instead, I had to look elsewhere. It was mostly all that I learned besides and beyond the official curriculum in economics, which helped me keep a broader perspective on the economic process, despite the narrow funnel professional economics was squeezing me through. Thus, I gradually observed how my academic path was diverging from economists’ standard, expected way. The more we advanced in our graduate course, the more we were brainwashed to lock at the economic process in a purely abstract, ahistorical and theoretical way. At the same time, the more I came to doubt that this was the right way to approach the economic process and started to look elsewhere. The economic process is a historical, social process that is not, by any means, governed by purely mechanical, cause and effect,

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universal and immutable natural laws. It is not—and it has never been—a process akin to simple natural phenomena like the one studied by Newtonian physics and other natural sciences in which recurring relations and dynamics can be observed and repeated in controlled laboratory conditions if needed, removing other factors from altering the outcome. History does not repeat itself, I once was told. Nor can we create frictionless environments and controlled laboratory conditions to observe economic processes and validate or refute our models’ predictions. Notwithstanding, I was told that we economists had to remain ‘objective scientists’ and not be swept by subjective perceptions as humanists and social scientists were prone to be. We had to do just like ‘real’, ‘objective’ scientists did in the natural and exact sciences. Just as physicists studying distant stars or engineers studying a mechanical machine’s functioning are supposed to be. We had to look only at the quantitative and measurable aspect of a supposedly ‘objective reality’, refraining from and disregarding all qualitative assertions and assessments about the real world. Follow the mathematical method and let the mathematics do the talking. But the clear difference from basing our knowledge of the complex historical economic reality on idealised models, from the practice of an engineer or physicist reducing his gaze to simple phenomena, was never seriously considered. At a given point, there are always straightforward empirical tests machines or bridges have to endure once built, thus asking them not to leave out of their models and studies relevant realworld aspects. But not so for economics: our models did not bother whether they are empirically relevant and close to actual reality. Nor have they to endure empirical tests. Although looking at abstract models and letting themselves be carried by the mathematical conclusions of these models, physics still has to confront their clearcut predictions with empirical observations. Carefully designed experiments and even human expeditions to distant places to observe the predicted curvature of space by following a star’s apparent position at sun eclipses have been done to test Einstein’s conclusions and predictions. Over US$7.5 billion have been spent to build the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to try and advance in the highly speculative, mathematical predictions of modern quantum physics. Although idealising an abstract model on how chemical bonds between different elements happen, chemists may still observe actual chemical reactions in a laboratory and see if the model’s conclusions are consistent with them. Nothing alike happens in the social and historical sciences. Nor in economics. A historian trying to understand the fall of the Roman Empire or, indeed, an economist trying to explain why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain and not in China, for instance, cannot recur to repeating examples always showing the same pattern and result. Nor can they realise a series of experiments in the laboratory, trying to verify their models’ predictions. Certain aspects and underlying forces can be found and described in different historical realities. But no clear-cut prediction can be tested once each historical context has its particular characteristics, colours and flavours, defying any attempt to explain it through some simple recurring cause and effect relations. The fact that we were dealing with a messy and complex reality in which all kinds of continuously changing factors were interfering and affecting

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the outcomes was presented as unfortunate but not as something that should deter us from basing ourselves on theoretical models. Economics was given to us as consisting of ‘a neutral toolbox’ to be used by others. It was called ‘positive economics’ to separate it from the ‘normative economics’ and those who included value judgments and questionings in their analysis. In any case, ‘positive economics’ sounded much more correct than the normative, value-tainted sort of science we were told other social scientists were doing. Indeed, we were repeatedly being warned that all these left-winged Marxists and those questioning the existing political and ideological status quo were not doing good science but defending an ideology instead, as those like Hayek or Popper argued. It was argued that Marxism was not open to falsificationism. But, somehow, the same argument was not applied to neoclassic economics and standard trade theories, which happened to ‘prove’ that free markets would lead to ‘maximum efficiency’ and ‘Pareto optimality’. The more I advanced in my studies, the more considerations about the economic process’s social, historical, cultural and political dimensions were to become absent from my curriculum, ending up being ignored as ‘externalities’ altogether. They were all seen as aspects that do not concern us as professional economists. Thus, not just in method but in its content, I was told that what I always believed to be a social and historically changing process, the economic process, had to be seen instead as a natural phenomenon, governed by universal mathematical laws. Paradoxically, the natural phenomenon which undoubtedly was of central importance to the economic process, namely, the working of ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole through which our lives and our economy unfolds, was utterly absent from my studies back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Although Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a brilliant and well-known economist, had already in the early 1970s pointed to the fact that biology and ecology, not Newtonian physics, should be the ‘true Mecca’ for the economists and that, in physics, thermodynamics and the entropy law, ‘the most economic of all physical laws’, had to guide our studies, all my official studies in economics ignored ecology and any attempt to come at terms with the physical, realworld nature of the economic process. It was—and still is—an alien science, dealing with abstract worlds instead of the real world I was hoping to understand better.

Chapter 2

Is Economics a Science?

This is the title of a paper I recently published, aiming to take this question seriously (Stahel, 2020b). I did so wondering how bold an argument my negative answer to this question was. After all, economics, in the way it is practised and taught, has been hegemonic in the academy for over a century. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people have and still devote their lives to studying economics, assuming it to be a science. Thousands of papers are published in prestigious scientific journals, and some professionals are called to share their scientific expertise and counsel. Nobel Prizes and other scientific distinctions are awarded, thus reaffirming the scientific status of what I have been trained to be. Could it be that it is not a science after all? To be sure, many serious critiques have been made to economics over the years. But to question its scientific status in bulk is another matter. After all, the Nobel Prize in Economics, which has been added to the initial ones created by Alfred Nobel, was assumed to recognise scientific contributions, not fiction. At this time, I had already realised that oiko-nomos in Greek means to ‘manage our home’. Having affiliated me to ecological economics as my specialisation in the field, I knew too that our home had to be understood not just as our domestic space but the larger environment we live in, our Earth. Hence the root for the word ‘ecology’ as well: oiko-logos.1 But, particularly after reading Aristotle’s ideas about the oikonomy in his Politics, I gradually realised that what the Greeks understood as being the oikonomy has little to do with what we nowadays believe it to be. Indeed, we nowadays consider being the ‘economy’ that which the Greeks called chrematistics or commerce. To them, ‘the art of acquisition’, when correctly done, represents just a part of the larger oikonomy. Chrematistics has to do with selling and buying in the markets only. Much broader in its scope, the oikonomy deals with how we manage our shared home, relate to each other and Nature, aiming

1

The etymology of the word is now clearly established, reaching back to the Greek word oἰκovóμoς/oikonoms (i.e. ‘household management’, a composite word derived from oἶκoς/oikos (‘house’) and vε
μω/nemein (‘to manage; distribute’) by way of oἰκovoμία/oikonomia.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_2

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to produce, distribute and consume wealth to sustain our lives and hopefully a good life, be it through trade, be it otherwise. But more of that later. In any case, the considerable difference between the Greeks and following their steps I came to believe constitutes the oikonomy, and the limited and reductionist perception of what the economy is all about in our modern world, made me recover the term oikonomy in a previous book I wrote where I aimed to ground this idea on a more academic-minded way (Stahel, 2020a). I felt the need to differentiate it from the more limited economy notion, which has become the norm and is a direct result of the reductionist perspective of our modern economics. When referring to the oikonomy, I’m not talking solely about chrematistics or commerce, as further shown later—a differentiation I keep and will be keeping along these lines. But it is not just the scope of what is considered ‘the economy’, but, more importantly, the way it is approached by modern neoclassic economics that is at the heart of the problem. When Adam Smith wrote his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and later in the nineteenth century when economics consolidated as a separate branch of science, natural sciences, in general, and Newton’s mechanics, in particular, set the paradigm of science. Its method was seen as the example to be followed. So did the architects of modern economics, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century when the neoclassic approach was consolidated to become not just hegemonic but, basically, the only way to approach the economic process in the academy, leaving the historical method and other alternative methods aside. Instead of looking to the oikonomy in holistic and living ways, as an ever historically changing creative process whereby new historical realities emerge, the economic process has been depicted in purely mathematical, abstract and reductionist ways. Economics was created at the image and resemblance of Newtonian physics. Without considering that Newton’s method was devised to look at the laws governing the movement of passive bodies, of lifeless planets orbiting the sun or of perfectly elastic assumed billiard balls with different masses colliding at different speeds and angles. It was not meant to look at a complex, ever-changing political and historical process. As for Newton’s laws depicting inertial bodies’ movement, the economic process laws were described as universal and unchanging. But, to do so, reality had to be significantly reduced to some relatively simple, linear causal relations between a few variables. Instead of a complex, irreversible historical process, the economy was— and still is—represented using straightforward functions and equations. Like aspiring economists worldwide, my studies resembled a somehow more complicated version of those I had back in school when I was taught Newton’s mechanics. In both cases, a simple idealised model consisting of some variables was presented, the functions relating all these variables among them in causal ways described, and I was asked to answer some hypothetical questions like ‘if the government increases the money supply by 10%, what will the new equilibrium interest rate be?’ Just as when, back in school, I was asked what would be the resulting speed and trajectory of two colliding billiard balls with given masses be, assuming them to be perfectly elastic and moving in a friction-free environment. Then I did the maths, hoped to get them right and looked at the correct answer at the

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end of the book. Or I had to wait for my exam grades to know. Just how I learned to do back in school for physics. Thus, focusing on the method and procedures, it was easy to forget the real world we were supposed to be studying. As so many others did and still do, merely assuming that this is the way it is and not bothering too much about it. After all, we were doing good science, I was told. I always remember a joke we used to repeat when asked to present a small paper for some grades. We looked at each other’s work, searching for numbers and formulas. Going over descriptive or narratively argued pages, we would shake our heads in dismissal, saying ‘just words, no science, bad. . .’. But, as soon as numbers and equations were presented, we approvingly said ‘now yes, here I see science’. . . Indeed, an ironic way to handle our frustration of doing something we felt was heading in the wrong direction. But we did it anyway until eventually believing it to be the only way for doing it. But the implications of applying Newton’s method to a complex, historically changing reality were never considered more in-depth. Nor was it explained why Newton’s same simplifying assumptions ignoring air friction to look at the movement of falling bodies could be applied to ignore cultural, political, administrative, ecological and personal choice factors affecting the economic process. Indeed, to treat and study the oikonomic process in the same way Galileo and later Newton tried to investigate the laws governing the movement of inertial bodies, modern economists had found a clever way to stick to the mechanistic paradigm. They started to use and abuse the so-called ceteris paribus condition, a little Latin economist worldwide learn, meaning everything else remaining unchanged. By assuming these variables as unchanging, they do not affect the other endogenous variables of the model and can, thus, be ignored. Just as Newton assumed that there was no friction involving the inertial motion of the studied bodies or, in the case of colliding objects, considered perfect elasticity to ignore the losses to heat and other factors affecting the collision of objects in non-laboratory conditions. Thus, economists too resorted to an idealised, abstract, frictionless world in which clearly definable cause-effect dynamics govern everything—ignoring the phenomenon’s complexity and all variables that simple linear functions cannot describe. But we never were asked, nor did we seriously asked ourselves, whether human behaviour and complex sociohistorical dynamics could be studied in the way Newton had studied the effects of gravity on falling apples or orbiting planets in empty space. It is easy to forget the difference in the behaviour of passive bodies studied by Newtonian physics and that of living beings and historically changing societies. Focusing on the method and believing it to be exact and scientific, we easily ignore that we cannot treat in the same way objects and living beings. The former does follow inertial movements, and their trajectories respond solely to external forces affecting them. But the latter continuously change their behaviour and course even in the absence of an external force affecting them due to their inner changes and metabolism. Notwithstanding, in economics, we simply managed to assume strictly linear and predictable behaviour. As a teacher, in my classes, sometimes I would hold a pen over the floor and ask my students if they could calculate how long it would take for it to reach the floor if I let it fall. Applying Newton’s equations or previous observations, a reasonably

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precise guess could be obtained. But what if, as a teacher trying to make my point that human behaviour is non-linear, I decided to pick the falling pen with my other hand before reaching the ground? Indeed, including me in the picture meant that the time the pen would take to get to the ground could not be calculated in advance, ranging from less than a second when I did not catch it to never reaching the bottom when I did. In some cases, when I missed the catch, it eventually was projected and fell somewhere else after describing a further trajectory. Or it could be caught by a student before reaching the floor. Like other historical or living events, the result could be understood and explained retrospectively but not calculated in advance. By arguing that economists were making a ‘cut in time’ and thus considering only the very short term in which there is no ecological, technological, political, institutional, cultural, indeed historical change, I was presented to models in which just a few called endogenous variables like prices, interest rate, output/quantity, income or other ‘economic variables’ were considered. All the others were simply ignored by assuming them as ‘unchanging’—ceteris paribus. Thus, a causal relation between the models’ variables can be established, unaffected by all the other ‘exogenous variables’ who, miraculously maybe, patiently remained unchanging in the meanwhile. Like in these movies where, suddenly, all other elements of the image stop and just the main character moves amid the frozen picture. Or, to come back to the example of the falling pen, assuming that we all—me included—would remain static observing the falling pen, thus not interfering in its trajectory. Just as politics, cultural values, individual and collective preferences, the environment, etc. are assumed to be static and unchanging, while the oikonomic process unfolds. The sheer audacity of simply imagining an abstract, laboratory conditions world in which causal changes and relations were ‘scientifically’ stated while, to do so, we merely imagine all the rest of the picture remaining unmoving, never sounded as absurd to me as it does now while writing it down again. Legions of students and economists simply accept it as a valid methodological procedure and go on doing it. Some may hope to earn a Nobel Prize for it or at least the praise of their peers; others merely wish to be recognised as professional economists. But all undeterred by its logical and empirical absurdity: ceteris paribus simply does not happen to happen in the real world in which everything is in constant movement. Nor can we freeze all the rest and just keep alive and change some chosen elements or characters, except, of course, in fiction and movies. But that is precisely what we, as economists, are taught to do at the core of our ‘scientific praxis’. Some of us had some doubts about this practice. So did I. At times, when presented with the assumptions underlying some models and economic theories, some of us would eventually ask, ‘but why are you assuming that?’ ‘How can you assume that there is no technological change?’ ‘Can we simply assume that there are no political and administrative factors affecting the market?’ ‘Nor consider that there are subjective, “irrational” factors affecting the consumer choices?’ The answers given were invariably the same: the ceteris paribus assumption is a needed tool to represent the model in the first place. Without this assumption, it would not just be too messy but downright impossible to create mathematical models of reality. Indeed, how do you state qualitative change and the complex, multidimensional

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oikonomic dynamics if not by enormously simplifying it? Thus, as the argument went, assuming all these variables as being external and unchanging was just the price we, as economists, had to pay to explain the oikonomic process just as elegantly and precisely as Newton had done for the movement of cosmic and earthly bodies. Ignoring that believing the moon is a passive body following an inertial motion in a frictionless environment is entirely different from assuming that markets exist in a frictionless world. We cannot believe that they are untouched by political, cultural and technological factors or that humans behave purely mechanical and rationally, provided with ‘perfect information’. But this is what economists do and what I was told to do to remain ‘scientific’. This is what we got. As students, we were there to learn, not to question, what had been established as the proper methodology by legions of previous very bright minds and famous economists. Or maybe more importantly for us, we needed to get grades at the final exams to get our diploma and pursue our careers. Thus, we ended up no longer bothering to ask, focused as we were to assimilate the different models’ mathematical logic and solve the equations. To become clever puzzle-solvers and accept that this is the way the science of economics works. Implicitly if not explicitly, assuming that the oikonomic process happens in an ecological, social, political, cultural and historical void. Thus, given enough time, we ended up forgetting this crucial difference: Newton’s law of movement applies to passive objects, not to living beings, as any observation of flying birds or walking ants shows. The assumption of inertial motion is a central aspect of Newton’s mechanics. Objects follow inertial trajectories, only affected by external forces and the impacting force of other things. A fallen apple’s course does not follow Newton’s law once caught in his flight by a human hand before reaching the ground. Nor would the moon’s movements and orbit be as predictable if he had a will of his own and a particular love for dancing to the music of the cosmic spheres in his way. Applying the Newtonian methodology to human oikonomy posed a further challenge given that humans are moved by their will, passions, ideas, aims, values and potentially changing purposes. Thus, how to represent human behaviour in a predictable way as mechanics does for inert bodies? Here too, economists found a convenient and easy solution. Instead of painstakingly figuring out why humans behave the way they behave, like sociologists, psychologists, historians, political scientists or anthropologists do, economists just assumed the existence of a new specimen: homo oeconomicus, the ‘cost minimising and benefits maximising’ ‘rational economic agent’. By assuming that humans instinctively or intuitively act in linear and predictable ways—hardly can we believe ordinary people doing all the number crunching and calculus of the economists’ models in their daily decisions, thus acting ‘rationally’ as assumed by the models—economists can think that humans taking their economic choices always favour that which allows us to ‘maximise our satisfaction while minimising the pain’ as a consumer or, as producers and merchants, ‘maximise our earnings while minimising the costs’. Thus, economists simply assumed that human behaviour followed linear and predictable patterns described by mathematical, linear functions. Undeterred by other scientists’

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work, particularly in the human sciences, pointing to the cultural, political, economic and psychological aspects affecting human behaviour and historical dynamics. Nor bothering about anthropologists’ studies of other societies and cultures pointing to how oikonomic behaviour was always affected and part of these societies’ cultural values and institutional settings. Thus, economics ignores not just Nature, our shared home, Oikos, which sustains us, but our human nature as well. As an example of the lengths economists may assume instead of observing and understanding real-world behaviour, we may take the example of the ‘rational expectations hypothesis’. Given that uncertainty about the future was one of the central elements of Keynes’ theory pointing to the expected existence of unemployment under free-market conditions—by the way, stating it in theoretical terms instead of just pointing to the great depression of the 1930s or actual unemployment which, indeed, accompanied the history of capitalism since its inception—in the 1960s, John Muth proposed the ‘rational expectations hypothesis’, assuming that the expectations of the economic agents, as an average, were consistent with those of the models. Thus, although no person is supposed to be doing all the number crunching of the models, it is still assumed that at the macroeconomic level, the decisions of the individuals are consistent with those of the models. That is, individuals have a rational foresight about the future and will not act out of fear or, as Keynes argued, hoard money for ‘precautionary reasons’. Thus, despite historical evidence pointing otherwise, the idea of full employment under freemarket conditions could once again be theoretically stated. From then on, economists could simply assume that people knew and operated according to the models’ predictions, although being unaware of it. It may sound weird for those who look at human beings and human behaviour from an empirical perspective, like psychologists, anthropologists or historians do. Indeed, assuming rational expectations and perfect information may sound weird to anyone trying to understand the spending habits of his partner, his children or ourselves when we remember the last time we were duped into buying an utterly unnecessary gadget in our previous visit to a department store or, at a moment of boredom, online. But this is how economists manage to stick to their models and assume a mathematically predictable human behaviour. It has, since then, become a standard assumption in macroeconomic theory. Employing this assumption allows economists to believe that agents inside the model ‘know the model’ and, on average, take the model’s predictions as valid. Thus, although individual agents may get it wrong, on average, all different expectations of individuals, firms and government institutions about future economic conditions level each other. Thus, although individual behaviour can be shown not to be consistent with the model’s hypothesis, the model is still valid because, globally, expectations are assumed to be in line and consistent with those of the model. Said otherwise, a clever way to avoid falsifying by empirical observation: the model is proven correct because we previously assumed it to be so! By sticking to this fiction, economists can ignore the insight into human behaviour gained by psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists or historians. Ignore the subconscious and unconscious elements of our behaviour, the social and cultural dynamics shaping it or the way group behaviour emerges. Homo

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oeconomicus, fortunately for our model-making practice as economists, is not affected by them. Thus, but still striking to me, history, anthropology, psychology and cultural studies, not to say ecology and a better understanding of the natural world, were absent from my economics’ curriculum. I did not have to study it, not even on an introductory level. Instead, I was expected to focus on mathematics, differential calculus, statistics and econometrics. For all the rest, I could just assume humans to be ‘rational economic agents’, and the ‘ceteris paribus’ condition would do the work. Implicit in this methodological choice, but mostly invisible and ignored by economists, is another even more challenging methodological and logical tour de force which economists have accomplished: although human behaviour, as manifested by the diversity of our cultural, technological, linguistic and historical achievements, is undoubtedly the most plastic, creative and changing behaviour on Earth, it is assumed to be the most linear, predictable and straightforward among all species by the economists. For instance, even ethologists would not dare express the bee’s behaviour through a linear mathematical formula. Like Konrad Lorenz famously did, some spend decades observing and living with gooses while trying to understand their ways. Instead, economists simply assumed this particular species, homo oeconomicus, to be the most predictable and straightforward of all behaving animals. Indeed, ethologists do not explain the gazelle’s escape behaviour when chased by lions through a mathematical formula. Instead, they spend hours observing it in the wild and then other hours reflecting on their observations. But economists, except perhaps now for behaviour economists who, thanks to big data and brain-scanning techniques, started to do some empirical studies, explain how we, let’s say, purchase a smartphone by assuming that we do it in purely rational and predictable ways. By reducing homo sapiens to homo oeconomicus, we humans are supposed to be short-term, money-focused, selfish individuals, acting without any kind of social, cultural and ethical constraints. But, then again, assuming that our behaviour, even in the oikonomic arena, takes into account other factors and may be changing according to social, cultural and ecological contexts, considering that we may take into account long-term considerations or empathically other’s needs while acting, would have made it rather messy and impossible to include humans in the economist’s mathematical models. Thus, it had to be dismissed, if not for empirical, for purely practical reasons. After all, humans’ behaviour deciding whether and which new smartphone to buy is much more predictable than escaping gazelles. Or is it not? Anyway, as aspiring economists, we were told not to bother about these questions? After all, can’t we observe economic regularities emerging from the myriad of interacting factors? Of course, we can. But it is at least naïve, if not downright foolish, to pretend to understand it by looking at an abstract, simple mathematical model, applying the Newtonian method to it. Nowadays, after decades of studying all these subjects by myself, after having refused to reduce human beings and me to ‘rational economic agents’, and refused to consider the oikonomic process in abstract mathematical form, I still wonder how can legions of students all around the world be brought into accepting this reductionist view of reality and our human nature as

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being a valid approach to the understanding of the living, historically changing and certainly complex oikonomic reality? How can we accept it as ‘scientific’ and even ‘objective’? Why are Nobel Prizes given to intelligent model-building economists, then celebrated as great scientists at the same level as physics, medicine or chemistry, when their models depict a reality far removed from the real world, and they repeatedly fail to predict the next oikonomic crisis? Why and how had this single approach to economics, although so far removed from reality, become so hegemonic worldwide?

References Stahel, A. W. (2020a). Oikonomy—The art of living and living well. Montseny Spiral Edition. Stahel, A. W. (2020b, December). Is economics a science? Real-World Economics Review, 94, 61–82.

Chapter 3

About Economists and Theologians

By following my PhD in social sciences at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences of the University of Campinas (IFCH-UNICAMP in its Brazilian initials), an answer to this question became more apparent to me. I had previously done a master’s degree in international economics in the Graduate Institute of Higher International Studies of Geneva (IUHEI in its French initials, nowadays known as just ‘The Graduate Institute’ after fusing with the neighbouring Development Studies Institute). While applying to the institute, I still hoped it would help me better understand the world around me, particularly our global oikonomic dynamics, once a multidimensional approach to the international reality was promised. Something which my first degree had failed to do. But it ended up opening my eyes to my practice as an economist instead. To reflect on how far removed from reality this profession has become and how this relates to our present oikonomic structures and development practices. The international economy branch of the IUHE had a strongly neoclassic approach to economics. Thus, although it was a multidisciplinary course and we could attend classes in two of the other specialisation lines, choosing between international law, international politics and international history, my core course in economics was entirely theoretical and model-based. Although happening in the same institute and to the same students, I could experience how far from the other branches (law, history and political sciences) economics were, in both method and content. As if it were studying another world or subject. I had my classes in international history and international politics, but nothing of what I learned there ever appeared in the models I was taught in economics. Indeed, these models were assumed to be universally valid, happening as they were in a historical, cultural and political void. A place where historical and political events and cultural and institutional changes, like those I learned in the other courses, did not affect the outcomes of the models we studied in our macroeconomics and microeconomics courses. While in all other branches of the institute, other actual international realities and facts were explored and some explanatory frameworks proposed, in economics, it

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_3

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was all about learning different theoretical models and handling them mathematically. Nor was there any reference made to actual world events. I remember how, as students aiming to specialise in international economics, we had to attend the institute a week earlier to do a crash course in mathematics to ‘have a solid mathematical background to be equipped to handle the technical aspects of economics’.1 Our teacher—a PhD student—started by presenting several famous macroeconomic models and discussing their mathematical underpinnings. Following the standard ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ approach, the assumptions of the model were stated, like as an example, (1) aggregate demand is determined by the standard open economy IS-LM mechanism (itself the basic model studied by all economists, based on a series of non-realistic assumptions which, once hidden behind the model, need not be stated again)2; (2) financial markets can adjust to shocks instantaneously, and investors are risk-neutral; and (3) in the short run, goods prices are ‘sticky’.3 Based on these assumptions, a mathematical model was presented, showing—in the case of the Dornbusch overshooting model on which this example is based—that aggregate supply is horizontal in the short run while positively sloped in the long run. Once the whole model is outlined, economists (and we as students) were supposed to define mathematical relations between economic variables, such as interest rates, money supply, prices and output. Then we were asked to examine how some variables (the supposed exogenous ones) affect others (the endogenous or dependent variables of the model). Confronted by this kind of models and method, one day, I raised my hand. I asked our teacher if, once all assumptions of the model being presented were known not

1

As stated in the brochure we received prior to the course. The IS-LM model is a model which summarises and relates the ‘monetary’ or ‘financial’ side of the economy (money and other financial assets) and the markets of goods and services (also referred to as the ‘real economy’). It rests on a series of restrictive assumptions about the short- and mediumterm behaviour of interest rates, the different agent’s expectations and consumer preferences and behaviour while assuming as well a closed market economy and, of course, assuming no innovation or disruptive technological, ecological or political dynamics behind its pervasive ceteris paribus assumptions. In fact, it is a model which has suffered countless criticisms over the years, including from Hicks, the initial proposer of the model based on Keynes ideas, because of its simplistic and unrealistic assumptions about the macroeconomy. In fact, Hicks later admitted that the model’s flaws were fatal, and it was probably best used as ‘a classroom gadget, to be superseded, later on, by something better’, as quoted in Kates (2010, p. 130). Indeed, now I believe, its main virtue is to be taught and used by economists in their models and classes. A convenient way to keep them and myself busy working with models instead of observing reality. As Kates (2010, p. 129) showed just a page before, ‘The old- fashioned IS–LM framework, based on the work of John Hicks, has already been thoroughly debunked—by John Hicks. (. . .) Hicks observed that theories “built upon the hypothesis of a stationary state [are] quite satisfactory under that hypothesis, but incapable of extension to meet other hypotheses, and consequently incapable of application”’. 3 These are the summarised basic assumptions taken from a famous model by Rüdiger Dornbusch (1976), the overshooting model, which we extensively studied during our degree course. A full description of all underlying assumptions and how the model is constructed starting from them can be found directly in the paper itself, which may be consulted at https://www.jstor.org/stable/18312 72?seq¼1 2

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just to be non-observable in the real world but empirically false as well, the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the model should be that, except for an incredible coincidence, in the real world the findings of the model should be expected to be false too? No matter how well we did the mathematics? I remember the quietly puzzled look I got in return before she managed to come up with an appropriate answer. After agreeing that I had a point from a purely logical perspective, she argued that this was not the real question to be considered. As economists, we were supposed to construct models, a procedure that was simply needed to create the models in the first place, present them at conferences, write a thesis about them and confront them with other models developed in the same way. As a scientist, of course, I could propose other models based on different assumptions. But at no point it was argued that maybe we should avoid the models altogether and ground our conclusions on observed reality instead. According to her reasoning and an argument that economists often repeat, the assumptions are needed to create the models in the first place and cannot be avoided. Once economics was understood as an exact, mathematical and objective science, we had to proceed that way to keep on being ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ and therefore ‘neutral’ economists... But no question was raised whether we should approach our subject differently, as other social scientists do, and even in the institute, the other branches of study were doing. Look at reality instead. It did not appease my anxiety to know that some months later, having completed her highly theoretical and equations-filled PhD thesis, she went on to work at the IMF. There she joined other equally mathematically skilled and model-building economists. But, instead of just playing around in these abstract worlds as we did in our classes, they eventually team up in ‘technical missions’ which, given minimum time and by dint of back-breaking work, propose ‘structural adjustment programmes’ to entire countries like I had seen in Brazil during my youth or, more recently, Greece went through. I do not know whether she participated in that particular ‘technical mission’ responsible for devising the adjustment plan the Greek authorities were eventually summoned to sign unless they wanted to be cut off from international financial markets. But those who did probably had similar training and background. Nor were they asked to have an understanding of Greek history, culture, institutional framework and politics. Just sticking to the models and feeding them with numbers would do, once all these variables were assumed to be unchanging, ceteris paribus, thus thought external to the models. Thereby, nowadays, we have strangers telling a democratically elected government what to do if it wishes to survive in the face of its debt crisis. They are not grounded on a deep understanding of the local reality but based on the outcomes of abstract models and theories whose validity is deemed to be universal. Although, as she conceded, being based on unrealistic and false assumptions, we should not expect the effect on the Greek reality to be in accordance with the theoretical outcomes of the plan. Notwithstanding, these plans are imposed with the same air of truth, superiority and disdain for the local reality as when the European explorers brought the Cross to convert those they found to their faith without even bothering to know their faith and beliefs first. Like those early missionaries, those economists working for the IMF

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may see themselves as just bringing this superior knowledge about the economy to these countries and governments in need. Indeed, using the term ‘mission’ to these procedures may be not just a coincidence but a reflex of the arrogant superiority felt by many ‘experts’ and particularly economists after having worked hard to learn the hidden secrets of the economic doctrine revealed by the different models. It may be fitting to remember how a feeling of doctrinal superiority has always imbued the spread of Western European society to the rest of the world. From the medieval crusades promoted by the Vatican to the marriage of Crown and Church, which fuelled the Iberian conquest of America, aiming to both plunder indigenous wealth and convert indigenous souls to the Catholic faith. Even slaves brought from Africa to America were seen to be saved from the risk of eternal damnation by being baptised into the Christian faith before being shipped. Or how, well entered the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Saxon ‘white man’s burden’ to spread progress by force if necessary helped to legitimise European colonial expansion around the world. ‘Missions’ may be more than the simple use of the same word to designate the twentieth-century ‘technical missions’ aimed to bring development—now basically reduced to the aim of fostering chrematistic growth—and the missions of those who ‘heard the good News’ to spread the Word to those who have not. Although much more hidden, it still bears the same moral imperative of extending the right faith and gospel to the world or, as stated nowadays in the ‘Millennium Goals’, to ‘fight against poverty’ by fostering the development of those ‘underdeveloped’ countries. In all these cases, both personal interest and a moral imperative lead these ‘missions’ to convert the others to the ‘superior faith’ and ‘path to salvation’. No one asks what this faith actually is and whether it is justified. In the case of the IMF missions, faith in economics as a science, belief in the virtues of free markets and the sacrosanct aim of increasing chrematistic growth. . . Mocking the use of unrealistic assumptions to build our models, in our classes in international macroeconomics, whence presented with a model and being asked, for example, what would happen if, as a recurrent example, there was a 10% increase in the money supply thrown from helicopters on the economy,4 I proposed a standard answer which sometimes we used for fun: ‘under the right assumptions, nothing happens. . .’. For instance, in this case, I liked to suppose that a stroke of lightning would burn the paper money before touching the ground in a beautiful firework

This example was first suggested by Milton Friedman (1969, pp. 4–5), when he argued that money should be given directly to households in order to stimulate the markets, similar to Keynes’ idea to bury money in bottles and thereby stimulate the oikonomy by the creation of a ‘bottle mining industry’ and the resulting mined fresh money in the oikonomic process. Although not tested in practice—except maybe for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoins, which are actually ‘mined’ in the virtual world—this is another favoured assumption made in order to study models once, among other advantages, it simplifies the models by showing a direct net increase in the money supply variable and not, as happens in actual quantitative easing standard economic policy, where money supply is increased by the central bank buying government bonds, thereby affecting the interest rate also during that process.

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display, thus not affecting the economic activity any further. Why not? It sounds as plausible to me as assuming that we have ‘perfect information’ whence buying a new smartphone or asking for another beer. Or, as in the case of the Greek government, believing that things would turn out as expected by the adjustment plan they were forced to sign. These experiences and working my way through sophisticated models and struggling to handle their mathematics instead of looking at the world around us made me realise that ‘economics’ and ‘economy’ are not just slightly different words but are worlds apart. How could it be, I wondered, that something so far removed from actual reality was still professed and recognised as a science by so many intelligent, respectable people worldwide? Talking to a brilliant and sensible good friend of mine in the pauses between classes, I asked him how he felt about us dedicating so much time playing around with models with little or no relation to the real world instead of learning how to get to grips with it? I still remember his answer: although fully agreeing with me, he told me that to fulfil his dream to become and be recognised as an economist, to follow his PhD studies and his career as a teacher and researcher in economics (his main project at that time), this was what he had to do. Indeed, he was right, and thus he went on pursuing his PhD. Nowadays, he is a Division Chief at the International Monetary Fund and has published plenty of wellargued, model-based papers in international economics. I do not know how much he believes in them and their relevance to the real world. But that is what he had to do to advance his career and what he is supposed to keep doing if he wishes to build up his professional prospects. Along the same lines, I remember once meeting a student at the university’s cafeteria. After hearing that he had studied theoretical physics but had decided to follow a PhD in economics, surprised I asked him why he changed his subject that radically. His answer was plain and simple: ‘I wish to earn a Nobel Prize and realise that, given my mathematical skills, my chances of doing so in economics instead of physics are much higher’. I had to agree with him. Once economics is defined and accepted as a clever model-building practice, instead of its empirical relevance, a mathematically skilled physicist has undoubtedly better chances than me to gain recognition and praise as an economist. After all, Stanley Jevons (1879, p. xiii), one of the founding fathers of modern neoclassic economics, had already suggested that ‘I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicit mathematical basis. When mathematicians recognise the subject as one with which they may usefully deal, I shall gladly resign it into their hands’. Should this fellow I meet manage to propose ‘a theory of everything’ in economics instead of trying to do it in physics—unifying microeconomics and macroeconomics, for instance—or write a ‘general theory’ of economics like so many economists have been attempting to do, he would certainly be well placed in the profession. With the advantage that no one would be able to refute his models. While experiments and observations in physics are made to verify given assertions and predictions of the theoretical models, these experiments are impossible and not even attempted to be made in economics.

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Notwithstanding, I had not yet grasped the full ideological implication of this practice at that time. But gradually, I came to see it. Instead of helping us understand and represent reality as it is, economic theory is presented as a guide and model to what it could be if only we made the needed reforms. Most models point to general equilibrium, maximum individual and collective welfare (in economics, it is called ‘Pareto optimality’ following the theories and models of Vilfredo Pareto) and full employment, except for the Keynesian models pointing to the need for government intervention in the markets. Thereby, given these positive outcomes, it is easy to conclude that the world should be as balanced and harmonious as depicted in the models if only the world conformed to the models. Being based, as they are, on the assumptions of free-market competition and ‘rational’ human behaviour, it is easy to argue that if in reality markets were free, competition was promoted and people based their decisions purely on chrematistic calculus and prices, the world would be a better place. Thus, instead of the models being replaced once not observed in practice, the reality has to be conformed to the models to have full employment, welfare and ‘economic efficiency’. Thus, for instance, whence subjected to the ‘structural adjustment plans’ imposed by the IMF to have access to the international credit again, the first thing that is asked is reforms, reducing government regulations and interventions, thereby promoting more ‘market freedom and efficiency’. Moreover, it allows for a simple answer whenever the result of the undergone ‘structural adjustment’ and ‘reforms’ is not as expected by the models: it is not the plan that was based on false and unrealistic assumptions, but it is the country that has not yet advanced enough in the direction signalled by the plan’s assumptions. It has not yet advanced enough in its reforms. Thus, there is a perverse twist to the argument. Although presented as scientific and showing all its scientific credentials by basing itself on the mathematical, analytical method, economic theory and models function as ideological constructs pointing to how the world should be. Not on how it is. Thus, economics in the way it is professed has to be seen not as a science but as an ideology. Like any ideology, it signals an ideal world not yet existent or informs us which direction to go and how to behave. Economics does not show how things are. But, as students, we were mainly occupied with learning how to act to get our grades—gradually accepting that this is all we have and can do, not having learned to approach the oikonomy otherwise. Thus, in a certain sense, we were being trained to become the advocates of this particular ideology. We like to think about ourselves as ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’. Believe that objective thinking allows us to detach ourselves from our subjectivity and emotions. But we forget that, more than rational, we are rationalising beings. I remember how, as a teenager, I knew that I was able to justify almost any attitude and behaviour I engaged in, from innocent petty shoplifting to misbehaviour in school trying to impress my schoolmates or just give way to some inner emotional tension. I still can, particularly when I feel my self-image and ego threatened by someone else, enter into an argument and eagerly defend my subjective opinions believing them to be objective facts instead. Indeed, we humans, being self-reflective and potentially

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conscious of what we do, need to understand and justify it—in others’ eyes and to ourselves, not wanting to carry a heavy consciousness on our shoulders. Thus, we do as did slave owners in the past for imposing their will on slaves finding justifications to their behaviour. We do so mainly at a subconscious level every time we do something. From our eating habits to our behaviour as consumers, although possibly consuming our way towards social and environmental collapse, we believe that, at a personal level, we are doing the right thing given the circumstances. Despite our beliefs and understandings about human-related climate change, we may and can always find good reasons to take long-distance flights. Be it just travelling for a holiday, having a business meeting, visiting our family or even participating in an international conference on climate change. At least I do, often catching myself stopping short from inquiring further in certain subjects knowing that it would hinder my behaviour. I became vegan some years ago for many reasons, at least in theory following my present understanding and consciousness. But sometimes, to enjoy a good fish or, more importantly, a good dinner with friends, I will simply close my eyes and enjoy it. Without asking myself too much about it. And there are plenty of reasons I can find to do so. Like any other organ we have, our mind’s primary function is to ensure our survival. Not objectively inquire into the ultimate reality of the universe or the deeper meaning of life. It may occasionally do so, but we have to act and behave more than simply and patiently meditate about it to survive. More than understanding reality, we need to adapt and behave to ensure our survival in this reality. That is how we, as a species, managed to survive and evolve. If confronted with a lion or other predator in the wild, it may be better to protect and secure ourselves from a survival and evolutionary point of view. However little harm this specific predator would pose if he happens to be satiated and calm. To take our time to ‘objectively and rationally’ figure out whether this particular lion is a threat or not may not be a good option if he happens to be hungry. Thus, as aspiring economists, it may be better to rationalise our way into professing our profession the way we do, instead of inquiring too much, ending up living at the margin of the profession as it happened to me. Monty Python, the famous British comedians, has a hilarious sketch of what would happen if football was played by thinking philosophers instead of active players. If you wish to win a football match, you rather do not try to philosophise too much about its virtues and innermost nature. . . .5 Standard objectivist modern science forgets that the world we ‘see’ is not merely a linear sum of the perceived inputs we receive from our senses. Reality and what we actually ‘see’ is always a projection and creation of our mind. We do not ‘see’ a lion or a tree just through our eyes. Instead, according to the signals received by our mind, our inner beliefs and our past experiences, we project an internal image and perception on that which we see. Perception is active, not passive. Simultaneously,

The sketch features a hypothetical football final between Greek and German philosophers and is largely available on YouTube under titles like ‘the Philosophers World Cup’ https://www.youtube. com/watch?v¼92vV3QGagck

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our mind and inner mental processes have been selected by evolution according to how they managed to help us adapt and behave in different and changing environments. When we ‘see’ a stone being thrown towards us, we project it slightly closer than our eyes perceive. This gives us the extra needed reaction time to avoid its impact. When we first throw a ball to a young child, he will not catch it, as he misses the kick when first playing football. We all have first to learn how to project the reality so that the movement of the different elements is rightly predicted and thus coordinate the activity of seeing and doing. Indeed, our mind is continually learning how to project a reality so our behaviour may adapt and fit into the different personal and cultural contexts we may be. But there is a price to be paid for it: our mind projects a reality and rationalises our behaviour, making us prone to adopt as ‘truths’ abstract ideologies and models learned in the past. It allows us to adapt to given environments. But once the environment changes, we may stick to rationalisations, theories and ideas that no longer hold into this new reality. Just as we may cling to emotional patterns and behaviour that once helped us survive but no longer enable us to lead a happy and fulfilled life. This is what may be happening now with our modern economic theories and way of seeing reality. We stick to a worldview that has brought us until here but may not help us address the present reality and lead us towards a better future. We mistake theories and ideologies for reality, prices for value and chrematistic growth for oikonomic development. Believe that we are getting more prosperous when we may be destroying our environment and generating more social polarisation and violence instead. This is what our mind does, although absurd some justifications, seen from the outside, may seem. It is what happens once we start to take our projections for reality instead. Believe that what we ‘see’ is given objectively by our eyes and not an image we create ourselves. Do not realise that every ‘seeing’ is a hypothesis about reality, not reality as such. But, particularly in times of changes and new challenges, we eventually have to reconsider our beliefs and convictions. Look to reality in new ways and find new paths. That is what happened, for instance, in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe when a new reality was emerging and our modern world came into being. Old beliefs and ways of looking started to be questioned. New ones appeared. ‘Eppur si muove’6 Galileo is quoted having said after being found ‘vehemently suspect of heresy’ by the Roman Catholic Inquisition for sticking to his observations and conclusions that the Earth circles the sun and not the other way around as assumed by the Church’s accepted dogma. His telescopic observations, made public in 1610 in his Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) describing the moon surface with his valleys and mountains, the planet phases of Venus and Jupiter (which implied them as well circling the sun) and all other evidence he described like Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons circulating these planets, they were all considered heresy at the eyes of the Church. The argument went on for many decades, and

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‘Still it moves’.

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despite the empirical evidence supporting Galileo, he was condemned in 1633 to lifelong imprisonment, commuted to house arrest until he died in 1642. Many church astronomers repeated Galileo’s observations. But instead of arriving at his conclusions, they went on complicated arguments to reconcile them with the accepted geocentric view. Others directly refused to look through the telescope, as Galileo complained in a letter to Kepler: ‘My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth’.7 Unlike Galileo, Newton, who built on his method and followed his observations, was seen as a God and hailed as a hero still during his lifetime. At his death, the poet Alexandre Pope proposes in his epitaph intended for him to state: ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light’. Although this epitaph was finally not approved, a more extensive inscription in the Westminster Abbey where ‘lies that which was mortal of Isaac Newton’, nevertheless, points to the same fascination and perspective: ‘Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced. Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the Holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on 25th December 1642, and died on 20th March 1726’.8 Thus, at the time modern economics was born, modern science had already taken the upper hand. Theology having been relegated to a minor role, the Bible and inherited texts being read not as factual descriptions of reality but according to their symbolic and spiritual meaning. In this context, Adam Smith wrote the founding book of modern economics, An Inquiry into the Origin and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Following him, as we saw in the previous chapter, it was in the mathematical, model-based deductive method proposed by Galileo and Newton that modern economists would seek advice on approaching reality ‘scientifically’. Even if at the price of greatly simplifying and reducing reality and ultimately ignoring it by introducing the ceteris paribus condition. However, economists never asked

7

From the Latin original source, quoted in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair and Favaro (1890/1909). 8 Available online 17 May 2017: http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/sir-isaacnewton

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themselves whether this could be done without impairing their undertaking’s scientificity and objectivity. David Ricardo, maybe the most crucial author to consolidate economy as a science and responsible for formalising and giving Smith’s ideas a more rigorous and coherent form, may have been the one who, already before Jevons, Walras and the Neoclassics, gave to modern economics its methodological structure. He was a member of the British Parliament, and his theories, although presented in very abstract and formal ways, tackled burning political issues of his days. But, by arguing not based on empirical evidence but logical terms applied to a simplified, idealised model of reality, his arguments had the aura of scientific certainty and necessity. Simultaneously, although more unnoticed, they favoured clear and specific political interests and, particularly, the growing interests of having access to expanding free markets the British industrialists had. It is certainly not a coincidence that modern economic theory was born in Britain, home of the Industrial Revolution, and its industrial and commercial interests are looking for new markets worldwide. Being presented as logical, scientific conclusions and not as politically motivated interests, Adam Smith’s, Ricardo’s and later neoclassic model’s defence of the benefits of the ‘invisible hand’, the free-market competition, driving individual greed towards the common good, end up being represented not as what they mean, namely, the interests of some, but as a logical necessity. Notwithstanding, at the time and still today, in practice, the need or not for greater market freedom was highly disputed. Fiercely arguments went towards both sides once they affected different individuals and groups differently. In my classes, I used to say that if I ever was to accept to fight a professional boxer, let’s say, Mike Tyson, even with us two being the same age and having had the same time to develop our fighting skills, I would only do so under strict protectionist rules. For instance, a rule prohibiting any kind of physical contact during the fight. Conversely, he would undoubtedly be perfectly fine and instead ask for the total freedom to fight just how he pleased to do. It is the same with market freedom. In cases of unequal negotiating power, those with more power will usually ask for freedom to negotiate. Simultaneously, those with less may need protection and ask for limits to the stronger side’s potential abuse. It is not a coincidence that countries discourse about the convenience of freetrade changes according to the sector considered and its industry’s strength. While writing my previous book, Oikonomy—The Art of Living and Living Well, I looked for a quote by Arnold J. Toynbee’s, the famous British historian. Instead, by pure chance and the internet, I discovered another Arnold Toynbee, actually the uncle of the former one, a prominent economic historian and social reformer of the nineteenth century. I had never heard about him. Nor had I heard about the Historical School of Economics, which he represented, in my classes about the history of economic thought. As if he and others never existed or their contribution to economic theory was irrelevant. It was only then that I discovered that Smith’s and, more importantly, Ricardo’s methodological approach and their defence of free trade were highly disputed at their time. Crucial debates economists and I worldwide were never told about in or classes, and thus we simply ignore it.

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But the historical school of economics, I learned, was still the dominant school during the second half of the nineteenth century and well entered the twentieth century, particularly in the Prussian Academy of Sciences and in the USA once most of the American economics professors were holders of German PhDs. They firmly rejected the universal validity of economic theorems, arguing that economics should be based on careful empirical and historical analysis instead of logic and mathematics. The school also preferred reality, historical, political, social and economic, to mathematical modelling. Indeed, they even looked with a certain disdain and intellectual superiority to the then growing neoclassic school, also known as the Austrian school, in opposition to the Prussian one. It can be noted that continental Europe was, at this time, going through its own industrial revolution, part of the so-called second industrialisation wave that was done through protectionism and government support to its infant industry. Thereby, both politically and ideologically, more nuanced and pragmatic approaches to the oikonomic reality and, particularly, to the convenience or not of leaving it all to the ‘invisible hand’ of the free-market competition were sought for. In any case, the favoured approach to economics in the German academy was historical. Focusing on the historical reality, they firmly rejected the then emerging neoclassic economists. The latter, in the words of Stanley Jevons (1871, p. vii)—one of its foremost advocates—aimed ‘to treat Economy as a Calculus of Pleasure and Pain’, proposing to model economics at the image and resemblance of Newtonian physics. Jevons (1879, p. xiv) even went on to substitute ‘the name Political Economy for the single convenient term Economics’ since he could not help ‘thinking that it would be well to discard, as quickly as possible, the old troublesome double-worded name of our Science’. The fact that the neoclassic approach was gaining terrain at the time continental Europe’s industries were consolidating, and notably Marx and other critical economists were building on Smith’s and Ricardo’s labour theory of value to fuel social protest and to question free markets, is undoubtedly one further aspect which explains the ascent of this approach in the academy. The twentieth century has been a century full of social conflict, labour struggles and geopolitical tensions resulting, among others, from the spread of markets and free trade. Whatever was said about them had profound political ramifications and was often used by the different parties to defend their positions. Thus, paradoxically enough, while history was being written with fire, blood and iron in a time of intense social, institutional, environmental and geopolitical changes and conflicts, economists precisely started to ignore history, politics and environmental change in their models. When the political dimension of the oikonomy manifested itself, ‘political economy’ began to be named just ‘economics’. But nothing of this dispute was told to me. Nor was I said there had been a strong argument against using this methodological approach to the social sciences, which had become the only one I was taught and presented as an aspiring economist. As if there is no other way to approach the oikonomy from a ‘scientific perspective’. Nothing was said about Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1989) hermeneutic and phenomenological approach, firmly rejecting the application of a methodology formed exclusively from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) to the human sciences

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(Geisteswissenschaften). While the former explains natural phenomena subjected to unvarying natural laws, the latter deals with life’s creative manifestation and historical change. Thus, as Dilthey argued, in the natural sciences, we seek to explain phenomena in terms of observable cause and effect, which repeats itself universally in space and time. By contrast, in the human sciences, we strive to understand the relations of the part and the whole as a living, changing reality. Thus, according to Dilthey, a distinctively hermeneutic, phenomenological approach had to be applied to understand the Geisteswissenschaften (or ‘spiritual sciences’). Therefore, not just the hermeneutical understanding and interpretation of ancient texts, religious works, law, history, aesthetic theory and so on, but all historical and human phenomena should be approached trying to understand it in its changing movement and contexts. Not unchanging universal laws, but content-specific and changing contexts and realities characterise the oikonomic process. In the case of Arnold Toynbee, the uncle, I discovered that his lectures on the Industrial Revolution in Britain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were highly influential. He popularised the term industrial revolution in the Englishspeaking world, a term coined by the French revolutionaries, mesmerised by the huge transformations they saw on the other side of the channel. Simultaneously, having struggled all my academic life to reconcile my conflicting perceptions about the free-market mechanism at one hand and state control and interventions at the other, I had never been presented to nuanced and carefully argued arguments trying to understand markets in their actual historical reality, as, for instance, Toynbee did. Instead, to most economists, ‘markets’ is just an abstract concept considered by models, not a historical fact whose pros and contras should be carefully studied and understood once they profoundly affect our lives. Here too, problems started right at the beginning. When making his point about the virtues of the ‘invisible hand’ and market competition, Adam Smith (Smith 1776/ 1937, p. 14) simply stated it in absolute form by generalising partial observations as constituting universal truths. He merely went on to argue that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages’. Indeed, as can be observed daily, people do not give you what you need as a gift and out of benevolence in the context of a market economy. They sell it and may try to sell it at the highest possible price. Nor did my father go to work out of love to the company he worked for, but primarily out of his need to earn his living, pursue his career and pay for my studies, among others. But, by just asking a little bit further, we can—and thus could have had done Smith—find plenty of examples pointing to the opposite directions. Cases whereby out of greed people have been exploited in the marketplace, ecosystems destroyed for profit and people speculating in financial markets irrespective of its effect on other people’s life. The same disregard for empirical facts can be found in Smith’s defence of international trade. Indeed, as later Ricardo would do, he argued that free international trade would promote the local oikonomy and not lead to delocalisation of production. The detail that history proved them to be wrong does not deter

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contemporary economists, looking from the perspective of our globalised economy with multinational companies shifting their production to the places with the lowest labour and environmental and social costs, to still quote Smith and Ricardo as favouring free international trade—often leaving desolated local oikonomies behind, as can be seen everywhere. Thus, it may be interesting to quote Smith’s and Ricardo’s argument more in length: ‘Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society. First, every individual endeavours to employ his capital as near home as he can, and consequently as much as he can in the support of domestic industry; provided always that he can thereby obtain the ordinary, or not a great deal less than the ordinary profits of stock. (. . .). Therefore, every individual naturally inclines to employ his capital in the manner in which it is likely to afford the greatest support to domestic industry, and to give revenue and employment to the greatest number of people of his own country. Secondly, every individual who employs his capital in the support of domestic industry, necessarily endeavours so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest possible value. (. . .). As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it’ (Smith 1776/1937, pp. 421–423). In the same vein, later on, Ricardo (1817/1960, p. 83) argued that ‘Experience, however, shows, that the fancied or real insecurity of capital, when not under the immediate control of its owner, together with the natural disinclination which every man has to quit the country of his birth and connexions, and intrust himself with all his habits fixed, to a strange government and new laws, checks the emigration of capital. These feelings, which I should be sorry to see weakened, induce most men of property to be satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own

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country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations’.9 Given that later historical developments proved them wrong, it is fair to ask whether Smith and Ricardo would still support free trade nowadays that these feelings and barriers preventing individuals from investing their capital far from their homes have been significantly weakened. Notwithstanding, their arguments not being contrasted to empirical historical reality and developments, it is not something economists do. Nevertheless, from an empirical perspective, Smith’s arguments could be read the other way around. We could paraphrase him arguing that ‘it is not from the lack of social and ecological consciousness of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we’d expect cheaper or adulterated ingredients in our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. By preferring to employ children and women at lower wages; and by using lower cost and correspondingly lower quality ingredients to produce their sausages, beer or wine, they only intend their own security; and by directing their industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value at the lowest cost, independently of their nutritional value or the environmental and social costs incurred in their production, they intend only their own gain. They are in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end that was no part of their intention. By pursuing their own interest, they frequently harm that of the society more effectively than should they consciously be willing to do so. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for their own interest. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it’. Had Smith and those economists who followed him based their arguments not just on a logical but partial view of reality and looked at the larger picture instead, it could easily be seen that the ‘invisible hand’ of market competition may work in both directions. Sometimes promoting the so-called ‘win-win’ situations; in other cases, one gain at others’ expenses. Precisely what Toynbee (1894, pp. 83–84) concluded: ‘if we once grant the principle of the division of labour, then it follows that one man can live only by finding out what other men want, it is on this fact, for instance, that the food supply of London depends. This is the basis of the doctrine of laissez faire. (. . .). But the principle of laissez faire breaks down in certain points not recognised by Adam Smith. It fails, for instance, in assuming that it is the interest of the producer to supply the want of the consumer in the best possible manner, that it is the interest of the producer to manufacture honest wares. It is quite true that this is his interest, where the trade is an old-established one and has a reputation to maintain, or where the consumer is intelligent enough to discover whether a commodity is genuine or not. But these conditions exist only to a small extent in modern commerce. (. . .) Thus the interest of producers and consumer conflict, and it has been necessary to pass Adulteration Acts, which recognise the non-identity of interest of sellers and buyers. (. . .) Adam Smith, moreover, could not foresee that internal free trade might 9

Emphasis added on both quotes.

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result in natural monopolies. A conspicuous feature of our times is the concentration of certain industries in the hands of a few great capitalists, especially in America, where such rings actually dictate the prices of the market’. These arguments are even more true today than in Smith’s time when shorter distance and less product complexity and diversity meant a potentially better understanding by the consumers of the underlying production conditions and quality of the product they were acquiring. Depending on a small local demand for their products, local producers certainly have a greater selfish interest in maintaining their reputation. But this cannot be assumed within increasingly globalised markets and even internet sales where buyers do not even know where and how the products have been produced. Thereby, to assure quality and ‘honest wares’, all kinds of product controls and laws are required to avoid cheating and harming consumers’ interests and health, among others. There is simply no automatic mechanism whereby empirically and theoretically, the ‘invisible hand’ alone suffices invariably to redirect individual greed towards the common good. More today than ever before, consumers relate to the products in an inherently and structurally alienated way, ignoring most of the actual social and ecological conditions of production or even the eventually faked character of what they are acquiring. Standard neoclassic models simply avoid the problem by assuming perfect information or even the existence of perfectly rational expectations. By ignoring asymmetric information and the market incentives to phishing for phools, as Akerlof and Shiller (2015) put it, economists also ignore markets’ inherently alienating nature, which Marx had already pointed out over one and a half centuries earlier. Here, too, it may be highlighted that although both Akerlof and Shiller are acknowledged professionals in the field, both having earned a Nobel Prize, their critique and common-sense arguments respecting the marketing and sales practices whereby markets and the search for profits push producers to fish for fools and dupe consumers are still ignored by standard models. They are rationalised aside by being considered a minor potential market failure addressed by appropriate regulations that do not impair the basic free-market assumption. They are not taken for what they potentially are: a severe questioning of the bulk of neoclassical theoretical framework built upon nonempirically verifiable and existing beliefs. Nevertheless, Toynbee and, as we saw, the historical school globally suffered an even harsher fate, simply being ignored by the academy nowadays. Unlike many Marxist authors, Toynbee was certainly not illiberal. In the debate in the political arena between mainstream economists and industrialists defending laissez-faire on the one hand and the socialists’ critique on the other, he sought a reasoned middle ground. ‘Competition, heralded by Adam Smith, and taken for granted by Ricardo and Mill, is still the dominant idea of our time; though since the publication of the Origin of the Species, we hear more of it under the name of the “struggle for existence”. (. . .) It is next assumed that this struggle for existence is a law of nature, and that therefore all human interference with it is wrong. To that I answer that the whole meaning of civilisation is interference with this brute struggle. We intend to modify the violence of the fight, and to prevent the weak being trampled under foot.

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Competition, no doubt, has its uses. Without competition no progress would be possible, for progress comes chiefly from without, it is external pressure which forces men to exert themselves. Socialists, however, maintain that this advantage is gained at the expense of an enormous waste of human life and labour, which might be avoided by regulation. But here we must distinguish between competition in production and competition in distribution, a difference recognised in modern legislation, which has widened the sphere of contract in the one direction, while it has narrowed it in the other. For the struggle of men to outvie one another in production is beneficial to the community; their struggle over the division of the joint product is not. The stronger side will dictate its own terms; and as a matter of fact, in the early days of competition the capitalists used all their power to oppress the labourers and drove down wages to starvation point. This kind of competition has to be checked; there is no historical instance of its having lasted long without being modified either by combination or legislation or both. In England both remedies are in operation, the former through Trades-Unions, the latter through factory legislation. In the past, other remedies were applied. (. . .) Competition, we have now learnt, is neither good nor evil in itself; it is a force which has to be studied and controlled; it may be compared to a stream whose strength and direction have to be observed, that embankments may be thrown up within which it may do its work harmlessly and beneficially. But at the period we are considering it came to be believed in as a gospel, and the idea of necessity being superadded, economic laws deduced from the assumption of universal unrestricted competition were converted into practical precepts, from which it was regarded as little short of immoral to depart’ (Toynbee, 1894, pp. 86–87). I have quoted him here in length not just because of the relevance of his arguments but because he has simply been forgotten by mainstream, if not nearly all, contemporary economists. His almost complete oblivion from the history of economic thought, at least to me, is a clear reminder of how economics came to lose contact with actual historical reality, looking at idealised mathematical models instead. How it lost touch with its history, self-reflectively looking at its practice. Reading him now and seeing how this crucial debate about the nature and real-world functioning of markets is absent from the scientific discussion in the field make me wonder how significant this loss has been. Instead of inquiring into the causes and nature of wealth, economists see their profession as debating different models. Internal intellectual competition to see who’s best in model-making and puzzlesolving. This, indeed, was what I was being trained to do and learned in my classes. Notwithstanding, little had I advanced in the understanding I wished to gain from my classes in economics. For sure, I had improved a lot in solving first and second derivatives, finding the ‘equilibrium’ and ‘optimum’ points both graphically and mathematically. I still remember how in the 1980s in Brazil, a time of hyperinflation in which all people had to learn how to invest and protect their savings, family and friends would approach me saying, ‘you, as an economist, what do you think can be done to curb inflation? Why do we have inflation?’ Internally, I would think: ‘I have no idea’ or, at least, not much more than those asking me the question. But I could sense the expectation in the eyes of those asking me, as a believed expert, and,

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wishing to gain some self-importance, I would give some technically sounding answers and talk about ‘inertial inflationary expectations’, the ‘growing velocity of circulation of money’ or problems of ‘supply squeeze’. . . Usually, it did the trick: although we were as clueless as before, at least my self-image and that of the profession were saved. Some would even think my studies were justified once I learned quite a bit, and economics is complicated and sophisticated. Notwithstanding, the truth is that at large, at the time I finished my master in the early 1990s, although I still did not feel having progressed in understanding actual oikonomic reality, except for all the courses I took besides my classes in international economics, I did learn and experienced a lot about the actual practice of neoclassic economists. Saw how economics as a science and institutionalised practice was structured and supposed to be. And I was still unconvinced. By returning to Brazil, I was lucky enough to start teaching with total freedom, following my convictions and understanding of the subject, focusing on ecological economics, system theory and development studies. I did so from a transdisciplinary, holistic perspective, including the Gaia theory to political ecology, permaculture and authors like Ivan Illich, André Gorz and, in economics, Georgescu-Roegen and those who followed his approach. I even went further, and instead of basing myself on mechanical thermodynamics, as Georgescu-Roegen did, I started to see the economic process as a ‘dissipative structure’, in line with Ilya Prigogine’s far-fromequilibrium thermodynamics. I began to approach the oikonomic process from a complex system’s perspective. But, for all effects, in institutional terms, I could affiliate myself to ecological economics, to whose membership I claimed to belong. Moreover, at this time, I was lucky enough to engage in one of the first courses in environmental sciences in Brazil, which had been proposed by a new friend I made in my university and who introduced me to deep ecology as well. Thus, new horizons and understanding were opening to me. Sometime later, following the steps of this friend, having decided to do my PhD, I engaged in the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH in its Brazilian initials), in the University of Campinas, where he was doing his research on Deep Ecology, instead of pursuing it in economics. It may sound strange, but it is there that, for the first time, I had the feeling that I started to become an economist. Not in the sense of a well-adapted institutionalised one, but in terms of better understanding the oikonomic process as an actual, multidimensional, living reality. It was there that, for the first time, I heard about Karl Polanyi. Although having been a representative of the historical school in economics, he was never quoted or considered during my economics courses. Indeed, he is well known and praised by other social scientists but virtually unknown by economists. His masterpiece, The Breakdown of Nations, for the first time, made me look at and understand free markets not just as an abstract concept but as an actual historical reality. It opened my economists’ eyes to the fact that markets are the product of past historical developments and the ground on which new historical events unfold. They are not just an abstract concept in which ‘perfect’ or ‘imperfect competition’ can be assumed. As all historical realities, markets are the fruits of past choices and developments. Thereby, they have to be understood not just as neutral physical

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places where supply and demand meet but also as a particular institutional ordering of our society—a specific way of oikonomy. Conventional economists like to argue that capitalism is not new and that markets as such have existed throughout history. As Polanyi argued, they had, but they never had, being ‘free’ and seen as a way to organise the oikonomic and social life instead of being controlled and managed by it. Indeed, our free-market-based industrial societies’ very idea and practice did not emerge until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, being unknown before then. By reading a German sociologist, Wolfgang Sachs (1999, pp. 18–19), the historical distinction whereby my perception of ‘markets’ as an abstract, institutionalised setting of society instead of an actual historical reality became clear. As he stated, ‘as late as 1744, Zedler’s Universal Encyclopaedia unwittingly gave a naive definition of the term “market”: «that spacious public place, surrounded by ornate buildings or enclosed by stands, where, at certain times, all kinds of victuals and other wares are offered for sale; hence the same place is also called market place». (. . .) There is no mention of “market shares”, “price fluctuations” or “equilibrium”. Between then and now a far-reaching change has taken place in the self-image of society. Adam Smith was the first thinker who, when using the term “market”, no longer envisaged a locally determinable outlet for goods, but that society-wide space throughout which all prices intercommunicated’. Previously, as I learned from Polanyi and other historical readings, markets were embedded and contained by society’s broader social, cultural and political norms and forces. Political and administrative regulations and restrictions, cultural values and individual ethics hold the upper hand and explicitly limit ‘market freedom’. It is true that, ‘at the local market places’ and long-distance wholesale trade, individuals freely engaged in ‘the art of acquisition’: buyers and sellers defining and accepting their exchange terms. Notwithstanding, these spaces were also circumscribed and limited by political, cultural and sometimes even moral and religious limits. Labour, that fundamental pillar of the oikonomic process, began to be hired in the labour markets instead of being acquired by warfare or at the marketplace in the form of slave labour, of being imposed by force or cultural tradition in feudal serfdom or even autonomously exerted by producers who owned their means of production and were free from slavery and servitude. With capitalism, wage labour increasingly became the primary way labour was exerted, being freely bought and sold as a commodity whose price was called wages. It was then, already with Adam Smith, that labour, or what he initially termed ‘productive labour’, was defined solely in terms of a market-oriented activity. There, as he did with his other historical examples, he took for the whole that which was but a part of it, one of its manifestations. He reduced labour to ‘waged labour’, ignoring all other ways we humans (re)produce use-values and create new wealth by transforming and combining different elements of our environment. From the burden supported primarily by women carrying for the family and the household to individuals self-building their homes or helping each other as friends and neighbours, all non-market-oriented productive activities were simply ignored. As if they did not constitute labour.

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Land, and for that purpose all naturally available use-values (re)produced by what we shall term ‘Nature’s oikonomy’ later on, was no longer to be inherited as an unalienable family domain or, elsewhere, conquered through military force or held as commons by the community. Instead, it became a commodity open to being freely bought and sold. As for non-waged labour, the dynamic and active ways local ecosystems and our biosphere continuously regenerate all life conditions and sustain our lives were simply ignored by the economists, being reduced to ‘natural resources’ or merely raw material. Thus, Smith and later economists simply ignored the free and balanced ecological dynamics whereby our air and waters are renewed, wild fish stocks replenished and our lives sustained—implicitly considering it not as relevant to explain ‘the causes and origins of the wealth of nations’. Money, too, became something which could be obtained or lent for a given time at a freely agreed price, namely, interests, freed from the medieval ban on usury. Indeed, as I learned in my classes, interest on money is the price of ‘time’: you pay (or receive) for exchange present for future. According to medieval theological reasoning, God is the Creator and thus decides about life and death. He is the Master of Time. Thereby charging for it was usury. It meant charging for something which does not belong to us. With the end of the ban on usury, time too became something we could own and freely buy or sell in the financial markets. Thus, everywhere, oikonomic development was supposed to be based on the chrematistic logic, on the ‘art of acquisition’ or, as modern economists put it, on the free decisions of the ‘rational economic agent’ instead of other, external, non-chrematistic considerations. The overall goals were to continuously maximise earnings (as producers) or satisfaction (as consumers) while minimising costs. Smith and those economists who followed him simply assumed that this was part of the ‘nature of the economic process’ and part of ‘the human nature’. Thus, it could be considered an initial model hypothesis and assumed a universal law—not something with a culture- and history-specific character. Of course, any even short glimpse at our human history observing the oikonomic practice of other cultures and societies, as anthropologists and historians do, immediately shows that what economists consider unvarying, universal aspects of the oikonomic process and human behaviour are historically and culturally changing dynamics. As Karl Polanyi (1944, pp. 43 and 41) put it, ‘market economy implies a selfregulating system of markets; in slightly more technical terms, it is an economy directed by market prices and nothing but market prices. Such a system capable of organising the whole of economic life without outside help or interference would certainly deserve to be called self-regulating. (. . .) The transformation implies a change in the motive of action on the part of the members of society: for the motive of subsistence, that of gain must be substituted. All transactions are turned into money transactions, and these in turn require that a medium of exchange be introduced into every articulation of industrial life. All incomes must derive from the sale of something or other, and whatever the source of a person’s income, it must be regarded as resulting from sale. No less is implied in the simple term “market system” by which we designate the pattern described. But the most startling peculiarity of the system lies in the fact that, once it is established, it must be allowed to

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function without outside interference. Profits are not any more guaranteed, and the merchant must make his profits on the market. Prices must be allowed to regulate themselves’. Nor was the emergence of modern capitalist society a ‘natural development’ akin to, let’s say, the way chemical compounds are formed from the reactions and bonds between different elements. Our current world is the result of a historical development whereby a completely different oikonomy emerged. As Polanyi (1944, p. 42) stated, ‘the transformation to this system from the earlier economy is so complete that it resembles more the metamorphosis of the caterpillar than any alteration that can be expressed in terms of continuous growth and development’. We may even take this image a step further to appreciate the scope of that historical transition better. It is known that once in their silky cocoon or their shiny chrysalis, caterpillar larvae first have to digest themselves, dissolving their previous form (except for some tiny ‘imaginal discs’ which will be the basis for some future new structures). After passing through this dissolution process, like how food is reduced to its tiniest components through the digestion process, new structures and forms may be built.10 Similarly, the ancient world had to be first wholly transformed and dissolved by the scientific, cultural, industrial, technological and political revolutions that opened the way for the modern world to emerge. Thus, the previous oikonomy had to give place to our modern market oikonomy. It is in this context that modern economic theory was born. But, modern economics simply ignored these facts by giving up in considering markets in a historical term to inquire into their nature and dynamics, viewing them as a simple abstraction instead. Economics lost touch with reality, and, by doing so, it stopped being scientific to become increasingly ideological and utopian. Thus, modern economic theory points and describes how reality could be if it were as defined by the model instead of trying to understand it—at the opposite of what I learned from Polanyi, who attempted to understand the implications of this new system in real terms. As he argued (1944, pp. 71–73), ‘a self-regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and political sphere. (. . .) True, no society can exist without a system of some kind which ensures order in the production and distribution of goods. But that does not imply the existence of separate economic institutions; normally the economic order is merely a function of the social in which it is contained. (. . .). Such an institutional pattern could not function unless society was somehow subordinated to its requirements. A market economy can exist only in a market society. (. . .) A market economy must comprise all elements of industry, including labor, land and money. (. . .). The crucial point is this: labor, land, and money are essential elements of industry; they also must be organised in markets; in fact, these markets form an absolutely vital part of the economic system. But labor, land, and money are

10

Jabr, Ferris, 10 August 2012, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/caterpillar-butterflymetamorphosis-explainer/

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obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. (. . .) Labor is only another word for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilised; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. None of them is produced for sale. (. . .). To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without also affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity “man” attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society’. Was this discussion not relevant to the understanding of modern oikonomy and its dynamics? Why were we, as economists, working with abstract models, ‘as if’ realities, ignoring the effects from both a logical and an empirical perspective of free markets on society and our world? Why were we drawing supply and demand curves for ‘labour’, ‘money’ or ‘wild salmon’ as if there was an industry supplying them like for the case of any other commodity? Indeed, why were we simply ignoring that there have to be limits to the individual greed to preserve humans and Nature from over-exploitation? Missing that there have never been, at least not in absolute terms as supposed by our models and for any more extended period, entirely free markets? Any even superficial historical analysis would show this: everywhere, there are political, administrative or even moral limits to the way markets work and are allowed to function. Maybe drug and other illegal markets are the closest we have to ‘free-market’ competition. But even there, people, cartels and gangs organise its function and set limits, using bullets if needed. Entirely free markets are a convenient fiction, not a historical reality. But then again, we did not have to study history to become an economist, did we? Had we done so, we would have better understood Polanyi’s point that modern industrial society’s political history is a constant push for and against more market freedom. Some groups and interests are asking for more deregulations and market freedom and others pushing in the other direction. Indeed, everywhere, the economic policy never followed the rule. Infant industry protection is how governments

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everywhere shielded their industry in the early stages from outside competition, just to become champions of the free markets once their industry became the leading power in their sector. Or governments everywhere selectively would establish barriers and taxes on trade in some sectors while pushing to remove them in others. Be it through direct administrative and state intervention, laws and regulations, be it promoting behaviours and values which go beyond short-term personal chrematistic interests. Everywhere, in their actual practice, people do not behave freely and ‘rationally’ according to the image of the homo oeconomicus economists suppose us to be. The more I tried to study economics from a real-world perspective, not just engaging in some phantasy models of the world, the more I came to ask myself about what was happening and why economics became, as a science, so far removed from a proper understanding of reality. I knew that ideology played an important role in it. It was certainly no coincidence that models proposed by Keynesian economists invariably showed that there were some market imperfections and that ‘countercyclical’ government intervention was needed to ensure full employment. At the same time, models proposed by the Monetarists showed that free-functioning markets were just fine. I saw it during my studies, particularly my master’s degree, where models of both sides were shown and discussed. Those proposed by the Keynesians invariably showed the scope and even the need for government intervention, those of the other group that it was not. . . I knew that it was no coincidence either that Adam Smith’s ideas about the invisible hand driving individual greed towards the common good started to find friendly ears in Britain, who, after all, based its hegemony on its industrial power and dominion of the world trade. Trade, not rule, was the official motto of Britain’s foreign policy in the nineteenth century, I had been told in my international history and politics classes. They had supported Latin America’s independence movements and signed favourable trade deals with all of them. In the same vein, Britain obliged the Chinese Empire to submit to free-trade deals with Britain after losing the Opium Wars. I sometimes think how incredible the argument was at the time, seen from today’s perspective. With the excuse that the Chinese Emperor’s attempt to control and limit the trade and consumption of opium was against ‘free trade’ and that it was harming the interests of British traders and citizens, Britain sent its naval military might to open China to trade. As if, let’s say, Colombia or Afghanistan, in the interest of its domestic drug production and drug dealers, asked for free trade in Europe and America, arguing that the consumer’s and the producer’s freedom had to be respected and that free trade is beneficial to all. Threatening war if not attended. As a Brazilian, I studied how British interests had been in the background and sometimes in the foreground of our history. I learned that the Methuen Treaty was signed between Portugal and England on 27 December 1703. It was a military alliance and a commercial treaty, a reminder of a time in which trade and commerce were seen as a matter of policy and state power, a prerogative of the Crown. The terms of the treaty allowed English woollen cloth to be admitted into Portugal free of duty. In return, Portuguese wines imported into England would be subject to a third less duty than wines imported from France. In military and political terms, it

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aligned Portugal to England within the European colonial power relations. It was crucial to help develop the Port wine industry and ensure markets for the English textile manufactures. Given that, in the face of England’s wars with France, it became increasingly challenging to acquire wine, Portuguese wines became a popular replacement, once being fortified by spirited wine to resist the long sea transport, thus giving Port wines their specific character. Simultaneously, it opened the British merchants’ involvement in the Port trade and even production, leading to a substantial social and cultural British influence in the city of Oporto. Many blame this treaty on the ongoing trade imbalances between Britain and Portugal. While England managed to export textiles for Portugal and its colonies, notably Brazil, Portuguese Port wine, although appreciated, did not have the same growth potential. Later, with the birth of British textile manufacture, it provided an additional market for its outflow. Simultaneously, the absence of duties meant that Portugal’s potential infant industry lacked any protection (which was how other continental latecomers industrialised, particularly in Northern Europe). Consequently, Portugal’s economy suffered as its productive structure and institutions were moulded toward wine production and other primary products, while its industry did not develop. Portugal’s trade deficit was overcome mainly using the significant influx of Brazilian gold from the region of Minas Gerais (‘General Mines’). Their gold rush enabled the Portuguese to cover their deficit and, as well, finance an essential part of British new industrial growth. Thereby, as Marx (1867/2015, p. 533) would later remark, ‘the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre’. The Methuen Treaty established the Grand Alliance’s war aims, too, siding Portugal to Britain and the Dutch, the Austrians and later the Catalans, in the war of Spanish succession against France. Portugal having a subordinated position, it was from the British decision to not come to rescue the Catalans, and secure Portugal’s integrity instead, that the national boundaries in the Iberian Peninsula would finally be designed. One century later, not having adhered to Napoleon’s continental blockade, it was under the protection of a British squadron that King John VI (Dom João VI) fled Lisbon to move to Brazil, faced by the invading Napoleonic troops in 1808. Tellingly, just 4 days after his arrival and still in Salvador da Bahia before arriving at the would-be new royal capital of Rio de Janeiro, John VI, as his first official act, declared the end of the colonial monopoly, opening the Brazilian ports to ‘the friendly nations’. Britain, for whom the Portuguese and Brazilian monarchy was now something of a protectorate, being considered the most ‘friendly’ of them all. Thus, Britain obtained several commercial, political and even legal privileges. Later on, once John VI returned to Portugal and his son, who was left behind, declared Brazilian independence on 7 September 1822,

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crowning himself Emperor Pedro I, England mediated on the dispute’s settling and the ongoing low-level war which Brazil eventually won. While settling the conflict peacefully through this mediation, Britain further assured many commercial and political privileges, placing Brazil firmly in its orbit too. Although short of cash, once King John VI took all reserves of the treasury with him, Brazil was compelled to assume Portuguese colonial debts with Britain as well as war repair payment to Portugal (although the Brazilian won the war), engaging in a private loan from British bankers, particularly Rothschild & Sons, to pay for it. Moreover, through the 1825 treaty by which Portugal accepted Brazilian independence, Britain maintained all its commercial privileges it had before and which it gained from Portugal during the Napoleonic wars: it paid only 15% customer taxes for its products, while Portugal itself had to pay 24% and other countries 25% to sell to the Brazilian market. Thereby, Brazil inherited from its previous colonial master an unequal oikonomic dependency on Britain, which hampered its endogenous development while being instrumental to the British commercial and geopolitical ones. As a result, Brazil remained mainly agrarian, primary goods exporting and manufactures importing society. At the same time, Britain asserted its hegemony through its ‘trade not rule’ policy, fostered by its political means and ascendancy as well as its ‘soft power’. Although not corresponding to reality, the doctrine of the benefits of the ‘invisible hand’ and ‘free international trade’ proposed by Smith, Ricardo and their followers is essential for its ideological legitimisation. At the same time, it says nothing about the fact that it was Britain that financed and supported Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in their war against Paraguay, then going through an endogenous industrial development threatening British economic interests in the continent. Nor would we study, in our curriculum in economics, why the efforts of the Viscount of Mauá (known as Barão de Mauá in Brazil, 1813–1889), a Brazilian entrepreneur, industrialist, banker and politician, did not lead to Brazil’s early industrialisation and development like in the USA. At the end of the 1860s, he was one of the world’s richest men, and his wealth was larger than the annual budget of the Brazilian Empire. A pioneer in several areas of the economy of Brazil, one of his most outstanding achievements was to start the construction of the Mauá Railroad, the first railroad in Brazil. At his peak, he controlled eight of the country’s ten largest companies (the remaining two were state-owned), and his banking interests stretched over to Britain, France, the USA and Argentina. Notwithstanding, without support and infant industry protection against foreign (mainly British) competition, his fortunes would dwindle already during his lifetime after the Paraguay wars, and Brazil would stick to being a primary goods exporting country. But then again, I never heard about these developments in my courses in economics. There was no single word about how Brazil, where I was learning economics, developed and how these trade deals affected it. Instead, we learned about Adam Smith’s theory about the ‘absolute advantages’ of trade and later Ricardo’s refinement of the model, showing that free trade is always positive. But, having learned about the Methuen Treaty in my history classes back in school, it looked at least ironic that David Ricardo’s model (1817/1960, p. 82) was based on a

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hypothetical reality in which he imagined Britain and Portugal engaging precisely in the trade of wine and textiles. But instead of describing the actual development, the story went like this: ‘England may be so circumscribed that to produce the cloth may require the labour of 100 men for one year; and if she attempted to make wine, it might require the labour of 120 men for the same time. England would therefore find it her interest to import wine, and to purchase it by the exportation of cloth. To produce the wine in Portugal might require only the labour of 80 men for one year, and to produce the cloth in the same country might require the labour of 90 men for the same time. It would, therefore, be advantageous for her to export wine in exchange for cloth’.11 In this imaginary world, contrary to actual reality, we can see that Ricardo, as a proper Gentleman, even conceded to Portugal better producing skills and productivity in wine and textile production. Ignoring what his eyes certainly could see clearly: that Britain was undergoing an Industrial Revolution and was far more productive than Portugal in textiles and, at the other hand, it was not and never has been a wine-producing nation, thus having to import it anyway. But, hardly a coincidence, it made the point he wished to make right from the start, namely, that Portugal specialising in wine production and leaving the textile production to Britain was of its interest. It is as simple and straightforward in its pure mathematical logic as it is removed from truth and reality. Fascinated by its mathematical elegance and simplicity, economists hardly notice that this is just not how the historical fact was at Ricardo’s time. Nor how it is today. As for fictional movies, Ricardo should have included a disclaimer at the end of his book: ‘all characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental’. Indeed, it is something economists, in general, should do once they do not write about real-world events but imaginary models instead. But he did not, and we, unadvertised readers, have mistaken fiction for reality. As we do all by taking economics as a science. Implicit to his model are, of course, a series of assumptions that neither Ricardo nor his followers bothered to make explicit. Like that goods are assumed homogeneous and identical in each industry—thus, you can speak about ‘wine’ and ‘textile’ industry in abstract and general terms; production functions are linear and, therefore, there is no marginal increase or decrease in productivity as labour units are added or subtracted; labour is homogeneous within a country but heterogeneous (non-identical) across countries—again a way to treat it in purely abstract and numerical terms; goods can be transported without cost between countries; labour can swiftly be reallocated between industries within a country but cannot move

11

The mathematics of the model is simple and easily explained to graduate economists (usually without any further consideration, as if the rigour of the algebra is already proof enough of its validity): considering that labourers in Portugal are relatively more productive at producing wine than cloth while in England it is the other way round, if each country dedicates its total labour force to that which labourers are relatively better at internally, the combined output of wine and cloths would improve, and both countries would benefit from trade in which the exchange-value of wine in terms of cloths is 8/9  wine/cloths  12/10.

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between countries and thus ruling out that which, according to the model’s premises, would be the most efficient solution, namely, that all British labourers move to Portugal and production is concentrated there where the labour productivity in both wine and textile’s output is the highest. . . Just as, to a certain extent, can be observed nowadays when we see how the bulk of industrial goods production is delocalised to China. Further, he implicitly assumed that labour is always fully employed (otherwise, global production could just be increased by using more labour, or a rise in unemployment due to specialisation could undermine the gains in productivity); production technology differences exist across industries and countries and are reflected in labour productivity parameters, not changing in time; labour and goods markets are assumed to be perfectly competitive in both countries, and firms are considered to maximise profit, while consumers (workers) are deemed to maximise utility. These and other implicit assumptions can be summarised by saying that both countries’ historical present reality and potential future changes and development are simply wiped out of the model. Ricardo’s reasoning applies to a no-place, no-time abstract reality instead. But most remarkably, it assumes just a fixed existence in time and does not consider developments in productivity which would completely change the relations. As it indeed happens in reality and how countries like Germany, Japan or the USA, although starting from a relative disadvantage respecting Britain’s industrial productivity, managed to catch up, overcome it and reverse the picture. By assuming a static example, Ricardo and all those who followed him simply disregard history and reality as relevant for theory. Indeed, Ricardo’s model is the basis for neoclassic trade models and the so-called Heckscher-Ohlin models I profusely studied in the IUHEI and which later gave Bertil Ohlin (Heckscher, his tutor, had already passed away at this time), jointly with the British economist James Mead, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1977 due to ‘their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements’.12 Even though no empirical evidence backs these models, they simply restate Ricardo’s view and model in an even more sophisticated and mathematically precise model. But, here is the point I gradually came to understand, within the historical dynamics we saw above: Ricardo’s choice of a hypothetical example justifying Portugal’s specialisation in wine production and Britain’s specialisation in textiles is not as innocent as it may seem. On the one hand, by naming the two countries and both wine and textiles as his hypothetical example, the model seems to reflect actual reality, although in a distorted form. Given that his model is not based on the true reality of these countries, he should instead have given them a fictional name, producing imaginary goods. Like ‘Utopingia may be so circumscribed that to produce the baramuta—a simple, completely homogenous abstract commodity—it may require 100 abstract production unities we shall call productas; and if she attempted to make colinde—another simple, completely homogeneous abstract

12

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1977/

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commodity—it may require 120 productas. . .’. Notwithstanding, by naming actual countries and goods, concluding that Portugal should specialise in wine production and England in textile production, further evidence could be inferred once it seemed to be confirmed by the actual historical reality. Indeed, Britain was a textileproducing country, while Portugal produced wine, both nations trading these goods. But, more importantly, it was a way of rationalising and legitimising it. It gave a logical and mathematical rationale to something that was already there. By doing so, it presented as desirable from an apparently ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ perspective both the past developments (represented as having been in the interest of both countries) and the efforts of the British foreign policy to extend it to the whole world by trying to open other markets to its industrial exports at the time—an elegant and apparently ‘scientific’ way to defend particular economic policies and political interests. By relating particular economic theories to the political and ideological disputes and interests of their time, it gradually became clear that economics’ importance has to be found not that much in what it explains but in what it defends and legitimises. Not that much as a way for human reason to better understand reality, but as a way for humans to rationalise and ideologically defend and confirm given interest. Indeed, examples in that direction abound. But the critical point to retain is that the methodological choice of applying the logical-deductive method borrowed from Newton’s mechanics to economics, which started already in the very beginning with Smith and Ricardo, although possibly unwittingly, placed economics not in the realm of science, but of the ideological disputes of their time. These and other examples made me increasingly see that although I thought economics to be a science and would help me better understand the world around me, it was much more of an ideology legitimising and rationalising specific policies and interests. Gradually, like Alice in wonderland, I started to perceive how deep the rabbit hole went. During my bachelor’s degree, I had read in my classes on methodology Mark Blaug (1975, pp. 410–411), who wrote illuminating chapters and articles discussing economics in terms of the philosophy of science. There, he argued that ‘analytical elegance, economy of theoretical means, and generality obtained by ever more “heroic assumptions” have always meant more to economists than relevance and predictability. They have in fact rarely practiced the methodology to which they have explicitly subscribed, and that, it seems to me, is one of the neglected keys to the history of economics. The philosophy of science of economists, ever since the days of Senior and Mill, is aptly described as “innocuous falsificationism”’. Summing up his conclusions about the methodology which became hegemonic in economics, Blaug (1988, pp. 697–699) went on to argue that ‘since the days of Adam Smith, economics has consisted of the manipulation of highly abstract assumptions, derived either from introspection or from casual empirical observations, in the production of theories yielding predictions about events in the real world. (. . .) Economists have always regarded the core of their subject as “science”, in the modern sense of the word: the goal was to produce accurate and interesting predictions that were, in principle at least, capable of being empirically falsified. In practice, they frequently lost sight of this scientific objective and the

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history of economics is certainly replete with tautological definitions and theories so formulated as to defy all efforts of falsification. (. . .). The striking fact about the history of economics is how often economists have violated both their own and later methodological prescriptions. (. . .) Methodological disputes in the classical period took the form of disagreements over the realism and relevance of the underlying assumptions on which the whole deductive structure was built, while everyone paid lip service to the need to check the predictions of logical deductions against experience. (. . .). The standard defence was to attribute every contradiction to the strength of “counteracting tendencies”. In effect, the classical economists treated certain variables that entered into their analysis as exogenously determined (. . .). For the most part, they did not raise the question whether exogenous variables were really independently determined constants. In addition, they failed to inquiry whether the phenomena labelled “counteracting tendencies” entered, as it were, as additional parameters to the original equations of their model, or whether they in fact altered the structure of the equations themselves’. Maurice Dobb (1973, p. 22), a Marxist economist, made a similar point by stressing the ideological dimension of economics. As he observed, ‘when certain theories become the ruling scientific idea of their times for “good” internalist reasons, there are frequently also ideological reasons that make the theory palatable to vested interests and appealing to the man-in-the-street’. ‘Whatever one may be led to expect a priori, the history of political economy from its inception makes abundantly clear how closely (and even consciously) the formation of economic theory was linked with the formation and advocacy of policy. Although the doctrines of the classical school were very abstract, especially in the form given to them by Ricardo (whom Bagehot called «the true founder of abstract Political Economy»), they were related very closely to practical issues of their day, indeed surprisingly closely as we shall see’ (Blaug, 1988, p. 711) as well pointed to the ideological character of modern economics by stating that ‘there is an undetermined body of economic propositions and theorems which appear to be about economic behaviour but which do not result in any predictable implications about that behavior. In short, a good deal of received doctrine is metaphysics. There is nothing wrong with this, provided it is not mistaken for science. Alas, the history of economics reveals that economists are as prone as anyone else to mistake chaff for wheat and to claim possession of the truth when all they possess are intricate series of definitions or value judgements disguised as scientific rules. (. . .) To be sure, modern economics provides an abundance of empty theories parading as scientific predictions or policy recommendations carrying concealed value premises’. But then, there was still a mystery remaining: how come that economics for way over a century was still being practised in this way and presented as a ‘science’ to the world as objective and scientific just as, for instance, physics claimed to be? I still was puzzled once, although we had these discussions in our classes on methodology and history of economic thought, no one seemed to take these critiques seriously. Economics was still taught and professed as if it were an objective, value-free rendering of reality. Nobel Prizes and professional recognition were given to

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microeconomists and macroeconomists proposing models not backed by empirical evidence but representing abstract, reductionist and idealised realities. Theories that defy any attempt on falsificationism but happen to be ‘palatable to vested interests and appealing to the man-in-the-street’. They are all presented not as fiction but as a fine and objective portrait of reality to laypeople unable to judge and even understand the truthfulness of theories, concealed as they are by their mathematical and abstract treatment. The final piece of the puzzle occurred to me while following a course in hermeneutics during my PhD. Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation. It was born from the attempt to translate texts written in one context to another, particularly in the Bible studies that, having been written in the past, had to be understood many centuries later in a completely different context. Later, it was amplified to the interpretation of language in general, both verbal and non-verbal. It recognises that words—and all phenomena in general—have to be understood not just in the context of the phrase or the text they appear but in the context and meaning given to them by the writer who wrote them. Thus, words have different connotative and denotative meanings. Language and history are alive, and both the uses and the contexts change. Therefore, a hermeneutic explanation has to be done to interpret and understand their true original meaning. Thus, hermeneutics recognises that it is always a matter of the relation of the whole and its parts, and we cannot consider things in isolation, in reductionist terms. We cannot look at them in isolation as modern science does or a literal interpretation of the Bible would do. For the final exam paper we had to write, it occurred to me to take a hermeneutic look at economics. Take the chance to look and try to understand its development and practices in the broader historical context in which it happened. Look at my training and experiences as an economist. Gradually, an image emerged that made me see how deeply and surprisingly similar modern economists’ practice resembled medieval theologians. Thus, it appeared that modern economics had replaced medieval theology as central pieces legitimising and rationalising their respective social orders. Just as medieval theological discussions seemed metaphysical, dogmatic and abstract, so did economics. Both were based on initial dogma or hypothesis from which conclusions, through deduction, were obtained and taken as truths. Both followed strict rules and orthodoxies, all those deviating from them being simply expelled from the corps and considered heretic. Just as so many economists I came to admire were merely considered ‘unscientific’ or ‘sociologists’, ‘historians’ or whatever. But not economists. Just as for instances happened to Meister Eckhart accused of heresy or on a subtler scale to Saint Francis of Assisi, who was brought to distance himself from the order he created, those economists or thinkers who do not follow the accepted rules and institutionalised procedures are simply expelled and ignored by other economists. Nor should they expect to earn a Nobel Prize for their contribution to understanding the oikonomic process, although helpful they may have been in practice. Their arguments are simply dismissed and deemed unworthy of even being considered by not following the orthodoxy. Like the Church who ignored or censured the views of those who, like Giordano Bruno, Galileo or Kepler,

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dared to go against the accepted orthodoxy. Or those heretics and reformers who dared to question the institutionalised accepted dogma. Both Medieval Church and modern economics maintained their orthodoxy and closed character by resorting to a private language inaccessible to others. Thus, they shield themselves from other perspectives and critiques external to their world and practice. Latin and the intricate theological arguments for the theologians, mathematics and, probably more than in most other sciences, a series of technical terms and terminology as ‘Pareto optimality’, ‘bounded rationality’, ‘yield gap’, ‘monopsony’, ‘generational accounting’, ‘marginal propensity to save’, ‘income elasticity of demand’, ‘liquidity trap’ and a series of others. A language which you have to know and command even to be admitted to debate the subject. Thus, effectively excluding the common folk and even all non-theologians/economists from the discussions, thus generating a self-referential environment in which truth and the status of specific assertions and individuals are assessed not according to its proximity and accordance to the supposed study object (spirituality and transcendence for the former, actual economic reality and dynamics for the latter), but are assessed by its peers. During my bachelor’s study, I also read an interesting article by a Brazilian economist, Pérsio Arida (1983). In it, he argued that once there are no commonly agreed external objective factors to assess the heuristic content of economic theories—unless other sciences in which empirical reality and falsificationism procedures are the ultimate yardsticks used—by looking at the history of modern economic thought, it could easily be seen that in economics it is more a matter of rhetoric and of managing to assess your ascendency among your peers, than a positive overcoming of theories with a lower heuristic content by others with a higher level of explanatory power. Even because, like for theology, in economics, there are no commonly agreed procedures whereby one theory’s heuristic content and value may be compared to that of another. Indeed, both theologies’ and economics’ abstract reasoning and idealised, non-observable realities on which their logic is applied render them immune to external, empirical scrutiny. Truthfulness can only be assessed by internal criteria, by its peers and not by empirical evidence. Once the arguments are based on highly abstract realities which cannot be observed in practice, it is all a matter of how the agreed rules, dogmas and procedures are followed or not. Thus, as Arida argued and in line with theological practice, rhetoric and sticking to a clearly defined abstract field where given assertions are supposed to be valid and validated became the primary way disputes within economics have been solved. These rules and practices, and some accepted assumptions and dogmas, may vary slightly in space and time. Nonetheless, as Arida claimed, some basic principles have been repeatedly favoured by economists and have led to some authors and models’ enthronisation and others’ side-lining. Among them, he quoted: Simplicity, as an ideal borrowed from physics, is one of the central rhetorical practices in economics. Despite the intrinsic supposed complexity of the studied object, straightforward statements are preferred to unclear, nuanced, dialectical and complex ones; simple, elegant mathematical formulae preferred to hermeneutic

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digressions and considerations. Like Newton’s movement equations or Einstein’s famous E ¼ mc2, economic theories and models are supposed to be simple and elegant. They may be based on complicated mathematics and formulae. Still, they should exclude the ambiguity of linguistic discourse, contradictions and complexities inherent to qualitative and ever-changing realities and their reluctance to be mathematised. Ricardo’s model we saw above is just an excellent example of it. Inner coherence and avoiding ad hoc hypotheses to realign models’ inconsistencies are among those generally agreed procedures. Thus, authors should clearly state their models’ assumptions and arrive at given statements through mathematical and coherent operations. Like in theological arguments, reasoning starts from clearly defined and accepted initial premises or dogma, and conclusions are reached by logical deduction and coherent argumentation. Other fundamental and widely used rhetorical procedures are the greater amplitude and extent of given theories and models, those able to explain a broader range of phenomena preferred to those with a more restricted scope. Hence the frequent practice of portraying rival theories and models as ‘special cases’ of the ‘general model’ or theory being presented. Thus, Keynes’s portrayal of the neoclassic fullemployment equilibrium models as a particular case of his general theory, which, in its turn, was portrayed as a specific case of the more general IS-LM model later on. Moreover, as was the case in traditional societies and other sciences, economists gain prestige by adherence to a tradition and line of thought. Thus, an allegiance to the founding father, Adam Smith, or the Ricardian tradition or Malthusianism in their polemic respecting rent and full employment are cases in point. As do modern economists who line up as monetarists or fiscalists—adherents of the Chicago School of Prices established by Milton Friedman, or Keynesian based on Keynes, although certainly not all manage to go through and absorb Keynes’s heavy line. As for the other principles, adherence here has to be regarded as rhetorical rather than necessary. By declaring to follow the line of accepted and revered authors, authors claim their authority and ascendency. As did Jevons by creating a list of many pages of ‘mathematical economists’ whose tradition he claimed to have inherited. Thus, giving legitimacy to his approach and statements. In this context, another often used rhetorical practice identified by Arida has to do with the (re)invention and (re)assessment of tradition. Thus, by reinterpreting past authors, ideas and controversies, authors claim given practices to represent false paths, while the tradition claimed by themselves is portrayed as the correct one. Hence Keynes’s vindication of Malthus in opposition to Say or Sraffa’s vindication of the classics and particularly Ricardo in the face of the neoclassical tradition. Another fundamental rhetorical practice in economics is to claim independence from particular interests and political and ideological motives. Although most economics debates are related to specific and often conflicting interests, economists are expected not to be affected by these issues and follow ‘objective’ and ‘nonideologically tainted’ research. This, although, as we saw, theories have clear and profound political and distributional implications. Dealing, as they do, with our economic reality and the role of markets, they legitimise given economic policies over and above others. Thus, affecting different actors in radically different ways.

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Notwithstanding, like their counterparts in the natural sciences, as, for example, astrophysicists showing little concern with the fate of distant stars and supernovas, economists too are supposed to be immune to and detached from the future and the destiny of our society and our world while creating their models and theories. Thus, economists present themselves as technicians and objective scientists, positively developing the economic toolbox arsenal, whose use and application are to be decided by others, by the so-called normative political instances. Related to this rhetorical practice, another practice identified by Arida refers to the minimum use of metaphors. Although the use of metaphors and images may be necessary at the early stages of controversies, economic practice favours those who use more literal and direct explanations to those based on analogies and vague images. Thus, it is based on what may be described as a logical-deductive mode of consciousness, rejecting the intuitive and holistic mind trying to make sense of the wholeness and emergent reality features. Finally, and in a certain sense encompassing all these rhetorical practices, we find the choice of mathematical language and formalisation over narrative and qualitative description. By favouring, like in physics, mathematical formulae, economics portrays itself as simple: reducing the world’s complexity to simple formulae. By sticking to the rules of mathematics, differential calculus and algebra in general, the theory’s internal coherence is assumed. Moreover, it claims mathematical universality and amplitude and adherence to the scientific tradition of modern natural science and such great luminaries as Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Moreover, based on mathematics’ precise, abstract language, theories and models are presented as free from metaphors and particularly economists as objective and detached from particular interest groups and conflicting powers. As we have been arguing here, this all despite economics’ direct relevance to informing and legitimising economic policy and, thus, particular interests. Indeed, to the economists, mathematics became the new Latin, a language whose grammar and meanings are not understood by the general public and are only accessible to those who become ‘professional economists’—like theology, only discussed by those who went through the proper theological studies. A practice that effectively shields economists from external critique and which, among others, allowed me to, just through combining some jargon, answer and appease those who ask me to comment on some economic developments from my supposedly specialised and superior perspective. Just as understanding Latin endowed medieval theologians with ascendency over society as a whole by their apparently deeper understanding of God’s will, mathematics provided economists (and scientists as a whole) with a supposedly deeper understanding of the underlying workings of reality too. The analogies that can be made between theologians’ practice and one of the economists were striking to me. I had experienced the pressure to conform to a given, highly orthodox way of doing science and approaching the subject, just as I can imagine happens to aspiring theology students. As for theology, if you wish to be accepted by your peers and follow an institutional career, you should adhere to form rather than content. Not bother that much about spirituality, but follow established

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and accepted religion in the case of theology; conform to the academy’s rules and procedures as an economist. It is that which I was learning in my studies and which I could observe in the IUHEI: we were learning to become economists not through better understanding reality, but by following the hegemonic method to approach it. Just as my colleagues had done, learning to conform and many hundreds of thousands aspiring professional economists have done in the past and still do today. I always wonder why, in the end, I learned more about the actual oikonomic reality by following non-economists or those like Karl Polanyi, Manfred Max-Neef, Georgescu-Roegen, who, although being economists and greatly helped me better to understand the modern free-market oikonomic development process, are mostly ignored by profession and have never been part of my economics curriculum, than I actually did by reading well-known economists and economics’ textbooks and models. Just as medieval mystics had to follow their path beyond the hegemonic Church looking for their spiritual growth, at the risk of being excommunicated and eternal damnation. Thus, by reflecting on my practice and experiences and looking at economics in the historical context in which it developed, it became clear that economists had become the new theologians: economics and its dogmas, the new theology ruling our world and practices. Just as theology was a central ideological piece legitimising and holding the medieval social order, modern economics plays a major role in keeping the modern, industrial, free-market-based order together. Just as the medieval hierarchical order and tradition, with the Catholic Church and the Pope as central figures, did not accept being questioned; the idea of the benefit of free-market competition and the dogma of the invisible hand as leading to the common good and welfare was and still is not something that is easily questioned without jeopardising and menacing existing social structures, interests and practices. With the feudal society’s crumbling down based on inherited privilege and tradition, a new set of theories and a new ideological construct replaced the previous one once modern society took its place. Instead of the resort to tradition, reason and empiricism became the new way to access truth. As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued, instrumental reason replaced communicative reason. Instead of tradition and morals, human action had to follow a means-to-an-end logic—efficiency instead of respect to tradition. Thus, the future, not the past, is to guide our practice. To get there, the human spirit had to be freed from past superstitions, morals and ideologies. It had to get rid of religion and theology’s ascendency as ways to understand and order our lives. But, in the end, it feels very ironic that by following Galileo’s method set out and consolidated by Newton and the scientific revolution that ended the theological explanation of reality, economics ended up becoming the new dogma, the new guardians of the truth. That, seen in their respective contexts, economics occupies the same place theology once had occupied. Its orthodoxy and purity must be preserved at all costs once our very perception of what oikonomic development means and how it should be carried out depends on it. Once we question human needs and how they have been defined in our modern world, we examine the reality of free market’s automatic benefits; we look at the way wealth is being produced,

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distributed and consumed in our world and how we set our priorities according to chrematistics’ logic instead of a proper understanding of what the oikonomy was meant to be in the first place, namely, a means to ‘live and to live well’ and not an end by itself; our very oikonomic practices as individuals and as a society have to be reviewed. But now that our chrematistic growth-oriented development limits become evident, the social and ecological imbalances resulting from it increase more and more, and a new understanding and a new ethos may be ripe for emerging. Exacerbated by the current Covid-19 pandemic, our current development model’s political, social and ecological limits and contradictions are becoming more evident. Just as were the limits of the medieval feudal order at their time. Thus, the ‘new normality’ spoken off cannot follow and repeat the previous one. A new world has to emerge. It is undoubtedly a needed step if we hope to find new development models and practices that are not at the service of profits and the logic of exchange-value accumulation, of infinite chrematistic growth, but at our individual, collective and ecological balances and welfare. An oikonomy ‘as if life matters’. Just as modern science and the enlightened reason, providing a new way to perceive and approach reality, opened the way to our modern world, a new understanding of what the oikonomy is all about, of ‘the art of living and living well’, is nowadays needed. Now that a series of interrelated crises and imbalances point to the crumbling down of our current world and a new reality is trying to emerge. Given that economics to follow Newton’s method had to resort to the ceteris paribus condition, the assumption that everything else is kept unchanged and history and life’s creative movement has been wiped out of its view, we may nowadays, following Galileo, state: eppur si muove. The reality, and particularly oikonomic reality in our increasingly accelerating and interdependent world, is always moving. Thus, a new way to rightly look at it and understand it has to be found. The ceteris paribus condition has to be removed. And just as Galileo looked at the cosmos with fresh eyes, we too have to look at the oikonomic process and our world in a new, living and open way.

References Akerlof, G. A., & Shiller, R. J. (2015). Phishing for phools—The economics of manipulation and deception. Princeton University Press. Arida, P. (1983). A História do Pensamento Econômico como Teoria e Retórica. Textos para Discussão n 54. Departamento de Economia da PUC-RJ. Blaug, M. (1975). Kuhn versus Lakatos, or paradigms versus research programmes in the history of economics. History of Political Economy (HOPE), 7(4), 399–433. Blaug, M. (1988). Economic theory in retrospect (4th ed.). Cambridge University Press. Dilthey, W. (1989). Introduction to the human sciences—Selected works (Vol. 1) R. A. Makkreel & F. Rodi (Eds.). Princeton University Press. Dobb, M. (1973). Theories of value and distribution since Adam Smith – Ideology and economic theory. Cambridge University Press.

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Dornbusch, R. (1976). Expectations and exchange rate dynamics. Journal of Political Economy, 84(6), 1161–1176. Friedman, M. (1969). The optimum quantity of money and other essays. Macmillan. Jevons, W. S. (1871). The theory of political economy (1st ed.). Macmillan. Jevons, W. S. (1879). The theory of political economy (2nd ed.). Macmillan. Kates, S. (Ed.). (2010). Macroeconomic theory and its failings—Alternative perspectives on the global financial crisis. Edward Elgar. Marx, K. (1867/2015). Capital—A critique of political economy (Vol. 1). Progress. Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation. Farrar & Rinehart. Ricardo, D. (1817/1960). The principles of political economy and taxation. J. M. Dent. Sachs, W. (1999). Planet dialectics—Explorations in environment & development. Zed Books. Smith, A. (1776/1937). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Random House. Toynbee, A. (1894). Lectures on the industrial revolution of the 18th century in England—Popular addresses, notes and other fragments (First Edition published posthumously in 1884). Longmans, Green.

Chapter 4

Taking a Phenomenological Approach to Oikonomics: Looking at the World in Living and Holistic Terms

In my research and writing, I try to consider the economic process from a living and holistic perspective instead of standard economics’ approach. Initially, I did so from the system’s complexity theory perspective. Then, gradually I discovered Wolfgang von Goethe’s ideas about science and that which may be termed a phenomenological approach. It has become the perspective that guides my research and practice and what I call regenerative oikonomics. ‘Oikonomics’ to rescue our understanding of the economic process from the narrow, chrematistic, market-centred perspective modern economics has placed us. Regenerative rather than sustainable or any other term, because it is all about regeneration in life processes. Not of ‘sustaining’ or conserving structures but of actively and creatively recreating them. Objects fight against entropy, against the effects of time, by passively resisting. Life does so by continuously regenerating itself. The etymology of words is always a good way of assessing their more profound meaning and society’s cultural changes. Ecology and economy have the same root, eco which comes from the Greek for home, oἶκoς/oíkos (‘house’ or ‘home’). Thus, on the one hand, we have the logos of our home in oiko-logos. Logos is a word that has a deep meaning in ancient Greece and has been used in different senses, from ‘word’ to ‘discourse’, ‘principle’ or ‘order’. Indeed, in the original opening chapter of the Gospel of John, it is stated that ‘in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God’. Logos has been translated by ‘Word’ in the conventional translations, but the term has to be understood much deeper than just verbal language. Logos is related to the classical Sanskrit noun Dharma and the Daoist Dao, the ultimate law and dynamic order holding reality together. It refers to the way something manifests itself or speaks to the world, thus its inner essence. Thus, in our modern language, the use of geo-logy, bio-logy, interesting enough astro-logy or eco-logy: the internal law, order or simply discourse/language spoken by the different phenomenon, their logos. Oἰκoνoμία/oikonomia derives from oἰκoνóμoς/oikonomos (i.e. ‘household management’). It is as well a composite word derived from the same initial oἶκoς/oikos and νε
μω/nemein (‘to manage; distribute’). While the original meaning of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_4

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‘Oikonomou’ was a homeowner (following Aristotle, who starts from the family as the smallest oikonomic unit), it evolved to denote someone responsible for all resources on the estate, a steward. Oikonomou was also a medieval Eastern Roman title for somebody in charge of a project or institution. The Greek Orthodox Church still uses it. The first recorded use of the word economy in the modern sense can be found in work composed in a monastery in 1440, meaning the management of resources. Since the proper administration of resources would use the minimal amount to reach a given aim, ‘economy’ has also taken on the meaning of frugality: ‘an economical use of resources’, ‘to economise’ or someone being ‘economic’ in their spending habits. In our modern standard textbook definition of the economy, these meanings can be found each time the economy’s aims are defined as to ‘maximise utility through the best use of available scarce resources’. Or, in more simple terms, how to live as best as possible given the limited available resources we have at hand. Given this meaning and aims, how can we expect to manage our home’s scarce resources best if we do not understand and follow the logos, the laws and the order governing it? But that is what we have been doing in the last centuries, and that is what happens in modern economics by ignoring and keeping Nature out of its models. We foster chrematistic growth without considering Nature and the ecology on which our lives and our oikonomy depend. Having affiliated me, in institutional terms, to ecological economics—people like to know and label what you do—in the early 1990s, I still remember having to explain that ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’ are not in contradiction or at least should not be. As Joan Martinez Alier, a brilliant ecological economist I had the privilege to know here in Catalonia, suggested, economics, at its essence, is the study of our human ecology. Ecology, I now realise, is Nature’s oikonomy at large. Indeed, what should puzzle us is not that someone aims to do ecological economics, but the other way around: that modern economists do as if there can be an oikonomy which is not grounded and respectful of the ecology? Indeed, human oikonomy is about how we humans, as do other species, use and transform our environment’s resources to sustain our lives and wellbeing. In the case of humans, having free will makes it all being a matter of choice. We humans, as Aristotle argued, are a political animal, a zöon politikon. Thus, it is political economy because we humans are not mechanically acting homo economicus, following a behaviour easily represented in a linear mathematical function. We are conscious social beings, homo sapiens sapiens, self-reflectively knowing that we know. Thereby, it is all about choice. Something economists have ignored for far too long, assuming that we only act following strict rules according to our short-term monetary interests aiming to receive as much as possible and pay as little in the marketplace, not having to worry and take responsibility about the broader social and ecological effects of our behaviour. It will all be taken care of by the ‘invisible hand’ of market competition, automatically redirecting individual greed and competition towards the common good, as argued by Adam Smith and those who followed. Nowadays, with climate change, dramatic loss of biodiversity globally, desertification, pollution and resource depletion, this oblivion’s cost is becoming

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more and more visible. We are reaching the point in which our civilisation based on an oikonomy that is blind to ecology is more and more in crisis and our wellbeing, if not our survival as a species, is at risk. But, as we saw, both Nature and our human nature is ignored by modern economics. It is simply assumed to be unchanging and then kept out of the models and out of sight. The way natural processes regenerate life conditions on Earth does not enter the economist’s equations, although central to our oikonomy. Nor is our behaviour mechanical and linear. We are homo sapiens sapiens, self-reflective beings, knowing that we know. According to our personal and collective cultural values, we do not act mechanically, out of instinct, but according to our narratives and how we perceive the world. We are a social animal, and, through our selfreflective practice and potential free will, we can choose. Thus, we can observe the myriad of different and changing social structures, cultures and, of course, oikonomic development models throughout history. All these different kinds of human ecologies and the ways humans have transformed both their external and inner nature. All ignored by modern economics, which, notwithstanding, claims to be ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’. We unfold as individuals, behave and pursue our oikonomic aims within these specific and changing ecological, social and cultural contexts. But we do so according to our context and our social and environmental relations. Our consciousness and our being do not spring out in isolation. They emerge from our social and ecological interactions and learnings. Nor do they remain unchanging in time. Moreover, we behave according to our conscious and subconscious beliefs. Thus, the different cultural and individual ways we perceive the world and the mythological or ideological narratives that we create and believe all condition our development and use of tools and technology. They affect our ways of socialising and of course our oikonomy. Reality is always whole, and the oikonomic process does not happen in a void in isolated laboratory conditions. It is a multidimensional and everchanging historical process, far removed and not akin to the movement of passive objects as those studied by Newton. Understanding how small technological and cultural changes may impact our whole oikonomic behaviour and development practice became even more apparent when I decided to do my PhD research about time. It is not time in a philosophical sense. However, it is impossible to think about this essential element of our existence without a philosophical reference. Notwithstanding, I focused on our social and culturally hegemonic modern mechanical time concept and how it affected our individual and social practice and relations. Knowing the importance of our cultural perceptions and beliefs, I wished to contrast our modern conception of time, as linear, mechanical and external, to what I termed systemic time and which is at work and inherent to living biological, ecological, psychological, cultural and even physical, thermodynamic processes. Seeing how the mechanical time concept is central to both our social life and our modern perceptions and consciousness, guiding, among others, our current scientific worldview and, of course, our oikonomic practice and science, I tried to understand better how our individual and collective human dynamics are at odds with the

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internal, irreversible time of self-organised, complex systems—the creative and qualitatively changing time of autopoietic, living systems and the far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic processes of what Ilya Prigogine called dissipative structures.1 Guided by the idea of ‘think global and act local’, I wished first to get a global picture of the whole dynamics and then understand how to best act in every concrete situation. At a deeper level, study how we in our modern world perceive time and behave accordingly, generating social and ecological conflicts and contradictions. Investigate how our oikonomy and cultural values, technology, institutions, reductionist and fragmented science are all informed by a mechanical time concept and are at the source of our current social and ecological imbalances and conflicts. While researching the topic, I learned that the mechanical time concept, the so-called clock-time we take for granted and base our social interactions and behaviour upon, is relatively new and specific to our modern, Western civilisation. Previously and elsewhere, time was not regularly and mechanically produced by a mechanical machine—nowadays electronic devices—whose products are seconds, minutes, hours and all their fractions. Time was always related and read in the movement and changes of natural processes. Traditional hunter and gatherers observed seasonal and migration patterns to know the time. It was central to them knowing and anticipating the patterns of behaviour of other species and Nature. Indeed, some indigenous people of the Amazon ‘smell’ the new year by the flowering of a specific tree. Others used the cooking time as a time unit. Agricultural societies would look at the seasons and the sun’s movement, the moon and other celestial bodies and the weather changes. For all these societies, time had an essentially qualitative nature, each offering different opportunities and challenges to humans who had to behave and adapt accordingly. With mechanical time, it is an entirely different story. It represents a purely quantitative, external and linear conception of time, which is not given by Nature and creation but is the product of a human-created device. It is a Western invention of the eleventh or the twelfth medieval world and marked a radical departure from previous time conceptions and ways of measuring time. As many philosophers and historians of science pointed out, it paved the way for our modern world and our current oikonomic development practice, radically changing not just our conceptions but our behaviour. As the product of a human, technical device, it could be perfected and bettered. Thus, through technological progress and human technical skills, it was becoming each time more ‘precise’ and ‘efficient’. Therefore, humans placed themselves as the new ‘masters of time’, and gradually the idea of progress instead of the previous circular time concept emerged. Notwithstanding, by putting it in the centre of our modern worldview and culture and our practice, we gradually came to ignore the more fundamental internal, 1

Autopoiesis from the Greek self + creation/making is a term proposed by the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, while dissipative structures are a term proposed by the physical chemist Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine to make reference to self-organising, dynamic complex systems whose order is actively maintained in a far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic state. We will return to these ideas and terms in the next chapter about Nature’s oikonomy.

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qualitative and creative time of dynamic and living systems. The organic and creative time of Nature, open dynamic systems and indeed our own body and communities. The Greeks had two different concepts of time. One was Chronos, identified with the Titan Cronus or Kronos. According to the myth, after having castrated his father Uranus and taken his place as the supreme ruler, he would eat all his children, afraid of suffering the same fate at the hand of one of his children. It is, thus, related to the idea of the all-consuming, entropic time. The other they called kairós, the time of opportunity, the right moment to act. The former refers to chronological or sequential time, while the latter signifies a proper or opportune time for action. While chronos is quantitative, kairós has a qualitative, impermanent nature. Kairós also means weather in Modern Greek. Just as it happens in my native Portuguese and other Latin languages in which tempus/tempo/tiempo/temps/timp refers to both the time that passes and the weather we have. Thus, just like we need to adapt our behaviour to the different weather conditions, we must adjust to the qualitative realities and opportunities presented by kairós. A reminder that our behaviour has to be in accordance with our environment. We are not an external master of time and Nature but a co-evolving part of it. This idea of kairós is stated as well in the Bible where it is said, in Ecclesiastes 3: 1–2, ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted’. From that perspective, although our modern time measured in hours, minutes and seconds is given as the product of a mechanical or nowadays electronic device, kairological time is not something produced by a human-made machine, defined by humans in purely abstract terms. It is inherent to all creation, to all beings and everything that exists under the sun. Humans have to learn to listen to this kairological time before acting and speaking to it in ignorance of the different requirements and opportunities each moment offers. We need to adapt to the weather conditions, listen to kairós and not just impose our narrative, our own scientific and technological discourse of progress and economic growth grounded on a linear and chronological perception of time. As I learned from reading authors like Richard Gault (1995, p. 156), ‘today forecasting and planning are so common that it is difficult to appreciate their relative novelty. In kairological time, planning is inconceivable. Those dwelling in kairological time cannot determine in advance the right time to do this or that. They await the unknown future and prepare to respond to it. The response is vital since the kairological future delivers not a pre-determined, fully formed present but opportunities and challenges. It is the human response to the possibilities which emerge from the future that actually yield the present’. The oikonomy has to listen and understand the oikology first. Otherwise, we may just go out into the cold and rain without any protection or plant our seeds when we should be harvesting or at times and places when they will not sprout. By not seeing that history is always the result of human-nature dialectics and not just the fruit of our human dialectics as separated from the world, we believe that history and development are purely human affairs. But, by not taking into account that there is ‘a time to plant and a time to pluck’. Thereby, by not learning to read the opportunities and challenges we face at each moment, we simply go on believing

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that the future can be controlled and planned by our progress. That climate change, biodiversity loss, desertification and environmental pollution are just secondary aspects when even considered. Economists have to solely focus on how to foster market competition, innovation and chrematistic output. Instead of understanding reality’s essential openness, creativity and unpredictability, we still stick to planning. Even worse, when done based on standard economic models, we ignore Nature’s and our human nature’s movements and changes altogether. By focusing solely on our mechanical time concept, we ignore that we are an interdependent part of the whole and that the future is a collective, co-evolutionary result. We are not dancing alone, but part of a joint dance and symphony. We have to adapt our moves and rhythms to that of our partners and the music. Sometimes leading; others being led. Thinking that just by improving our technical skills, we may produce more ‘precise’ and ‘efficient’ clocks and time measures, better master and control time, we forget that time is first of all of a relational and qualitative nature. It is not something external but inherent and emergent with the unfolding of life processes and the universe itself. Each moment and time is creating its own time, its climate and weather—time as movement and time as the weather, Kairós. As part of Nature and part of Gaia, we humans are part of this creative, autopoietic unfolding of life. Thus, our responsibility as conscious and potentially free beings is to respond to each moment and circumstance according to their own needs and openings. By focusing solely on our mechanical time concept and basing our social and economic practice on it, we follow a false narrative and nowhere, maybe, is this narrative as false and far removed from reality as in economics. Nowhere has this misplaced reductionist approach to reality proven as damaging and dangerous to our world and ourselves. By grounding our economic models, like Newton’s mechanics, on a mechanical time concept, we simply fail to understand our Oikos, the planet Earth, adequately. The more I studied and learned about this kairological time, about the ways of Nature and humans, the more a living, fascinating picture of reality emerged. I could find it in anthropological studies about the myths and rituals of native people, how humans managed to co-evolve with their environments for tens of thousands of years, creating the most diverse cultures and societies. It is something central to traditional mythology and cultural norms. But it is something that I could find in modern, holistic science too. For instance, the Gaia theory shows how life has evolved on Earth for billions of years by keeping and maintaining vital balances and inner homeostatic balances. It is central to biologists’ discussions like Lynn Margulis pointing to the central role of symbiosis in evolution or Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s autopoiesis notion and understanding of the ways of life and the development of our consciousness and humanity. Relations, movement, wholeness, interdependence, qualitative change and impermanence are of the essence. Identity, ‘objects’ and stability are just transitory emergent properties of underlying relations, movements and orders. A reality far removed from the abstract hypothetical worlds I studied to become an economist. By learning about environmental history, I learned how our history is the result of not just our human dynamics and social dialectics but also our human ecological

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relations. We are part of Nature, this larger organic and evolving living Earth, and history is always a co-evolutionary process. Just as we cannot understand the development of organs without understanding the organism and the metabolism which connects it all, we cannot understand our human development without understanding its connection and relation to the larger whole we are but a part of. We are changing the environment while being changed by it. I learned how failing to understand this and establishing the proper relations with their environment, past civilisations from Romans to the Mayas, from the Spanish colonial empire to the Eastern Island civilisation, had all collapsed. Nowadays, we humans have become one of the leading forces affecting biological evolution, provoking a mass extinction at a speed comparable to the past mass extinctions. We have even become a major geological force changing our climate, seas and land. Thereby, more than ever, it is a matter of utter importance to understand the political dimension of the oikonomy and our responsibilities. As zöon politikon, a political animal, it is up to us to choose to live and develop one way or another, transforming our times, both the time we live in and the changing climate-times. Hence, geologists propose considering a new geological era, the Anthropocene, to designate this new time and this new environment and climate we humans have brought upon Earth. But yet, being but a part of life and a part of our living Earth, Gaia, we may feel ourselves on top of creation, as the masters of the Earth. We are going on performing our solo dance without listening to Nature. But, life is much stronger and resilient than we are. Fossil evidence shows that life on Earth has developed under the harshest conditions and has gone through many major ecological crises before. Some, like the extinction of three-quarters of all life forms, including all non-avian dinosaurs as a consequence of the significant disruptions brought by the impact of a great asteroid or comet in the Gulf of Mexico around 66 million years ago, may have resulted in the extinction of more than 80% of all species at the time. Others, like the so-called Great Oxidation Event or the Oxygen Holocaust, completely changed the structure of life on Earth. But even then, life’s autopoietic onward march continued, adapting and creating new co-evolutionary dynamics from which we are the lucky inheritors.2

2

As well called the Great Oxygenation Event or the Oxygen Revolution, it refers to the gradual accumulation of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere and shallow waters resulting from the photosynthetic processes liberating highly reactive oxygen into the atmosphere during the first two billion years of life on Earth by cyanobacteria. The highly reactive, oxidising effect of oxygen not only changed the abiotic structure of soils and minerals but poses a threat to biological processes too. Thus, life had to adapt to this new reality, and, among others, it is suggested that a local rise in oxygen levels due to cyanobacterial photosynthesis in ancient microenvironments drove the evolutionary transformation of an archaeal lineage into the first eukaryotes. This archaeal ancestor may already have had DNA repair mechanisms based on DNA pairing and recombination and possibly some kind of cell fusion mechanism. Selective pressure for efficient DNA repair of oxidative DNA damages may have driven the evolution of eukaryotic sex involving such features as cell-cell fusions, cytoskeleton-mediated chromosome movements and emergence of the nuclear membrane. Thus, the evolution of eukaryotic sex and eukaryogenesis were likely inseparable processes that evolved in large part to facilitate DNA repair. It ended up opening the development

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4 Taking a Phenomenological Approach to Oikonomics: Looking at the World in. . .

Now we humans, self-conscious homo sapiens sapiens with our ability to selfreflectively understand our actions and their impacts, we are the ones called to develop our ‘response-ability’ to the new challenges we now face. The list of challenges keeps on growing from the Covid-19 pandemic to climate change, extreme natural catastrophes, social conflicts, wars, refugee crises and oikonomic breakdowns. We are all part of the world and ignore its speaking at our peril. As aimed by permaculture, we need to live with instead of against Nature. As a social species, we have to live with our neighbours and not against each other. We need to listen and learn from Nature and our neighbours. After all, life and Gaia have been an ongoing success story leading to growing diversity and complexity despite drawbacks and crises along the road. Giving birth to immeasurable beauty, wealth and consciousness on this tiny little blue spot in the vast space we call our home. We, humans, are part of this world, co-evolutionary partners in this journey. We may as well learn from past experiences and, in some cases, still present traditional wisdom. The understanding of kairós, this qualitative, internal time concept, is central to all animist societies and traditional agricultural societies where human life and human oikonomy were utterly dependent on knowing the right time for every activity. Blind to our home, we in our modern capitalist industrial world aim to grow more and more at any cost, without listening to Gaia’s times and requirements, the time of the dao, the dharma or the logos. History is full of examples of how those who know when and how to respond to every moment, every situation and every opportunity have thrived and have developed and created wealth and riches. Some have managed to create balanced and harmonious relations with their environment, respecting the Great Spirit, Pachamama, Gaia and the Gods, thrive. Others have not. Living by the dao, finding balance and harmony is not just an individual issue but a collective, oikonomic issue as well. For over 25 years, I’ve been teaching and researching, trying to find ways to understand the oikonomy as a living whole: a living and organic process. To look at it in holistic ways, without ignoring how we depend and transform our Earth and how our culture, values, social relations and social standings affect how we behave and pursue our oikonomic aims. Thus, we have to bring the oikonomy back to Earth from the cold and distant abstract worlds where modern economists and our current culture have placed it. It’s a journey I’d like to share with you. I firmly believe that it is increasingly becoming not just a matter of intellectual interest but a crucial challenge we have to confront as individuals and as a society. In any case, getting a better and living understanding of what the oikonomy is all about is certainly a central aspect of improving our wellbeing and happiness. After all, the oikonomy still rules the world and our lives, and it is all about ‘the art of living and living well’.

of multicellular organisms able to neutralise the highly reactive oxygen and using it as an energy source instead: our breathing ancestors.

Reference

Reference Gault, R. (1995, May). In and out of time. Environmental Values, 4, 2149–2166.

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Part II

What Is the Oikonomy All About?

Chapter 5

Aristotle’s View: Oikonomy as the Art of Living and Living Well

The shortcomings of our modern perception of the oikonomy start with the definition of what the oikonomy is all about. By reducing it to chrematistics and marketoriented activities, we ignore all other ways whereby wealth is created and distributed—the way we sustain our lives and wellbeing. Not just does modern economics miss our home, Nature in which all oikonomic activity takes place and on which it depends, as we saw above, but it ignores the very nature of what the oikonomy is all about and which are its fundamental aims and forms. More than two millennia ago, in his Politics, when Aristotle talked about the economy, he differentiated between oikonomy and chrematistics. He based his distinction on a crucial difference between use- and exchange-value. The former is related to the primary function or use of something; the latter is a secondary function that refers only to the fact that we may exchange some useful thing for another, hence its exchange-value. To better visualise this distinction, we may take the example of a shoe he gives: ‘A shoe is used for wear and is used for exchange; both are uses of the shoe. He who gives a shoe in exchange for money or food to him who wants one, does indeed use the shoe as a shoe, but this is not its proper or primary purpose, for a shoe is not made to be an object of barter’ (Aristotle, 1999, p. 14). As Aristotle already tried to clarify, the distinction between the primary and the secondary use of a shoe, between its exchange- and use-value, is crucial to understand what the economy and wealth are all about. As he pointed out, people are rich according to their access to the primary function of goods, the use-values they have to attend to their needs. The more than 2700 pairs of shoes the former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, was found to possess brought her wealth whence used or remembered. They responded to her love or obsession with shoes, her feeling of power and importance or whatever emotional or physical need she aimed to satisfy by her behaviour. Notwithstanding, it is not the combined price or exchangevalue of her collection per se, which is essential. As use-values, they serve an end, namely, attending to a human need. As exchange-value, they are just means-to-anend, namely, to facilitate the exchange/barter between different use-values. The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_5

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same happens with the wealth of the so-called super-rich: while stored in a bank account or growing while speculatively circulating in the financial markets, it is just a number that may even appear on the Forbes list. But it is only the fraction represented by goods and services consumed and used that constitutes actual wealth for their owners. This common misunderstanding became central to our current view. It can be seen each time we classify people and whole nations according to their accumulated exchange-value and not by the riches in use-value terms they enjoy. Or when we look for ‘fostering economic growth’ instead of focusing on leading happier and more fulfilling lives. To make his point better, Aristotle pointed to King Midas’s story, who ended up miserable after having his wish realised that everything he touched was turned into gold. Instead of the hoped-for wealth, he was no longer able to calm his thirst, his hunger or even his affection once food and wine became gold by touching his lips, as did his daughter when he tried to hug her. As Aristotle (1999, p. 15) argued, ‘indeed, riches is assumed by many to be only a quantity of coin, because the arts of getting wealth and retail trade are concerned with coin. Others maintain that coined money is a mere sham, a thing not natural, but conventional only, because, if the users substitute another commodity for it, it is worthless, and because it is not useful as a means to any of the necessities of life, and, indeed, he who is rich in coins may often be in want of necessary food. But how can that be wealth of which a man may have a great abundance and yet perish with hunger, like Midas in the fable, whose insatiable prayer turned everything that was set before him into gold?’ It is precisely this that happened in our modern culture and particularly modern economics, where wealth is defined in monetary terms instead of use-value terms. In 1976, the social psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote a book called To Have or to Be? In it, he made the same point and showed how one of the main characteristics of our modern world is to mistake having for being as the main objective of life. We forget that living and happiness spring from our relating and dynamic behaviour, not our passive possessions. We live and experience joy by using or being supported by something or by someone. Not by merely possessing it. As Fromm points out in his book, this is reflected in our Western language by increasing nouns and decreasing verbs’ use. Thus, we say that we have a girlfriend, a wife or a job instead of pointing to the fundamental aspect of being in love, relating or working. It is also ingrained in our national economic policy or how we may talk about who is rich and not. Governments seek to increase our GDP, which is nothing more than the net sum of produced exchange-values during a year, while Forbes lists the wealthiest individuals in the world according to the sum of the monetary value of their possessions. Not whether they live happy and fulfilling lives. Nor do we ask whether the GDP has grown because more arms have been produced, illnesses had to be treated due to worsening health conditions or homes had to be rebuilt after being destroyed by natural disasters increased by climate change. As ecological economists like to point out, national statistics do not differentiate goods from bads. Neither do we when we simply look at the exchange-value of something. Consider

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the secondary use of something, its monetary value, instead of its primary use and how it is sustaining healthy and fulfilling lives. For Aristotle, as for the ancient Greeks in general, the oikonomy included all human activity to produce, distribute, own and consume use-values to live and live well. It encompassed both market-oriented activities and those not seeking to be exchanged and used to attend to a human need without being bought or sold. It included agriculture, manufacturing, warfare, piracy, slavery and other forms whereby human beings ‘earned their living’ at his time. Irrespectively if they were or were not market-oriented. As he argued, and we will see later, Adam Smith (1776/ 1937, p. 7) echoed two millennia later just to forget it again, ‘no man can live well, or indeed live at all, unless he be provided with necessaries’. Thus, the satisfaction of human needs is at the origin and purpose of our oikonomy. It included as well commerce, which the Greeks called chrematistics.1 For Aristotle, chrematistics was an integral part of the oikonomy only as long as it remained a means-to-an-end. As a tool to the broader oikonomic aims, it allows us to acquire use-values from others. If aimed at merely increasing the number of exchange-values we possess, it was not considered an integral part of ‘the art of living and living well’. Indeed, having more does not automatically translate into being healthier, happier or more fulfilled as a human being. As part of the oikonomy, chrematistics aims to sustain our lives and enhance our wellbeing. Thus, we engage in exchanging things we need less (and therefore represent a lower use-value) for things we may need more, getting richer by the exchange in use-value terms. But once it becomes an end by itself, as it all too often happens in our modern world, life and wellbeing are sacrificed in the name of monetary profits and accumulation. We gladly exchange our money for a beer or give what we possess in excess for something we lack to improve our wellbeing and sustain our lives, like exchanging our family jewellery for food in times of war and hunger. Although in exchangevalue terms we may be trading something which usually has a higher exchangevalue for something which has less, in terms of our lives and wellbeing, it may be saving us in a moment of great need. For Aristotle, as for the ancient Greeks in general, the word oikonomy thus found its meaning and purpose in the (re)production, distribution and final consumption of wealth sustaining a prosperous life. In contrast, chrematistics, whereby we trade and exchange our possessions with others, if not subordinated in the last instance to help us lead rich and meaningful lives, was not even considered part of the overall oikonomy or ‘art of living and living well’. Something Midas and so many of us

1 From the Greek χρηματιστική/krematistiké. According to Thales of Miletus, chrematistics is ‘the art of getting rich’. It derives from the Greek χρῆμα/chrēma for money (but also meaning ‘thing’ or even denoting ‘needed things’) as well as χρήματα/chrímata, acquiring wealth, still used for money and funds, as in χρηματoδoτω
/chrimatodotó for finance in Modern Greek. At the same time, the word is related to the Indo-European root ker for fire, which can be found in the Latin cremare (to burn) and English words like cremation. Here, the word’s etymology may point to an irremediable consumption of resources and the entropic dimension of the oikonomic process. Money and chrematistics, like fire, transform what they touch, eventually consuming it.

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5 Aristotle’s View: Oikonomy as the Art of Living and Living Well

Fig. 5.1 Aristotle’s definition of the oikonomy

in our modern world have ignored at our peril. Sacrificing our family life, dreams and wellbeing for our careers or blindly accumulating more money in our bank accounts. Once we have converted the means, that is, chrematistics and commerce, into an end, aiming to acquire and accumulate more and more money in an endless pursuit, not of happiness, but only of more of the same, we have forgotten that the oikonomy is there to sustain our life and our wellbeing, not the other way around (Fig. 5.1). From this perspective, chrematistics or ‘the art of acquisition’ was just one of the instruments that provide for the necessaries to ‘live and live well’, since ‘property is a part of the household, and the art of acquiring property is a part of the art of managing the household’ (Aristotle, 1999, p. 7). But there are many other ways of attaining this end that does not involve exchanging or barter, requiring us to engage in chrematistics ‘art of acquisition’. Hunting, gathering and agriculture for selfconsumption were, for Aristotle, an integral part of this effort, too, although no commerce is involved in humans’ relations to Nature. Nor when humans acquire through superior force, using warfare, plunder or forced slave labour. A slave may be bought and sold, but his work is not paid for as it happens with wage labour. Thus, we may see that not all use-values possess an exchange-value, although to have an exchange-value, something necessary must have a use-value. Even if only on an immaterial or imaginary subjective level. Otherwise, no one would be interested in exchanging it in the first place. Indeed, some of the highest use-values we cherish and need, like the regular seasons and climate we live in and love and friendship from our relations, these special moments in the company of someone or communion with Nature, have no exchange-value at all. They are not out there for sale. Once we understand this, we can easily understand why Nature and its ways, the oiko-logos, are central to the oiko-nomos. From Nature, we obtain the most fundamental use-values for our survival and our wellbeing like the air we breathe, the

References

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water we drink, the food we eat and all the materials and energy needed to produce the smartphones we use. Humans may only transform them through our labour according to our needs and then sell them to others or self-consume. But the whole oikonomic process starts and, once consumed or once we die, returns to Nature. These different use-values are produced, reproduced, regenerated and recycled through various ecological and biospheric processes. Aristotle (1999, p. 17) saw it clearly: ‘as political science does not make men, but takes them from nature and uses them, so too nature provides them with earth or sea or the like as a source of food. At this stage begins the duty of the manager of a household, who has to order the things which nature supplies; he may be compared to the weaver who has not to make but to use wool (. . .). The means of life must be provided beforehand by nature’. Modern economics, occupied with chrematistics, prices and market supply and demand relations, simply ignores it, assuming Nature to be unchanging and external to its models.

References Aristotle. (1999). Politics. Batoche Books. Smith, A. (1776/1937). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Random House.

Chapter 6

Polanyi’s View: The Different Forms of Oikonomy

It was by reading Polanyi that, for the first time, my eyes were opened to the fact that the oikonomy is not restricted to ‘market economy’. Through him, I learned to look at our modern market economy just as any other social scientist would do by observing it as a concrete historical reality and understanding the forces and dynamics shaping it. It made me see that our current understanding and oikonomic practice result from specific ‘cultural lenses’ and that markets do not exist as abstract entities in a cultural, institutional and ecological void. They are the product of specific historic development and human choices. Even less has the market economy existed forever and will keep on going forever. It is but one specific institutional way of organising the economic life that emerged at the time of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and then spread to the world. As Polanyi showed, human oikonomic systems have existed throughout history in varying historically and geographically specific nuances. It is always intimately related to the prevailing cultural values, political and institutional settings and power relations and the overall human-nature relations. Polanyi identified four primary oikonomic forms throughout human history: selfsufficiency, reciprocity, redistribution and market economy (commerce). Having been considering them in the last decades, while writing my previous book on the Oikonomy from a more academic perspective, I identified the fifth form to add to this list: plunder. Through plunder and abusively employing their superior force, people gain their living (or part of it) not by self-production, freely given gifts, redistribution or trade, but by taking for themselves by force. While other forms imply a voluntarily agreed relationship between subjects, plunder involves the other’s forced subordination and objectification. It, therefore, includes all forms whereby individuals or whole groups seek to ‘live and live well’ by seizing use-values not freely given but acquired by dint of applying their superior force. To a certain extent, plunder may be a dimension or qualification of other oikonomic forms identified by Polanyi. For example, an unequal market relation may lead those in a stronger position to exploit it to obtain better trade deals. It often happens that within a redistribution framework, those at the top of the hierarchical © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_6

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72 Fig. 6.1 The five basic forms of oikonomy

6 Polanyi’s View: The Different Forms of Oikonomy

Oikonomía ‘The art of living and living well’

Acquiring usevalues by means of commerce

- Self-sufficiency - Reciprocity (Gi economy) - Redistribuon Khrémaské - Plunder - Commerce/chremascs ‘The art of acquision’

‘The art of money-making’ (Accumulang exchange-values)

pyramid may redistribute a disproportional share of the product for themselves or use their position to gain improper benefits. In a reciprocity framework, someone may profit from taking without reciprocally giving back to the community, thus creating parasitic instead of symbiotic relationships. Lastly, even producing for subsistence, someone may over-exploit and plunder natural resources to make his living without respecting natural cycles and ecological regenerative requirements. In all these examples, plunder is merged with other forms of oikonomic behaviour, grounded on the abuse of unequal power relations and not an independent oikonomic way in itself. Nevertheless, it exists as an independent type of oikonomic behaviour, in its own right as well. In a certain sense, it is the most basic oikonomic form, mirroring preypredator relations in Nature. Predators are taking through their superior force, just as the hunting humans do. In one sense, it is a central dimension of our relationship with Nature, since by failing to recognise it as a subject with its rights, we plunder and over-exploit her for our benefit, without giving in return. But it is as well an important, sometimes central aspect of previous and present human oikonomies. Not only in earlier times, when armies plundered wherever they fought, lands and kingdoms were conquered, pirates sailed the seas and slaves were forced into labour, but also today. All kinds of corrupt and criminal activities in which people use their power to enrich themselves at the expense of others enter that category. The same can be said from our present-day industrial fishing, intensive industrial agriculture and extractive over-exploitation of natural resources, plundering our world for profits. As it happens in all these activities, we humans sustain our lives and try to satisfy our needs by utilising our superior force and technology by plundering Nature. That all said, we may adopt a new schematic representation of oikonomy (Fig. 6.1). Of these five fundamental forms of oikonomy, producing for our own is the most basic. It is the primary form whereby humans, like other living beings, provide for their needs and, by doing so, co-(re)produce and transform the world. It is in the centre of the oikonomy of life. Life itself, as Maturana and Varela defined it, is an autopoietic process. Every organism is an autonomous, self-reproducing, creative

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unity whereby the different internal processes and life functions are created and maintained. Thus, is our biosphere as a whole, our living Earth, made up of a series of interdependent but self-organised processes. Thereby, we can find self-sufficiency at work on all oikonomic activities and behaviour forms at a fundamental level. Once we grow up, we self-sufficiently provide for a myriad of use-values or satisfiers which may later be self-consumed, sold, gifted or redistributed or else taken by others forcefully. We self-learn, walk, clean up our house or fix things without depending on others and even less paying for it in the markets. The essential requirement for self-sufficiency is freedom, having the autonomy to do so, coupled with the ability or capacity to do it. In the 1980s, the Indian economist Amartya Sen developed what became known as the ‘capability approach’. The idea that according to each one’s capabilities and potential, freedom of choice and thus the possibility of manifesting it is of central importance to a person’s quality of life. Our capabilities depend on our internal psychic and organic abilities, maintaining a healthy organism and mind. Furthermore, they rely on having access to external factors of production, tools, resources and instruments.1 Once an individual or, for this purpose, a small group possess the means to produce, they can provide for their self-consumption self-sufficiently. Therefore, individual autonomy and possession/ access to the means of production are central prerequisites of this oikonomic form. Modern economics obsession with chrematistics and ignorance of other forms of oikonomic activity simply oversees the potential in wealth creation of merely ensuring individuals’ conditions to self-produce. We talk about economic growth when we add up in monetary terms the value of industrially produced vegetables. Still, we ignore the wealth reproduced by those who cultivate their vegetables in their vegetable garden to be self-consumed or shared with neighbours. I’ve been lucky enough to have had a vegetable garden at my home during my youth. I have experienced the pleasures and benefits of having a short walk and taking fresh lettuce to make our salad, collecting some eggs from our chickens on the way there. As do all who have a vegetable garden producing to attend their own need for food and even personal enjoyment doing it, not being worried about market prices and the exchange-value of their activity and the produce. The so-called Schrebergarten in Germany is an excellent example of it. Nowadays, around 960,000 allotment gardens or ‘small gardens’ (Kleingarten)

1

The biologist, Alfred Lotka (1925/1956), termed them exosomatic tools. From the Greek exo (external) and sôma (body), an external extension to our body functions. It is a very important insight, pointing to the importance to our oikonomic behaviour of tools and technology. Although we are not the only tool-using species, and many others from bees to birds and primates do, we are by far those who have most deeply become dependent on them. Thus, the futility of trying to understand human’s oikonomy without understanding the way we develop and use our tools. How they affect and are affected by our cultural values, social practices and ecological relations. How even our biological evolution is conditioned by our tool-using practice, instead ignoring technology altogether in our economic models.

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exist in Germany, occupying 44,000 hectares.2 They are the inheritors of a movement that started already in the early nineteenth century. With the Industrial Revolution spreading to continental Europe at the dawn of German capitalism, strong migration from the rural areas and urban growth meant that many impoverished families often had difficulty finding enough to eat in the growing industrial urban centres. Thus, some church communities, city administrators and even factory owners offered to lease land for a small fee to grow their food. These became known as Armengarten, or gardens for the poor. In the middle of the century, the ongoing urbanisation and industrialisation led a doctor from Leipzig, Moritz Schreber, to advocate for the importance of open spaces and contact with nature to foster adults’ and particularly children’s body and mental health. Together with the anatomist Carl Ernst Block, they managed to inspire a public initiative to lease areas within the city, with the purpose to make it possible for children to play in a healthy environment and harmony with Nature. On his colleague’s initiative, the school director Ernst Innozens Hauschild, the first Schreberverein (‘Schreber Association’) was created. It was a School Association resulting from the working together of parents, children and the school. Later on, these areas included actual gardens for children. But soon, adults tended towards taking over and cultivating these gardens while their children played around. It did not take long for tiny houses and verandas to be added to the picture, providing relaxed and productive areas to the city dwellers. Most of the plots were entirely converted to family gardens by World War I, helping a hungry populace to go through both world wars. This small gardening also became popular in other European countries, especially Germanic countries like Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Nowadays, food security is no longer the most significant concern; still, they play an important social, cultural and oikonomic role in these countries. They also illustrate how, by self-organising and autonomously pursuing our oikonomic aims, people act in holistic and organic ways to satisfy and balance a series of different needs simultaneously. It is not just a linear, singular calculus but an intuitive, changing dance that simultaneously looks after different needs. Autonomy, leisure, understanding, participation and identity are just some of the needs self-sufficiently attended by the garden activities and care. Much beyond the tasty vegetables and fruits which may be served to friends or shared with neighbours, selfsufficiently taking care of a vegetable garden may provide a deeper understanding of Nature, our food and ourselves. Schrebergarten may allow for some relaxed moments in a friendly conversation with friends after a stressful labour day or gain self-confidence and security. These are just some ways the self-production-oriented Schrebergartens contribute to ‘the art of living and living well’. At my student times, being more interested in the readings suggested by my sociology teachers than those indicated for microeconomics and macroeconomics by the economists, I happened to read André Gorz, born Gerhart Hirsh and also known

2 https://www.bbsr.bund.de/BBSR/DE/forschung/programme/refo/staedtebau/2017/ kleingaerten/03-ergebnisse.html?nn¼1659390

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by his pen names Gérard Horst and Michel Bosquet. He was an Austria-born and later French social philosopher and political ecologist. An early defender of basic income, he made a crucial distinction between autonomous and heteronomous work. The former refers to all those labour activities we do out of our free initiative and will. In contrast, the latter is related to work done on behalf of others like slave or wage labour and follows external design and aims. The old English travail for labour, which still is used in Latin languages (like Portuguese trabalho, Spanish trabajo and French travail), has its origin in a Roman torture instrument, the tripalium (derived from the Latin roots, ‘tri-’ and ‘pālus’—literally, ‘three stakes’). Its use to designate heteronomous labour is not just a coincidence but a reflection on how labour is perceived in our modern world: a burden and something imposed from the outside, attending an external need and not in respect and accordance with our own inner needs. The modern English word, labour, points in the same direction. Although its origin is less clear-cut, it derives from Latin labor, meaning ‘toil, exertion; hardship, pain, fatigue’. Some sources venture that it could be related to labere ‘to totter’ on the notion of ‘tottering under a burden’, although there is no consensus about this origin. In any case, it is not related to pleasant feelings. From that distinction, Gorz asked himself how it would be if we willingly developed tools and institutional structures to increase the time available for autonomous activities and work while reducing the needed heteronomous labour requirements? How would it be if, instead of generating more employment subordinated to the logic of chrematistic growth, we focused on generating conditions to develop and realise each one’s capabilities by self-producing in freedom and autonomy? Similar to the way public libraries offer people access to books and culture following their interests, or community centres promote a series of self-organised social and cultural activities, there could be community workshops and spaces with user-friendly tools and technology where people could self-produce and meet others like-minded, sharing and eventually cooperating to pursue common goals. Mechanical workshops where people can repair and even produce their bicycles, motorcycles and cars; workshops for tailoring, woodwork, informatics, co-working offices, community vegetable gardens or spaces where people could do cultural activities like music, choir, dance, theatre and even cinema not as a professional, paid-for activity, but out of their interest and autonomy. While self-producing and not necessarily aiming to sell their products, people would be freed from the markets’ external pressure and the monetary yardstick. The produced products and services may then be selfconsumed, gifted or directly exchanged with others voluntarily, as it happens nowadays in those Schrebergarten communities. By not having to subordinate production to the one-dimensional exchange-value logic of maximum output at the minimal monetary cost, individuals can follow the multidimensional use-value logic attending a series of different needs simultaneously as we do when we are gardening out of hobby and pleasure compared with when we have to earn our living from this activity. It changes completely. Therefore, Gorz’s argument went, we can open up spaces and times for people to follow their interests and manifest their capabilities autonomously. We do have the means and technology to do so. By changing our oikonomic logic, ensuring a

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minimum rent to people and flexible and partial-time employment, we could provide means and spaces for self-production, thus allowing people to self-produce and meet like-minded people, cooperating instead of competing. Instead of competing for market shares and employments, people would cooperate and consider which matters: balanced social and ecological relations instead of money and prices. Individual and collective needs satisfaction, the use-value logic, instead of chrematistic profits and money accumulation, could thus be the driving force of our oikonomic development. To expand productive autonomous labour to its maximum while reducing heteronomy spaces to the bare minimum. Something which could be complemented by the minimum rent Gorz proposed. By allowing all individuals to have their basic fundamental needs satisfied, they can further decide whether to engage in self-production, voluntary work or activities or waged labour or market-oriented activities to increase their monetary income. Thereby, people could balance different modalities and ways to produce, having access to more use-values both individually and collectively. Although the formal spaces for self-production are not as prevalent as possible, essential parts of our oikonomic life are still based on and regulated by selfsufficiency. We self-educate ourselves and our children beyond institutionalised education in the same way we may take care of our health beyond public or private social security and health structures. By walking, we self-sufficiently provide for our mobility, and by hanging around with a friend, we provide for our fundamental needs of affection, participation, identity and leisure. Moreover, there is a vast amount of non-waged labour, thanks to which we self-sufficiently provide for our needs. Everywhere, the oikonomic process is not just based nor reduced to buying and selling in markets. Simultaneously, this capacity to self-produce is often used to increase profits and is, thus, subordinated to the exchange-value logic, being colonised by chrematistics. As Illich, Ivan and Cayley, David (1992, pp. 155 and 156), a Vienna-born philosopher and social critic, pointed out, while focusing on wage labour and dismissing other forms of unpaid, self-sufficient forms of production, ‘one completely overlooked the fact that the commodities made by wage labor required further labor to make them into useful things. Commodities, purchased and brought into the family through the expenditure of wages, required more and more programmed and predetermined inputs in order to become something useful. And these forms of labor became mandatory. (. . .). The availability of unpaid labor that would add to the product the amount of human activity necessary to make it useful was the only reason why wage labor could be paid in the first place. I called this unpaid contribution shadow work, and I pointed out that, due to the polarisation of social sex characteristics in the nineteenth century, it was initially more incumbent on women than on men. It now touches also men more and more’. Nowadays, this use of shadow work is central to the so-called IKEA model, whereby ‘do it yourself’ is added to the commodity’s (re)production process. Moreover, with modern information tools like personal computers, smartphones and the internet, individuals are increasingly called upon to add their labour after

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or during purchase to transform goods and services into something useful. Thereby, through internet banking, online shopping, ATMs and barcode reading devices at malls, stores and airports, companies manage increasingly to outsource previously paid labour directly to consumers. Thereby, consumers self-produce a vital part of the product they will buy. Nonetheless, as Illich pointed out, this kind of self-sufficient production as something mandatory and ordered by companies’ chrematistic logic providing for these services and products cannot be seen as self-sufficiency in its pure form. It is not a free, autonomous activity performed self-sufficiently by the individual but rather a heteronomous activity outsourced to consumers. Therefore, it represents the subordination of self-sufficiency itself to chrematistic logic. Outsourcing paid to unpaid labour becomes, thus, an integral part of the chrematistic ‘art of getting rich’. It is on this that companies like IKEA, low-cost air carriers and indeed contemporary information-centred capitalism thrive. Simultaneously, it affects personal wealth according to the different individuals’ and groups’ capacity to autonomously provide for their needs. For example, while older people may struggle to get by in our increasingly digitalised world, younger generations, native to these technologies, access plenty of their satisfiers by expertly using what we refer to as ‘new technologies’. Some are speaking the language of these new technologies fluently; others struggling to learn and use it. Therefore, a wealth inequality gap in self-sufficiency exists between generations due to the evergrowing ‘digital gap’. But standard economists simply do not consider this kind of production as relevant, following Smith, who defined ‘productive labour’ or just ‘labour’ as only those market-oriented activities and not all those use-value-producing ones. They ignore that even in our modern, market economies, the ‘causes and origin’ of our wealth and riches are defined not only by our earnings but—and more fundamentally so—by our capacity to self-sufficiently provide for ourselves, amidst other nonmarket-based ways whereby wealth is produced, distributed and consumed. Something that affects the wealth distribution and inequalities in our world and which, by looking solely at monetary income, is wholly misrepresented by development practitioners, NGOs, governments and the general public alike. All are ignoring that people, like traditional people, had healthy oikonomic practices and managed to have their fundamental needs like subsistence, security, participation, affection, understanding, freedom and leisure attended by dedicating a fraction of modern man’s heteronomous labour days producing and distributing wealth. Indeed, as most anthropological studies, at least since the ground-breaking studies made by Marshall Sahlins (1972) and Pierre Clastres (1974) showed, traditional societies and particularly hunter-gatherer societies were not living in a state of hardship and the constant struggle for survival, despite their low if not inexistent GDP. Rather the other way around: relying on their skills and, mainly, on Nature’s autonomous reproduction of natural use-values and the free functioning of ecosystems, they devoted just a tiny fraction of their time to provide for their material needs. Instead, they indulged in idleness and all kinds of social, ritual and cultural activities. As stated by Clastres (1974, p. 165), ‘the Indians consecrated only a short

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time to what we call labor. And yet, they did not starve. The chronicles of the time are unanimous in describing the beautiful appearance of adults, the good health of the numerous children, the abundance and variety of food resources. Consequently, the subsistence economy, which was that of the indigenous tribes, did not in any way imply the anguished pursuit, at all times, of feeding’.3 They did not have had to ‘work hard to earn their living’, nor did they depend on markets and money. Besides self-sufficiency, they relied on another fundamental way of distributing and having access to the needed use-values to sustain their lives and wellbeing, namely, reciprocity. Several anthropologists call it the gift economy: the act of free-sharing and gifting goods and services to others.4 Here something (a use-value) is given to someone else without any expected immediate retribution. It includes intangible gifts like politeness, hospitality, trust, security and invitations to participate in rituals, parties and celebrations. But it also encompasses a myriad of material gifts like food, physical shelter, objects and all kind of celebrations and gatherings in which a host may invite people and even strangers. Polanyi (1944, pp. 47–48) takes as an example the Trobriand Islanders of Western Melanesia. There, ‘the sustenance of the family—the female and the children—is the obligation of their matrilineal relatives. The male, who provides for his sister and her family by delivering the finest specimens of his crop, will mainly earn the credit due to his good behaviour, but will reap little immediate material benefit in exchange’. Thus, all the oikonomic functions of producing and distributing are performed following tradition and the local ‘etiquette’. There are no markets, exchanges or prices involved—just individuals nourishing their social standings and social bonds through gifting and receiving. Instead of markets, we have feasts, dances and communal rituals and celebrations at which food, among others, is shared and given. At the same time, individual and cultural identity is reaffirmed; social bonds and relations are reinforced. In the Trobriand Islands, each coastal village appeared to have its counterpart in an inland village. Thus, the vital exchange of different use-values between the coast and the inland, particularly between breadfruit and fish, although disguised as a reciprocal distribution of gifts and disjoint in time, was organised smoothly, without any kind of bargaining or opposite self-interest involved. Both parts were gaining from it and, instead of seeing each-others at the opposite side of the negotiation table, they shared through gifting. As it may happen with neighbours in rural communities or even in some urban neighbourhoods in which chrematistics are not yet allprevalent, one member of the community gifting to another. We, humans, are a social species. Thus, as Polanyi (1944, p. 46) stated, ‘the outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s

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Quoted in Alphandéry et al. (1992, p. 107) This became particularly mainstream among anthropologists after Marcel Mauss’s (1923–1924) highly influential Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques. An oikonomic reality acknowledged and studied by anthropologists in all societies, including our own, but simply ignored by economists.

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economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only so far as they serve this end. (. . .) These interests will be very different in a small hunting or fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives’. In traditional societies, gifting is a fundamental way whereby the individual’s social standing is asserted. As nowadays, when we invite a friend for a beer or a feast. Indeed, in most traditional, pre-capitalist societies, accumulation is not wellseen, and people who do so without sharing their riches risk being ostracised. Thus, instead of accumulating exchange-values, people rather share and gift use-values with those who may profit from them, thus increasing their social standing and, at the same time, reinforcing social bonds and relations. Moreover, this kind of oikonomic behaviour is a much better way to redistribute riches and wealth once wealth flows from those who have an excess they may spare and share to those who actually may need it and consume it. The term ‘reciprocity’ points to the inherently horizontal and equalitarian structure of this form of oikonomy. Thank you in Portuguese is ‘muito obrigado’, ‘much obliged’, as used in old English. As a teenager, eager for freedom but not that eager to assume obligations and responsibilities, I had difficulties with these terms. ‘Much obliged’? Why and to whom? Only when I better understood the deeper meaning of reciprocity, of the bond created once we received something, could I better understand and cherish this expression. It is not a direct obligation to the person you happen to have received something from. It’s a gift, and it’s given for free. But ‘much obliged’ is an acknowledgement of our responsibility towards the world and the communities that sustain us in a much broader sense. Our life has been gifted to us, as has the world we inhabit and so many things we received that allowed us to become what we are. We are not just social beings but, as all that exist, profoundly interdependent. In constant relation with others in the process of giving and receiving. We are only nods of the broader web of life, receiving with one hand, sharing with the other, and thus nourishing and carrying for the web that sustains us, reaffirming our interdependency. We are just a part of larger wholes by means and through which we come into being. At the same time, it is by means and through our ways of being and behaving that this larger whole comes into being, is transformed and is regenerated. Or not, if we do not do our part. Life is always a constant dance of giving and receiving, balancing our own needs and those we relate to and depend on to be what we are. We have been gifted our lives, and we may reciprocally sustain others’ lives and wellbeing by granting back to the world. We may be much obliged to do so by our consciousness once we realise that we are interdependent beings and, together, constitute a giant organism—the community of life. Like any organism, the different organs are both the product and, through their interdependent working, how this organism is constantly being regenerated. In healthy organisms, there is symmetry and balance involved, without which the whole becomes sick and malfunctions. Each one receives what it needs to exist and gives what it can and is asked to provide. If one part ceases to reciprocate, just

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taking but not giving according to its capacities and other’s needs, inequalities, imbalances and illnesses appear. Like in cancer cells, dictatorships or modern society, few accumulate more while others are left behind, not managing to make ends meet. Although there is no barter and direct retribution involved, even less is this retribution set in fixed and quantitative terms, overall life is sustained by a dynamic dance of giving and receiving—a constant flow going in all directions. Sometimes we are at the receiving and, on other times and contexts, at the relation’s giving end. Sometimes empathically sharing with others what they may need, others thankfully receiving to satisfy our own needs. Each organ gifts what it can produce within an organism while receiving what it needs to exist. The lungs and our breathing system connect us to the world through inbreathing oxygen produced by plants, cyanobacteria and all photosynthetic processes while exhaling carbon dioxide they may use. Our heart pumps oxygen and all needed nutrients to our whole body; our digestive system transforms food into the building blocks of ourselves. If they all receive what they need to function, we have a healthy and vigorous organism. The same happens on a larger scale in ecosystems. It is a dynamic dance in which all are interdependent. Each part and process is co-reproducing and helping to regenerate the whole while being utterly dependent on all it receives to exist. Even predators have a crucial beneficial evolutionary role, as we will discuss in more detail later, helping to regenerate the ecosystems and fuelling evolution. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, who, among many other things, created the anthroposophical movement and the Waldorf Schools like the one I went for 13 years and which played an essential part in the way I came to see the world, described what he called ‘the fundamental social law’ as the most important one for the oikonomic process. This law applies to the social and oikonomic world as natural laws apply to the natural world. As he stated the law, ‘the wellbeing of a community of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work; that is, the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, and the more his own needs are satisfied, not as the result of his own work but as the result of the work done by others’. Or, said in other terms and pointing to the gifting and receiving dimension of it, ‘the wellbeing of a community is greater the more each one gives according to his possibilities and receives according to his needs’ (found in Seddon, 1993). Just as it happens in our organism, in ecosystems and indeed in our world and universe, each part is giving and providing according to its capacities and is receiving according to its needs—one part nurturing and being sustained by the others. The more we receive according to our needs, the more we will develop our capabilities to give. The healthier our heart is by receiving what it needs, the better it may sustain the whole organism by performing what is required for it to thrive and flourish. It is something that bees, ants and other social insects live by instinctively; indigenous peoples practice by tradition; great spiritual leaders have always known, and mothers practice out of love. By giving each one what it needs, you sustain each one’s ability, reciprocally, to contribute to the wealth and the world we are all part of and which ends up benefiting ourselves. The Fundamental Social Law asserts that

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which contemporary ecology identifies and we may learn from looking at Nature’s oikonomy: symbiosis, cooperation, mutual aid and a concern for others benefit society more than self-interested behaviour, competition and the desire for personal gain. But this is something modern economists ignore and which goes opposite to the assumption that homo oeconomicus is an essentially selfish, short-term, monetary profit-focused ‘rational economic agent’—trying to get as much for himself while giving as little as possible in his relations and exchanges with the world. It is something I came to discover whence travelling between the so-called developed and underdeveloped world. Being born and raised in Brazil but often staying with my grandparents and part of my family in Switzerland, the difference in gifting habits between these two countries was striking. Seeing friends and even family members splitting their bills at gatherings instead of alternatively paying for the others surprised me when visiting my relatives and ‘rich’ Switzerland. Nowadays, this has become standard practice in the more ‘developed’ centres of Brazil too. Once travelling on Christmas time in the Amazon region, my mother and brother happened to know someone on a boat on Christmas eve and were immediately invited to share Christmas with them and stay at their home for a couple of days. It was taken as an ordinary act of hospitality and kindness towards strangers far from their homes. Nothing was expected besides a momentary being together and social sharing of experiences and kindness. On the other side of the Atlantic, I remember once at Christmas time that, unexpectedly, my father’s cousin travelling back from a business trip to Brazil happened to take a stop in Zürich close to my family there. Once the family Christmas dinner had already been planned and organised, he was asked to stay at the hotel this day. Hospitality and providing food to wanderers has always been a characteristic of traditional societies. Notwithstanding, it has significantly been lost in our modern world where strangers and often even family and friends are expected to provide for themselves, paying for a hotel or a restaurant instead. Growing up in São Paulo, the industrial centre of Brazil, I observed the significant internal differences when travelling to other, ‘less developed’ areas. As a student, I still remember travelling to regions of the North-eastern coast where even tourism was unknown. Locals would ask me, puzzled, why I was travelling there. They used to wonder whether I was the descendent of long gone immigrants, a hippy or just working for the Brazilian census agency. The last option, I figured out, being the most acceptable and understandable to them all. But in all of them, I would be invited to stay at their home, be given food although little they may have had for themselves and receive all kinds of bits of help. I still remember how I was served by the whole family fresh fished shrimps with cassava flour they had received as food aid from the Red Cross in a small fishing village. Asking them how to get to the next village, I was told that, by coincidence, they had hired a small truck to take them all there to a religious celebration that same day. All contributed with a small amount for the expenses, and when I offered to pay my part, my payment was firmly refused. It was inconceivable to them that I, as a guest, should pay them, although they all

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were paying for the service themselves. Although I, coming from a place where money is fundamental for survival, was probably the ablest to do so. Further north, I arrived at another fishing village, Jericoacoara, which became a beautiful tourist spot. But it was still in the early days, and the transition from a selfsufficient village and gift culture to a marked-based, hot tourist spot could be spotted. At that time, people from outside would mostly stay at the local’s tiny houses. Following the behaviour of other young students like me, I stopped at a house entrance and asked whether they had a room for me to stay. They welcomed me and offered me their room which, being the best room in the house, they had emptied by moving to the home’s backyard. As someone who used to pay for everything in São Paulo and was wary of not being fooled, I immediately asked how much it would cost. Their discomfort of putting a price on their hospitality was visible. Struggling, they told me that it was not that necessary, that I could pay whatever I pleased at the end. But they rapidly added that if I couldn’t or weren’t happy with the place, I did not have to pay them at all. But at the end of their answer, the owner, overcoming his reluctance, added that ‘usually, people pay . . .’, suggesting a given amount. Talking to someone who had visited this place in previous years, I was told that they would not add this last part just 1 year before, not suggesting a price to be paid. A few years back, they would receive you in their house in the early days and refuse to be paid, just as I had experienced previously in other parts. Nowadays, it is a hot tourist spot, packed with hotels, restaurants and hostels. Indeed, I just read in the news, through a city hall decree, tourists have to pay, at the village entrance, a daily ‘Sustainable Tourism Tax’ for every day they stay there. Similarly, I cannot imagine any local fishermen offering their bedroom to a stranger for free nowadays. But no one complains once we all know that ‘there is no free lunch’ and have become used to paying and being paid for most of what we do. In Brazil, I happened to come from its wealthier industrial centre, São Paulo. At that time, I realised how shocking it must be for people from a largely traditional, self-sufficient and gift-nurtured community when migrating to our modern world’s industrial and financial centres. Every year, thousands of immigrants from the arid North-eastern region will leave everything they have behind and migrate, looking for a better future. But while I could experiment with their kindness and hospitality while travelling there, I could observe how in São Paulo, they often end up in the streets when they arrive with their meagre possessions and savings. They arrive at a place where nothing is given out for free. The same happens with immigrants coming from less developed areas of the world to Europe or the USA. If they are lucky enough to make it safe, unless they have friends or relatives who made it before and may care for them, they are on their own to survive. They arrive in a world based on the assumption of the benefits of short-termoriented greed and market competition—the world who those like Donald Trump and his ‘The Art of the Deal’ consider that it is all a matter of taking as much for yourself while giving as little as possible to the other. Instead of a culture of reciprocity and sharing, it is a culture of accumulating wealth and power to get even more. A world in which we are seen as separated and fragmented egocentric beings, each fighting for his share, and thus, instead of mutual enhancement and

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mutual profit, the bigger fish eats the smaller one. Plunder, predation and parasitism, instead of symbiosis and commensalism, are the favoured image of reality in this world. Forgetting, as ecologists and social scientists know, that they all ultimately led to unbalances, collapse and illness. In a healthy organism, fraternity and collaboration between the different parts provide for wellbeing and health. Instead, not perceiving how interdependent we ultimately are, we came to believe that short-term self-interest and individual accumulation will make us richer, even at others’ expenses. It does not. It increases social polarisation and impairs the majority’s capacity to provide according to their potential fully. From individuals to ecological communities and our human oikonomy, everywhere this fundamental law applies: an organism’s wellbeing, an organisation or a community is wealthier the more each one receives according to its needs and provides according to its capacity. Of course, in the context of our market-dominated oikonomy, in which you cannot rely on your autonomy to produce for yourself, nor the gifting kindness of others, it ends up being all a matter of having more and more ‘purchasing power’ and financial independence to live. We no longer rely on others to satisfy our needs. Thus, our relations and social bonds are no longer as important, nor are they reinforced by reciprocal and symbiotic connections. Even our modern technology and goods are designed to make us more and more independent of others. Thus, we may easily forget that we are still interdependent. Only the objectified market relations, where each pays in exchange for what is due, may give this false impression of being independent once we possess enough money reserves. But we still depend on the other’s capacity to provide and willingness to exchange. By paying producers a fair price to attend to their needs, we support their ability to produce that which we, in our turn, acquire from them. We all benefit in an exchange in use-value terms: the buyer gives out the money because he rather has the product. Conversely, sellers rather get the money to acquire something else with it. That is why we enter into a deal in the first place: giving something we value less for something we love more. Money, exchange-value, is just an intermediate step overshadowing the essential interdependency that binds us together due to the increased social division of labour and specialisation. But once we possess the money and tools that allow us to be ‘independent’ from others, we easily forget that our wellbeing depends on their existence and wellbeing. An example may highlight this relation between our oikonomic practice, cultural values and favoured tools and technology we adopt and develop. As Edward Goldsmith (1992, pp. 304–305) argued, within traditional gift societies and cultures, ‘when a hunter kills a game animal he will not sell it or even store it for a rainy day; instead, he will give a feast. In a sense this will provide him with all the advantages he could have derived from selling or storing it, because he knows that his hospitality will one day be reciprocated. Giving a feast is like putting money in the bank or using one’s friends as a deep freeze. It enables one to get fresh instead of frozen food by a process of exchange, and a party to boot. At the same time, the system creates a veritable network of mutual obligations which help knit together the members of the society, and increase its cohesion and viability.

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Once people are provided with the equipment for storing perishable food, the most basic motive for holding feasts is removed. In one of the Pacific Islands administered by New Zealand, deep freezes have been installed at the main population centres: as a result, reciprocity ceased to be the favoured means of storing surplus food. There are far fewer feasts and social life has suffered, with a loss of cohesion in social communities’. We may easily imagine the sequence initiated from there: competition over the better fishing spots; higher social polarisation according to consumption patterns and possessions; and social status and identity increasingly based on ways of having instead of gifting and sharing. Thus, a stimulus for higher ‘economic efficiency’, trying to earn as much as possible and give away as little as possible in return. Marcel Mauss calls gifting a ‘total social act’. It is not just like an anonymous purchase whereby no other relation and obligation exists once the good is handled and the price paid. Cultural values and practices, social bonds and networks, power relations and hierarchies and individual identities are all intrinsic and inseparable parts of how people give and share their riches with others. A gift creates and enforces a relationship, a social bond between the giver and receiver. Within a gift economy framework, the oikonomic dimension materialises and reinforces social and cultural relations and identities by providing what Manfred Max-Neef called synergetic satisfiers. Like true self-sufficiency, as we saw above, gifts are subjected to a multidimensional logic, and they satisfy different fundamental needs simultaneously. Hospitality, as an example, does not just provide subsistence and security for the guest, but for affection, identity, participation and understanding, among others, for the guest and the host alike. This is radically different from the purely utilitarian and self-centred logic of the so-called rational economic agent or homo oeconomicus inherent to modern economic culture and thinking. It is alien to ‘the rational economic agents’ linear calculus we are supposed to be doing while purchasing or selling something in the marketplace. In the context of a gift society culture, refusing to give or accept something means denying the bond and, thus, refusing communion. Reciprocity, as Polanyi emphasises, requires the need for institutional and social symmetry. It is fundamental to the gift economy’s long-term survival. While a given time and geographical distance separate receiving from giving (otherwise, barter would be happening rather than true gift-making), nonetheless, a balance and symmetry in time and space are fundamental to keeping the system alive. People give and receive, and broadly speaking during their lifetime, and between individuals and groups, a balance between these two dimensions must be struck and maintained. However, individuals may be more at the giving or receiving end of the chain at a local level and in given periods of their lives. This is precisely the meaning of the created bond: by sharing, richness is handled to the social community, which, one day and perhaps even from another direction, will flow back to the original giver in the form of received gifts. Although no direct barter occurs, globally in time and space, symmetry tends to balance out giving and receiving. Through gifts, wealth flows from those able to give (and thus may spare what is gifted) to

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those who need it. Wealth is thus redistributed, while social relations and bonds are reinforced. Therefore, not just in terms of subsistence but also in terms of security, participation, affection and individual autonomy, understanding and even leisure, reciprocity and the act of giving provide for both the individual and the collective ‘art of living and living well’. And it does so in a much more holistic and synergic way than when individuals have to rely on their own individualised relations to the market or government redistributive policies. While modern market relations are grounded on a short-term, selfish personal profit-seeking behaviour, reciprocity is based on cultural and moral values that require opening yourself to the other’s needs and empathically responding to them. In psychological terms, homo economicus is based on selfish, self-centred behaviour, while reciprocity requires empathy and the capacity to enlarge your consciousness and to encompass the other as well. It means expanding our self and understanding this larger community and interdependence, which includes us all. The more someone can attend to the other’s needs, the more his gifts will be appreciated and recognised. The higher he will be held in the other’s eyes, and thus the higher will be his social standing and status. It is quite the opposite of modern values in which personal status and ‘success’ are evaluated by accumulated material wealth instead of the one gifted to others. These values include the duty of hospitality, giving to the needy, sharing community work at times of harvest or sowing at different private properties, lending a helping hand or joining construction efforts of houses, churches or schools. Shared by a broader community, these are all values that ensure that many critical oikonomic functions are performed without the need for commerce or evaluating things and services in terms of their exchange-value. At the same time, they ensure that each one aims to give according to his best capacities, thus enhancing his status and the quality of his relations to others while receiving according to his needs once others are eager to gift and reciprocate. Moreover, gifting ensures a global balance in the oikonomic flows as long as reciprocity happens. For instance, parenting, on the one hand, and caring for the older community members on the other can be seen as the poles of a gift-based reciprocity bond. Those gifts once received as children are reciprocated when we become adults and care for our children and older people. In the same way, once becoming more aged, we may be cared for by our children and the community as a whole one day. Wedding parties that go on for days or even weeks to which not only parents and close friends but the entire community and often even neighbouring villages are invited; funerals including generous gifts and celebrations as is still the habit in some African societies; game and fish sharing in traditional hunting and fishing communities; and inviting friends to a dinner or giving to the demanding poor at the doorsteps of the church on Sundays, these are all examples of sociocultural practices whereby wealth is redistributed and individual social identity and status are affirmed. Conversely, denying hospitality to a stranger or accumulating wealth without sharing it in feasts and social gatherings with the broader community is looked upon with suspicion. In traditional gift-based societies, it tends to lead to social

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marginalisation and even exclusion from the community. Indeed, the risk of being marginalised and being cut off from the protective web of a reciprocal community is a significant threat to the wellbeing and even survival of individuals living in traditional societies where markets and other alternatives are not widely available. But once people can buy goods and services in the markets, the risk of exclusion ceases to be a powerful incentive to a self-serving selfless gifting behaviour. Instead, needing money to pay for them, financial independence and ‘saving for the future’ become important, making people less inclined to gift and give away wealth. Therefore, it is not a matter of people being ‘better’ or ‘more generous’ in traditional societies, but different cultural and institutional frameworks. Each individual pursues his strategies to live and live the best he can. But, as a means-to-an-end, not all systems have the same effect on people’s wellbeing and the community. Once people relate to the markets, selling their products and services and buying the chosen goods and services to attend to their needs, they no longer have to rely on the reciprocal network to get by. Thus, community, neighbours, friends, family and even strangers’ generosity is no longer needed to pursue individual oikonomic aims. Thereby, individuals no longer bother being selfish and exploitative once they base themselves on objectified market relations. The more anonymous and objectified they are, the more people may let themselves be carried only by their own immediate needs instead of empathically connecting to others’ conditions. Local markets and small local shops and businesses still allow for this personal, carrying dimension between people. Both buyer and seller benefit from the exchange and the other’s behaviour, cherishing a personal relationship that will enable them to attend to different needs like affection, understanding, participation and even security. At a local, personal level, buyers and sellers may better trust each other and know, among others, that if not having the money to pay one day, it may be spent later. Conversely, by going to a big Walmart or anonymously buying through internet products produced in distant countries or by connecting to outsourced services, not only do we ignore the underlying needs of those selling them and the social and ecological impacts of their production, but we are not even compelled and motivated to do so. Thus, once markets penetrate and develop, traditional gift-enhancing frameworks and practices are removed. In a self-reinforcing feedback loop, the more markets grow in importance, the lower are the dangers of being ostracised from the local community once individual needs are satisfied through markets and not by the community. Thereby, the lower the need to reciprocate and the higher the need to accumulate exchange-values and be financially self-sufficient. Thus, not only are the pressures to gift and reciprocate diminished, but the need to earn more and more purchasing power to participate in these markets increased. Thereby, gift-oriented practices are replaced by market-oriented behaviour and competition. In its wake, community networks are destroyed; people lead more solitary lives and feel more insecure once they have to rely only on themselves or official social security to get by. Nevertheless, gifting is still an essential oikonomic motive, even in our modern globalised and market-centred world. For instance, in the contemporary USA. Philanthropism has become a way for wealthy American magnates (and

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ex-presidents, among others) to affirm their social status and identity, as well as to inscribe their name in the country’s collective history and tradition. Although there may also be chrematistic considerations behind the philanthropic activity, tax exemptions included, the main driving force behind Carnegie’s charitable actions, Rockefeller, Ford, Gates, Buffet, Carter, Clinton, Zuckerberg and so many others, is of another nature. They are securing a place for themselves in their nation’s history and (re)affirming their philanthropic identity—something which may be enhanced by naming their charities after themselves. Similarly, NGO volunteers may be motivated not by chrematistic stimulus and calculus but by the need to affirm their own identity by working for specific causes and participating in certain groups and communities. Along the same lines, people nurturing their blogs, YouTube and other social media channels may be doing so for commercial reasons. Notwithstanding, and more commonly so, most individuals simply affirm and reinforce their identity in the online and offline communities they belong to. Thus, received feedback, the number of followers, likes and other ways in which individual status on the internet is evaluated and presented, become an essential driving force behind the new web-based oikonomy. Or people may just contribute anonymously through an intrinsic desire to give and reciprocate, as I would in my desire to contribute to different wikis after having benefited from the existing ones when it came to writing this book. Many anthropologists have already noted the oikonomic dimension of saving and the individual security implied in this structure. Charles Eisenstein (2011) equates this to an expansion of the individual self to the community. By giving and nurturing your social bond to those receiving, you become part of a broader community, of a network of mutually binding interdependencies whereby each one takes care of the other. In this way, everybody has their oikonomic security significantly reinforced by this larger whole, instead of relying solely on their own. On the other hand, without reciprocity, the gift oikonomy fades. Furthermore, once people stop sharing and gifting, the social bond structuring these societies and groups is not reinforced. Thereby, community feelings suffer, and societies themselves fade away or even collapse. This has been observed in many cultures and is, in fact, one of the main ways whereby the traditional social fabric is dismantled in the face of the introduction of modern market relations, leading to the rapid demise of traditional gift-based institutions and practices. An excellent example of this transition and the cost of this process in terms of ‘living and living well’ is given by Helena Norberg-Hodge (1992) in her account of the dissolution and destruction of the Ladakhis’ traditional way of life in her book Ancient Futures—Learning from Ladakh. As elsewhere, ancient reciprocal traditions have rapidly been eroded by the spread of chrematistic-centred development practices in self-reinforcing transition processes. When Norberg-Hodge first arrived at this remote and isolated region of the Himalayas in the early 1970s, she found a largely self-sufficient and gift-driven community. People worked collectively on each other’s land, feast and hospitality were the norms, and, as she found out to her surprise, people were effectively happier there and felt much more secure than back in England where, although much richer

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in monetary terms, people felt much more isolated, insecure and stressed. But once modern-style development was introduced and promoted by India, to whom this predominantly Buddhist territory belongs, gift-sharing declined, and the whole traditional way of life rapidly entered in crisis. As waged labour became the norm increasingly, markets expanded. Immigrant workers, tourists and industrialised products started to flow into the region. At the same time, Ladakhis began to engage in more market relations, working for a wage and selling their products and services to others instead of engaging in their selfsufficient and gift-based traditional oikonomic practice. Fewer people were able and willing to gift, and as the old way of collective community work, sharing and giving declined, people would get less joint help to work their land. That, in turn, increased the need for hiring waged labour instead. The decline in social gatherings, freesharing of wealth and labour, added to the increased need to pay for everything that was needed, increasingly drove people, mainly men in general and young men in particular, to seek a chrematistic occupation in cities and villages where more market opportunities existed. Thereby further reducing the availability of shared labour on the land, meaning that rural producers had to produce to the markets increasingly and earn the needed money to pay for often immigrant waged work. It meant a complete cultural shift in their values and forms of asserting social status and standing. Production and individual status became subordinated to and assessed in chrematistic terms instead of the traditional ways. Consumption of Western-style products and pre-fabricated phantasy lifestyles seen in most Bollywood movies became popular, and an endless race towards chrematistic growth and accumulation became the new aspiration. Social polarisation, ethnic struggles and ecological imbalances grew along with its growing GDP, chrematistic opportunities and expansion. Thus, in a place which managed to live for thousands of years in social and ecological balance primarily happy and fulfilling human lives, despite the harshness of the climate and the high mountain environment they lived in, nowadays growing social polarisation and tensions, and near environmental collapse, have become the norm. Identity politics and ethnic clashes over minding resources, increasing waste, pollution and rising oikonomic hardship have resulted from just a few decades of modern-style development. As Norberg-Hodge (1992, pp. 84 and 85) concluded from her experience there, ‘at first I couldn’t believe that the Ladakhis could be as happy as they appeared. It took me a long time to accept that the smiles I saw were real. (. . .) Hidden behind the jokes and laughter had to be the same frustration, jealousy, and inadequacy as in my own society. In fact, without knowing it, I had been assuming that there were no significant cultural differences in the human potential for happiness. It was a surprise for me to realize that I had been making such unconscious assumptions, and as a result I think I became more open to experiencing what was really there. Of course the Ladakhis have sorrow and problems, and of course they feel sad when faced with illness or death. What I have seen is not an absolute difference; it is a question of degree. Yet the difference in degree is all-significant. As I return each year to the industrialized world, the contrast becomes more and more obvious. With so much of our lives colored by a sense of insecurity or fear, we have difficulty in

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letting go and feeling at one with ourselves and our surroundings. The Ladakhis, on the other hand, seem to possess an extended, inclusive sense of self. They do not, as we do, retreat behind boundaries of fear and self-protection. (. . .). I have never met people who seemed so healthy emotionally, so secure, as the Ladakhis. The reasons are, of course, complex and spring from a whole way of life and world view’.5 It sprung from the whole of their human-scale oikonomic development practice and the culturally defined and specific ways their fundamental human needs were met daily within their traditional lifestyle. This has all fallen apart in a short time, leading Norberg-Hodge to try to cooperate not by promoting modern-style development but the other way around: learning from the traditional methods and understanding their importance to preserve both social and ecological balances and communities. To counterbalance our limited and short-sighted Western understanding of development which, as she observed, looks much better and scintillating when seen from the outside than when experienced from the inside. Western technology and Western development are indeed impressive and powerful. We have the power and ability to realise exploits that just some centuries or even decades earlier could not even have been dreamt of. But we ignore its social and ecological cost at our expense. Still, particularly after World War II and the decadeslong worldwide development push, it has become a global reality. On the other hand, as it does on self-sufficiency, the chrematistic ‘art of getting rich’ has expanded and sometimes thrives on this human tendency to reciprocate and gift: not by suppressing it, but by subordinating it to its logic. For instance, different marketing strategies to increase corporative profits in branches like health or education exploit the human tendency to reciprocate. Two good cases in point are schoolbooks and medicines. Those who decide which textbooks are to be adopted or prescribe specific drugs will not directly pay for them in these branches. By generously distributing gifts on special occasions to doctors and druggists, providing medical researchers with study grants or staging conferences and presentations of new drugs at fancy venues (sometimes family included), pharmaceutical industries are investing in what is undoubtedly a straightforward and efficient marketing strategy. Often at a subconscious level, people benefiting from such generosity and receiving such gifts tend to reciprocate by prescribing those particular drugs to their patients. The same goes for educational book and software publishers, who may hand out gifts and books to teachers, principals and educational authorities without requesting any direct retribution. It suffices to rely on the fact that their generosity will be reciprocated. Thus, their educational material will be adopted as required reading and support material, paid for by either the parents or the public sector.

As a linguist, she was one of the first Westerners speaking Ladakhi to visit Ladakh in the early 1970s. Up to 1975, Ladakh was closed to tourism and shielded from foreign influence by India once, at the border with both Pakistan and China and culturally closer to the Tibetan culture than the Indian one, it was seen as a sensible region. Thus, she could witness first-hand both the traditional way of life mostly untainted by major Western influence and the later changes brought by the adoption of the market-driven and state-sponsored conventional development model which happened later. 5

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Therefore, without the need to ask or establish written agreements and pay commissions on sales, or even ask for them, recipients reciprocating the received gifts assure the return on this kind of marketing investment often in more efficient ways than if they had been paid for it. Reciprocity may also be subordinated to the redistribution logic, as when NGOs and voluntary workers provide products and services to needy people and communities. Thus, redistributing wealth towards some society members and compensating for the lack of public or private redistributive politics are ways individuals gift their time or resources, favouring redistribution. For instance, caring for the elderly, immigrants or street children in places and times in which no official or insufficient government help exists. But, whatever the case, gift oikonomy appears much more limited, subordinated or even manipulated in modern society. Simultaneously, some reverse signs may be observed too, particularly in the face of oikonomic crisis and there where the chrematistic hardship is allied to a lack of government redistribution policies. It happens as well through the spread of the internet and the ‘new economy’, in which a great deal of oikonomic life springs from voluntary work, free-sharing and philanthropy. Thus, often accompanying the deepening social, oikonomic and environmental crisis of our chrematistically centred oikonomic development process—as well as deepening crisis in the public sector responsible for, among other things, redistributive policies—we may observe an increase in the post-modern realm of reciprocity: the growth of voluntary work, NGOs, associations and other initiatives surviving on volunteers, donations and gifts, while many people devote themselves to social and environmental justice and redistributive actions. Similarly, internetbased communities allow their members to share, on a gift basis, all kinds of services ranging from freely shared information and knowledge to travelling, housing and transport.6 Crowdfunding, Couchsurfing, peer-to-peer communities and a vast array of free-shared and gifted wealth are all on the rise as well. Thus, initiatives around the world, both local and global, are being continually created, allowing its members to engage in gift-based and social bond-creating oikonomic processes. Here too, use-values motivate and inform the oikonomic process, while market logic and functions (when present) are subordinated as a means-to-an-end to them. But on the internet, too, this human tendency to freely share, give and reciprocate may be exploited by chrematistics as a new way to make a profit. Initiatives like

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It would be impossible to make even an approximate list of the existing initiatives. Just to quote some internet-based forums, we have all kind of wikis, free software, P2P technologies and communities like Couchsurfing which allow their member to travel around the world just relying on the hospitality of the millions of fellow members around the globe (https://www.couchsurfing. com/). As posted on their web page, ‘Susi is the perfect example of the Couchsurfing spirit. She greeted us at the subway, took us out to Oktoberfest with her friends, took me on a nice bike tour of Giesling and made us feel at home in her apartment. Thanks a lot Susi, I hope you come to San Francisco soon so we can show you the same hospitality!’ (seen October 7, 2015). Gift oikonomy and reciprocity in a nutshell! In all these examples, wealth is (re)produced and distributed for free by its members.

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TripAdvisor or Waze (the former allowing people to benefit from fellow travellers’ free advice and the latter to benefit from fellow drivers’ tips to avoid traffic jams) became big commercial hits, as did Amazon, which offers product information and guidance by relying on its clients for providing free customer reviews and even support to fellow clients. In any case, the critical point to retain is that reciprocity, be it in its pure form or subordinated to others, has always been a primary form whereby individuals and communities pursue their oikonomic aims producing, distributing and sharing wealth to ‘live and to live well’—something entirely ignored by modern economic theory. A third fundamental form of oikonomic life is redistribution. Unlike in reciprocity, where a gift is given directly by the giver to the receiver, riches are centralised by a higher authority that redistributes them in the redistribution system. Thus, instead of horizontality and symmetry, like the former, it presupposes verticality and hierarchy: from the more individualistic patriarchal structures whereby the patriarch (or matriarch) redistributes to the family group or the clan up to the ancient empires and feudal systems where the nobility and the clergy concentrated a vital part of the social product later to be redistributed by them. It has been central to the twentiethcentury socialist regimes like the Soviet Union, China or Cuba and fundamental to the post-War European Welfare States. If we take countries like France or Finland in which the proportion of government spending to GDP is at over 55% in 2019, it meant that more than half of the yearly expenditures in the oikonomy are done not following the linear maximisation calculus of individuals, but according to government’s social and political priorities. Public healthcare, public schools, agricultural subsidies or unemployment payments mean that the government centralises the monetary resources through taxation to be later redistributed. From that perspective, the difference between ‘socialist’ and ‘capitalist’ regimes is more about form than content. Both share their belief in progress through scientific and technological development, a reductionist and objectified perspective on reality and the same industrial and material growth aims. They differ in how these aims, which can be summed up as the modern ideology of progress, are best realised. Furthermore, they coexist and complement each other, in both the so-called market and communist regimes. Within redistribution, politics and institutional power relations guide the oikonomic process. Instead of the individual freely engaging in self-sufficiency, gifting or buying and selling in the market, a central authority controls and defines production and distribution. Moreover, it is used to subsidise industry, commerce and agriculture and build infrastructures and other ways of supporting private enterprises and industry. But here, as in the other forms of oikonomic behaviour we have seen so far, in our modern free-market society, this realm also became increasingly colonised by and subordinated to the chrematistic logic. State policy and redistribution policy are subordinated to the need to counterbalance the adverse social and ecological side effects of an entirely free market. This is done either by directly engaging in the production and administration of oikonomic activities or by devising legislation and redistribution policies that balance the chrematistic development process’s social and ecological distributional costs.

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Thus, governments are called to secure the ecological, social, institutional, ideological and technical infrastructures and superstructures required to maintain and enhance the chrematistic efficiency and competitiveness of the local, national and global oikonomies. Thereby, through redistribution, a great deal of the produced wealth is either redistributed and reinvested in new transport and information infrastructures, formal education, research, innovation, police and security or spent as subsidies for rescuing the financial sector and particular companies ‘too big to fail’ from the crisis and the threat of chrematistic breakdown. In any case, despite the economists’ reductionist view equating the economy to chrematistics, through redistribution, even in the so-called market economies, a significant proportion of the produced wealth and the way it is distributed follows political and administrative constraints, being subjected to political decisions and power relations. As Polanyi showed from an empirical and historical perspective, markets have never been entirely free, nor can they without generating grave social, oikonomic and ecological imbalances and destruction. Thus, despite modern economist’s models’ assumption about the existence of free market and untainted ‘rational maximising behaviour’, the reality is that the political and administrative logic behind redistribution is a significant element of the oikonomic process, even in the USA, where government spending is over 37% of the total GDP. Then, there is the fourth form of oikonomic behaviour identified by Polanyi, namely, commerce, which, as we saw, the Greeks named chrematistics, ‘the art of acquisition’. By exchanging things and actions, goods and services, we acquire what we desire more in exchange for what we want less. Reciprocally, the other person who agrees with the transaction receives something he loves more in exchange for something he values less—otherwise, he would have no incentive to make the exchange in the first place. Thus, both parties are seen to engage freely in the exchange process, each with their motives and benefiting from the process in use-value terms. Freedom, horizontality and mutual benefit are integral elements of commerce, assuming no one is compelled to engage in a commercial transaction by force or abused due to unequal information and power relations. Or, said otherwise, that neither party is being duped by the other into buying a pig in a poke. Should this be the case (as it often is), we would be witnessing acquisition through superior force or merely unequal power relations, more akin to plunder than free commerce.7 Simultaneously, through the exchange, a quantitative relationship between qualitatively different goods (or services) is established, thereby giving rise to exchangevalue: one kilogram of potatoes being exchanged for, let’s say, a dozen eggs. Therefore, as Marx (1867/2015, p. 28) put it, ‘the exchange values of commodities

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It may be noted, a point we shall come back to later, that as George Akerlof and Robert Shiller (2015) argue, once profit is the main driving force behind commerce, sellers will systematically try to exploit psychological weaknesses and consumer ignorance through manipulation and deception. To increase profits, markets are inherently filled with tricks and traps and will, as they put it, ‘phish us as phools’.

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must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity. This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. (. . .). As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value’. As is well known, once this quantitative value notion is established, a further abstraction may arise, namely, money and prices. Money’s use-value is that it may be used as a medium for exchange, thus making exchanges easier. Here, money is simply a measuring stick that measures all different goods and services, like the potatoes and the eggs, both reduced to a common monetary denominator. Just as a balance allows us to weigh other things and a centimetre will enable us to compare different objects’ lengths, money only relates different things. By doing so, each commodity refers not just to another but to all things since this common denominator expresses everything in money terms. Notwithstanding, this further abstraction leads to the potential confusion of one with the other: taking money, which is no more than an agreed measurement of wealth, for wealth itself. Thus, we reduce the essence of things to their measurement stick, ignoring their qualities. As if we were to look at trees only according to their heights, ecosystems according to the combined volume of biomass or any other measure they may contain. Historically, as described in many accounts, certain items (like shells, stones, salt, etc.), by their particular characteristics (such as small size, divisibility, durability, homogeneity and relative scarcity), became the first means by which to mediate this exchange. Subsequently, metals like silver, gold or copper were chosen to serve as a means of exchange. Once different weights of a given metal had come to relate to other values, it was just a small step to arrive at stamped coins indicating and guaranteeing known compositions and weight. Then, in a further step, paper money was created. Initially as deposit certificates, indicating supposedly existing deposits, private or public debt and later a fixed amount of gold or other precious metal like bronze, silver, gold or any other metal (the gold standard). And finally, once the gold standard had been abandoned, paper money became governmentissued or guaranteed so-called fiat money, worth what people trust it to be worth. A dollar is worth a dollar, nothing else. Today, with information technologies and the spread of credit cards and global finances, we have reached the latest and most abstract incarnation of money: digital currency. Money, here, is merely a set of binary combinations of zeros and ones translated into numbers on the screen and processed in the computers’ dark rooms filled with electronic chips. As the outcome of this process, an increasingly abstract notion of value emerged, ending in a purely abstract incarnation whose existence is acknowledged solely by trust in its existence. Indeed, once electronic money has been created, actual

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commodities are exchanged through faith alone, trusting that the changes in the configurations of zeros and ones somewhere on a bank server will allow the receiver to trade these changes for something else further down the chrematistic line. Thus, that which was just a measure of wealth became to be seen as wealth itself. In all other oikonomic forms, use-values are the guiding principles behind the economic process. Notwithstanding, in the case of chrematistics, things are produced, exchanged and often consumed—once people subjectively attribute a higher use-value to more expensive items—according to their exchange-value. For instance, within a self-sufficiency framework, our own needs like consuming certain vegetables or the simple pleasure of gardening, for example, guide our work and production. In a gift oikonomy, as we have seen, wealth in terms of use-values tends to flow towards the needy and reciprocally return to the individual once he has particular needs that the gifts of others may attend. Lastly, within a redistribution framework, wealth redistribution is governed by political power relations, law or tradition, depending on each individual’s social position in society. Here, fundamental needs in use-values terms are the guiding principle: wealth is redistributed and assigned to each member through political and administrative means, aiming to attain specific social or ecological aims. Unless it is subordinated to chrematistics, plunder is also driven by the quality and use-value of what is taken. Having the superior force to do so, those engaged in plunder and piracy take what they desire and need to ‘live and try to live well’. The same happens when an exchange is made to acquire a different use-value by giving something in exchange for it. Here, too, use-values guide behaviour and thus constitute the driving force behind the oikonomic process. As we saw following Aristotle, in this case, it is a constituent part of the oikonomy. A tool to improve our lives and wellbeing. But once an exchange and an equivalence are intermediating the process when engaging in a market relation, as Aristotle already saw, a different, quantitative logic enters the stage. It is no longer the use-value logic, the exchange of qualitatively diverse goods or services to satisfy our needs, but the exchange-value logic, the purpose of accumulating more money, to earn a quantitative profit which may drive our behaviour. Thus, we enter the realm of commerce and exchange for profit: ‘the art of getting rich’, which Aristotle saw as external to the oikonomy but is central to modern capitalist society. In this realm, as Aristotle already foresaw, we enter into potentially infinite growth. There is a limit to everything in the universe. There is a limit to the use-values, too, we manage to use and handle. But once we enter into the abstract world of exchange-values, of numbers, growth can be pursued forever. Particularly now, whence most of our money has become digital money, and the multimillionaires ‘net worth’ in the jargon of our modern perception of wealth is counted into billions and even hundreds of billions. If handled in their physical form, given that a dollar bill weighs one gram, one billion dollars has, even if taken in US$ 100,00 bills, a weight of 10 tons. Given that all US dollar bills, regardless of currency, are 0.109 mm thick, stacked one over the other, they would be 109 times 0.109/10/100/1000 km high. That is, 109 kilometres! These days, in early January 2021, Elon Musk, the CEO and founder of Tesla and SpaceX, among others, has just overcome Jeff Bezos as the ‘world’s richest person’

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with a so-called net worth of US$189.7 billion. More than 20 thousand kilometres into outer space if stacked one over the other in one dollar. Even if taken in the 100 dollar denomination bill, they would staple way beyond the stratosphere, more than 200,000 km up into the thermosphere where satellites circle the Earth, weighing 1.897 tons. Although fulfilling Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos dreams of reaching space, their monetary wealth could not be handled in its physical form, existing just as an abstract measure of their supposed riches. We can quickly speak about numbers as high as we can imagine. Talk about vigintillions (10120) or googols (10100). But it becomes impossible to count them out loud or even to make sense out of them. Indeed, the highest number ever being counted out loud, so far, has been one million. It took Jeremy Harper 89 days, 16 hours a day, to do so. We live limited lives in limited spaces, and our lives and our wellbeing result not from enormity and disproportion but balances and relations. That is why Aristotle saw the unlimited growth drive and accumulation desire of those devoted to just growing their monetary wealth as unnatural and alien to ‘the art of living and living well’. Something we, in our modern capitalist society, have forgotten and still ignore. In our modern world and conventional economic theory, exchange-value logic becomes the primary aspect around which the oikonomic process is ordered. ‘Efficiency’ is evaluated in quantitative terms and measured in exchange-value terms. By doing so, we do not perceive that some oikonomic operations may be very efficient in chrematistic terms, providing significant quantitative profits, but very inefficient in use-value terms, in terms of ‘the art of living and living well’. Thus, when the last quarter results are positive and have increased, we rejoice that ‘the economy is doing well’ and GDP is growing—not asking ourselves about the qualitative aspects underlying these dynamics. Nor do we question whether the growth in the monetary value of the goods and services and how they have been made increased our wellbeing or not. We do not ask ourselves whether the GDP growth results from increased deforestation, polluted environments or needed paid-for healthcare and clean-up of rivers and waters or even whether it is just a speculative growth in the financial wealth without any new wealth in use-values having been created on its wake. We ignore that by looking at the quantitative relation between ‘things’ instead of the different relations and processes whereby life and our wellbeing are regenerated, we end up forgetting what the oikonomy is all about in the first place. To assume that human behaviour is based on these principles and that human rationality is directed towards the accumulation of exchange-values and monetary profits is a modern prejudice accepted by Adam Smith and introduced as a cornerstone of contemporary economics. As I came to understand, it became how economics wishes us to look at the oikonomic process. Here, chrematistics ceases to be a means to an end, a way to acquire different use-values, but a means in itself: a way to accumulate more and more exchange-values. Oikonomic behaviour pursues quantitative growth rather than seeking a means to satisfy our needs and sustain our lives and wellbeing. As I learned from Max Weber, this kind of oikonomic behaviour and rationality is a central aspect of the spirit of capitalism and the modern protestant ethic. It certainly applied to Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA who, having started the

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company aged 17, spent his whole life—he worked well into his 1980s—building it up into the world’s largest furniture retailer and himself into one of the world’s wealthiest men in chrematistic terms. Even so, the accumulated money was not meant to be spent on use-values but saved to allow for more exchange-value accumulation. ‘He shunned first-class travel. The champagne didn’t get you there any earlier, he sniffed; having lots of money was no reason to waste it. He bought his clothes in flea markets, and for years drove an elderly Volvo until he had to sell it on safety grounds. He had his hair cut in poor countries to save money. Even his tax exile in Switzerland was parsimonious. Visitors admired his views, but were surprised that his villa was so run-down’ (The Economist, 2018, p. 78). Companies exist to accumulate exchange-value and continue existing as long as they manage to ‘efficiently’ do so. Indeed, it is at the centre of modern corporations set up as a legal entity and having their identity and existence conditioned by this ongoing and potentially never-ending chrematistic growth pursue. It is also the very definition of capital and capitalism given by Marx: an ongoing process whereby commodities are bought to be sold again later at a profit.8 Chrematistics is based on the commodity form, its major prerequisite, and thus on the commodification of reality in that things and processes have to be open to being possessed, sold and bought. It means objectification of reality, a separation between the possessing subject and the possessed object. We feel separated from our reality, relating to it in terms of things that can be alienated from us, sold to or bought from someone else. Humans are not rooted in the land or home, which become just real estate open to be bought and sold. We as subjects may sell our labour as something external to ourselves, carrying out a job or a function without identifying with it or even feeling related to it, thereby separating our private from our professional life. Being desacralised and losing their special aura, which relates given realities and things to specific individuals or communities, is a prerequisite of commodity and quantitative market equivalence between different qualitative relations. Thus, as Max Weber had already shown, a process of rationalisation from which modern law and institutions emerged had to occur. Reality is analysed ‘rationally’ and objectively, in quantitative and reductionist terms, not in terms of our tradition, values and morals. It requires rational structural and institutional settings whereby the free act of transaction and private property is protected by law. Moreover, individuals in their behaviour are supposed to set aside their values and beliefs and look only to their chrematistic, short-term interests. In Brazil, there is a saying which goes ‘as friends, friends, business apart’. It means that once you enter into a commercial relation even with a friend, you will be treating him as you would

As Marx (1867/2015, p. 104) put it, there is ‘the simplest form of the circulation of commodities is C-M-C, the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy. But alongside this form, we find another specifically different form: M-C-M, the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the latter manner is thereby transformed into, becomes capital, and is already potentially capital’.

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anyone else, as if he were a stranger to you—each one looking only to his chrematistic interests.9 Private property, a legal and institutional framework to protect it, the social division of labour and freedom to trade are essential ingredients of commerce. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas called it a radical cultural change whereby instrumental reason takes the foreground in contrast to communicative reason. The former means looking and acting in terms of means-to-an-end logic, pursuing ‘efficiency’, ‘maximum profits’ or whatever goal may be set. The latter, by contrast, means to follow behaviour rules and ethics set by tradition and the way social relations, structures and meanings are created through social interaction and ‘language games’. Thereby, instead of external cultural and political values defining the use and eventual protection of given realities, by reducing everything to objects, price alone and the willingness of individuals to buy or sell at a profit are supposed to guide the oikonomic process and thus the relations among people and of humans with their natural environment. The means are justified by the ends instead of following tradition and the overall cultural values. The known slogan ‘the world is not for sale’ is a reaction to this process. By acknowledging that certain realities, certain lands, landscapes or people are not simply open to be bought and sold but need to be protected, limits to the chrematistic logic are sought. A sacred site, a particular species and a living being are thus attributed and given rights as a subject, therefore being protected from being subordinated by others to their ends. Thus, just as humans were prevented from being sold as slaves, other beings and realities are seen to possess intrinsic rights and value. Thus, too, the reluctance of traditional people to sell their land or their properties: being intimately related to them, they had even a sacred value, and they were not to be treated as objects that can be reduced to a price and be bought or sold. It has already been noted by psychologists and social scientists alike that the process of ‘objectification’ is a central aspect for exerting both dominion and violence. In wars, the enemy fighters are not portrayed as equal subjects but categorised as ‘Germans’, ‘Bolsheviks’, ‘capitalists’, ‘salvages’ or ‘imperialists’ according to which side you happen to be fighting for. Thus, the ‘other’ is not portrayed as an equal subject to you, with the same rights, sufferings and needs as yourself, but an anonymous object among others. The same happens in our relations with nature: we exploit ‘natural resources’ and eat ‘meat’, but not specific, named subjects possessing their rights to live and exist. Contrarily, by sacralising something, picking it up or naming something or someone amidst all of its kind, we attribute to it or her the status of a subject. We create a particular relation to the person or reality, thereby creating a framework for our behaviour and connection. Weber began his studies on rationalisation with his highly influential The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (original German Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, first published in 1904/1905), although it is a central theme which pervades his entire work. See also his Economy and Society (original German Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie, first published posthumously in 1922–1925). 9

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Rituals and worshipping are the most visual ways whereby our behaviour is moulded and restrained according to our beliefs and how we see the other as a subject with its rights and needs—putting limits to our freedom and needs where freedom and needs of the other start. A particular space, object, person or being is deemed sacred or special, asking us specific ways of behaving and relating. Thus, we do not eat our pets or wage war against those we see as our kind. Nor do traditional people exploit their sacred grounds for monetary profit. This all had to be put aside once we enter chrematistic, free-market relations where profit maximisation ends justify the means. Increasing commodification of things and processes converted into goods and services makes it possible to own, consume, exchange, sell and accumulate property and assets. The more so, the more commodified reality becomes, and more aspects are seen to be open to being freely traded. Thus too, among the main obstacles to be overcome to ‘foster economic development’ are the traditional values and practices limiting the use and exploitation of nature and others in the name of ‘economic efficiency’ and interests. Thus, the reason why the expansion of the domains subjected to the free-market competition constantly finds the resistance of those subjects, be they human or nature as an active actor on its right, refusing to be subordinated as objects to the chrematistic logic. Those fighting not to be reduced to the commodity status and who believe themselves or others are not open for sale. Simultaneously, expanding this objectification of reality changes how we relate to others and our world and how we relate to ourselves as subjects and assess our identity. Having and the number of accumulated objects, not being and the way we relate to the world, has become the primary way to determine our own identity and personal power as a subject in our modern world. We no longer base our identity and status on our moral behaviour, our adherence to traditional practice and etiquette but our bank account’s size. As Marx (1932/1959, p. 60) already put it in 1844, ‘that which is for me through the medium of money—that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy)—that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my—the possessor’s—properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money’. The corollary of that is that the greater the extent of markets, the more individuals may assess their identity and aim ‘to live and live well’ by extending their power and identities by exercising their ‘purchasing power’. Indeed, the more goods and services are open to being bought, the more individuals may assess their identity in chrematistic terms, accumulating exchangevalues instead of sharing or relying on others. Morals, notions of sacredness and inviolability are thus replaced by the individual’s chrematistic calculus and ‘naked self-interest’. It may be essential to note that, like all in life, we have to look at these five primary oikonomic forms as a continuously changing whole. Although each one possesses its logic and boundaries, they are not to be seen as separate, self-contained realities. Individual oikonomic activities and oikonomic development generally constitute the emergent, visible result of different combinations, arrangements and

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particular modalities and forms of self-sufficiency, reciprocity, redistribution and chrematistic and plunder-dominated oikonomic behaviour. They must be seen as ‘ideal types’ or ‘pure types’ in the Weberian sense, that is, as ideal images of given concrete realities. It should be noted that the term ‘ideal’ has not to be taken as referring to ideal in the sense of perfection but as of the world of ideas, of thought images (German: Gedankenbilder). As ideal types, they highlight the essential aspects of a given phenomenon by pointing to their essential elements and patterns: idea-constructs that help provide meaning to the seemingly chaotic diversity perceived by our senses. They allow us to illuminate concrete realities by pointing to some of their underlying dynamics and essential features. In this sense, they may be seen as what Goethe termed the Urphänomen, the archetypical phenomenon. As mixed realities, private companies pursue their chrematistic objectives through the markets while, internally, redistributing their revenues and profits and allocating their resources according to their administrative order and plans, maintaining a strictly hierarchical structure. Thereby, while externally engaging in chrematistic free-market competition, commercial companies are internally organised as redistributive systems. Conversely, public companies may pursue redistributive objectives while including, internally, results-based remuneration policies to stimulate higher productivity and even stimulate meritocratic and competitive internal labour relations. Similarly, Alfred Nobel, for example, financed his famous Nobel Prize—an instance of gift oikonomy—from his chrematistic earnings. Therefore, his historical identity has been cemented for posterity by being identified with the prize that bears his name rather than how he earned the capital to establish it producing armaments and holding more than 300 patents, among them dynamite he invented. As for Nobel, the use (and sometimes exploitative abuse) of the chrematistic art of acquiring money may act as an essential means to acquire wealth to be gifted or donated, thus reinforcing our social status and identity within a gift oikonomy mind setting. Conversely, to give other examples, social position in Soviet nomenklatura was an essential means towards individual wealth accumulation, as is still the case not only of contemporary China’s communist party but of Western-style democratic institutions as well. In all of them, a political career may be pursued for the sake of personal gain, either through more or less corrupt practices or through profiting from the so-called revolving doors between corporate and political establishments. Therefore, those who have the political and administrative power to regulate and direct redistribution and those who are chrematistically affected by these regulations reinforce each other reciprocally. In another example, closer to the time of writing, Donald Trump’s chrematistic approach to politics and to ‘the art of the deal’ (seen as a competitive power relation in which one party tries by all possible means to impose its interests on the other) illustrates how redistributive power structures (the state) are subordinated to the chrematistic interests and logic of the individual. Conversely, there are cases like Vladimir Putin’s control of the Russian state and government giving him and his allies access to great political power and chrematistic wealth. One is reinforcing the other.

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Thriving and growing GDP has always been the ground for modern redistributing Welfare State, the European and particularly the Scandinavian models being a case in point. It is too central to the maintenance of centralised power structures and regimes like the oil-exporting oikonomies of the Middle East or the rapidly growing China, where ongoing chrematistic growth has been a central aspect of legitimising its single-party system’s grip on power. At the individual level, we too pursue our personal goals and try to satisfy our fundamental needs by participating in and combining, differently according to each individual and at each period of our life, these five primary oikonomic forms. Some requirements we satisfy autonomously, self-sufficiently, producing the necessary satisfiers for ourselves; others we may receive as gifts; others from redistribution and still others through acquisition, freely engaging in commerce. We may as well take by force, pursuing the ‘art of living and living well’ through theft, exploitation of natural resources or fellow humans. At all times, individual and collective wealth and wellbeing derive from one isolated and the combined results of them all. My experience as a teacher and researcher at a public university may serve as an example too. According to my position and the department’s internal power structures, I had access to public research funds, scholarships and grants in the university. In this sense, academia is structured according to hierarchical (some say medieval) power structures. Available resources are redistributed to each member of the organisation depending on their social status, position and connections. Moreover, relying on public funds, I turned on the university and the state’s public and administrative redistribution policies. Simultaneously, teachers and researchers may also stimulate or create independent commercial activities, depending on their entrepreneurial and selling skills, by doing applied research, creating patents and consultancies and launching partnerships with the private sector. Both forms of oikonomy are mutually reinforcing: academic position may foster chrematistic benefits, while commercial businesses may add to a researcher’s income. At the same time, I may rely on my savings (selfsufficiency), on publicly funded social security schemes (redistribution) or on friends and family (reciprocity) to sustain myself, having retired from my paid job (chrematistic) and engaging in writing this book. As an academic, I may even plunder someone else’s research or sometimes, through subtle power relations, get graduate and post-graduate students I may supervise to organise conferences or publish papers in my name. Thereby, I may improve my academic position within the institution and, eventually, my chrematistic prospects by exploiting others’ work. In any case, in a changing dynamic balance in all its details, everyone bases their ‘art of living and living well’ on different mixes and qualities of these various forms of oikonomic behaviour to get by. Thus, contrary to the hegemonic reductionist view, ‘the art of living and living well’ cannot be assessed and evaluated by simply looking at a person’s or nation’s chrematistic income or the sum of possessed assets. Since it is not static but based on a qualitative mix of use-values, it is a process that goes far beyond easily measurable and quantifiable chrematistics. Simultaneously, as a living, dynamic and ever-changing whole, the oikonomic process must be understood as an interdependent part of more extensive and ever-

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changing socio-ecological processes with their own rules and logic beyond purely oikonomic ones. Social structures and processes, cultural values and dynamics, politics and environmental changes, ecological dynamics and individual behaviour are all elements that shape the oikonomic process while being transformed and (co)reproduced by it. In the same way as the functioning of a given organ like the heart or lungs cannot be fully understood if we do not see the way they relate, transform and are transformed by the other organs and the organism as a whole, we cannot understand the oikonomic process as separate from its broader social and ecological contexts: all both product and the producer of itself and the larger whole they participate. Economists, separating the market process from its context, take the vain attempt of modern natural sciences to understand life and the living by dissecting living beings within the sterilised walls of laboratories one step further. Unable to create artificial laboratory conditions to observe life process in isolation, economists simply imagined an abstract, non-existing laboratory in the realm of mathematical models and reasoning: an idealised world where isolated variables are mathematised and manipulated to observe their dynamics and evolution. Thus, instead of being isolated in a brick and mortar laboratory, an abstract laboratory is premised and assumed to exist. An environment in which all potentially disturbing factors are kept out from the laboratory conditions by merely supposing them to be unchanging and thus not affecting the evolution of the model’s variables. But here, and this is the main point I came to discover, sticking to a reduced and misleading perspective on reality, particularly in the realm of economics, is not just a matter of scientific interest. After all, ‘the economy does rule the world’, our lives and our wellbeing. Indeed, it affects us all and is at the centre of our current struggles and our social and ecological crisis. But, if we wish to change the world, we have to change the way we perceive it first. We have to enlarge our understanding of the oikonomic process and start looking at the real world instead. As for King Midas’s case, following a false perception of reality, as the Greeks constantly depicted in their myths, ends in tragedy. Instead of sustaining a prosperous and healthy life, perishing amidst his accumulated gold. Thus do we, growing and gathering more and more without realising that we may end up in social and ecological tragedy amidst our glittering possessions, the magical powers of our technology, our increasingly sophisticated gadgets and the sheer scale of our industrial exploits. Thereby now, much more than in Aristotle’s time, we have first to change how we perceive reality and thus guide our behaviour. Look into the nature and cause of wealth and how we, through our oikonomic practice, regenerate wealth and sustain our lives or, instead, follow in the wrong direction. After all, there is nothing more inefficient than speeding in the wrong direction at maximum efficiency. Indeed, it seems exactly what we are busily doing: pursuing more and more growth in exchange-value terms instead of the balance in which health and wealth are found. Even within today’s developed market societies, our lives and health still owe more to non-traded and even non-tradable things and dynamics than tradable ones. They nourish and sustain such fundamental and intangible things as love and

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affection, meaning, understanding, identity, security and freedom. Even in physical terms, our subsistence owes a significant amount to non-bought things. As we shall see in the next part, as a composite, complex symbiotic being made up of more non-human cells than properly human cells, we do not pay for these tiny creatures, nor do we pay for our internal metabolic systems and functions. Nor do we pay for love and friendship. We may pay for a doctor and buy probiotic pills, vitamins and food. We may even pay for sexual intercourse and human encounters with a psychologist or teachers. These may all be satisfiers, use-values acquired by money or by direct barter. But the ecological and human essence of the affection, health or understanding we may gain is of another nature, non-reducible to prices and quantitative measuring. Even today, the bulk of what makes us human and sustains our lives remains beyond the grasp of chrematistics. Even so, by considering ‘the richest people and countries in the world’ according to their bank accounts and their potential purchasing power and not by the way their necessaries are being satisfied or not, we succumb to the same illusion and confusion Midas did. We forget that gold and, even less, today’s electronic virtual money cannot be eaten. Moreover, as we will come back once we discuss the ‘nature and cause’ of human needs, they are always relational, being satisfied or not according to the relation which is established in each particular changing context and reality, and not something related to the ‘thing’ or the satisfier as such. It cannot be measured and objectified but represents an emergent property of changing wholes instead. Through it, both parts, the consumer and that which is being consumed, are transformed. Gold, for Midas, negatively affected his life in the same way that possessing huge sums speculatively invested in financial assets may be a source of anxiety instead of improving the holder’s quality of life. Thus, eventually leading to suicide, pathologies or violence. As something fundamentally understood in the classic Greek tradition, life and particularly a good life—eudemonia10—are not based on and derived from ongoing growth but on the proper balances. Oikonomy, as an art subordinated to life and the good life, is thus neither alien to eudemonia nor dissociated from ethics and aesthetics, from combining different qualitative elements in the proper balances and keeping them within the correct limits. It is from this perspective that we may also understand Aristotle’s (1999, p. 17) final claim that of the two sorts of chrematistics, the one concerned with the ‘art of living and living well’ is ‘necessary and honourable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and

εὐδαιμoνία/eudaimonia is a Greek word commonly translated as happiness or welfare, derived from eu (good) and daimōn (spirit). It can be understood too as meaning ‘human flourishing’ and was a central concern of Greek philosophy, where many varieties of eudaimonism can be found. Two of the most influential forms are those of Aristotle and the Stoics. Aristotle takes virtue and its exercise to be the most important constituent in eudaimonia, but also acknowledges the importance of external goods such as health, wealth and beauty. By contrast, the Stoics make virtue necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia and thus deny the necessity of external goods.

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not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural’. Here too, Aristotle foresaw the dangers of financial capital, which, as we will turn back later, has increasingly become the primary way whereby chrematistic fortunes are being created nowadays, individuals breeding money out of money.

References Akerlof, G. A., & Shiller, R. J. (2015). Phishing for phools—The economics of manipulation and deception. Princeton University Press. Alphandéry, P., Bitoun, P., & Dupont, Y. (1992). O Equívoco Ecológico—Riscos Políticos. Brasiliense. Aristotle. (1999). Politics. Batoche Books. Clastres, P. (1974). La Société contre l’État. Ed. de Minuit. Eisenstein, C. (2011). Sacred economics—Money, gift & society in the age of transition. Evolver Editions. Goldsmith, E. (1992). The way—An ecological world view. Rider. Illich, I., & Cayley, D. (1992). Ivan Illich in conversation. House of Anansi Press Limited. Lotka, A. J. (1925/1956). Elements of physical biology (re-edited as Elements of mathematical biology). Williams & Wilkins. Marx, K. (1867/2015). Capital – A critique of political economy (Vol. I). Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1932/1959). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844—Third manuscript. Progress. Online version. Norberg-Hodge, H. (1992). Ancient futures—Learning from Ladakh. Sierra Club Books. Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation. Farrar & Rinehart. Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone age economics. Aldine Atherton. Seddon, R. (Ed.). (1993). Selected writings of Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner Press. The Economist. (2018, February 10). Self-made man—Obituary Ingvar Kamprad. The Economist. Weber, M. (1904–5). Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik—Deutsche Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik, 20, 1–54; 21, 1–110.

Chapter 7

The Troubles with Free Markets

As something we all experience whence buying something, we just look at what is in front of our eyes. We cannot see how it came into being. We do not perceive the underlying social and ecological production dynamics, nor how it will affect ourselves and our environment once we consume and dispose of it. The commodity form, that is, reducing something to an object which may be bought and sold, is a way of increasing our ignorance and alienation. By converting something into a commodity, we isolate it from its context and history. Thus, we see a shirt, a pack of frozen shrimps, a car, but we do not see mines, energy grids, labourers and degraded ecosystems. Marx called it ‘commodity fetishism’. In the same way that we may take a fetish for the real thing—for instance, praying to a Virgin Mary figure as if we were talking to the mother of God as such—by relating solely to an object transformed into a commodity, we do so as if the only thing that matters is that which we have right in front of our eyes. We only take into account the product and its price. We overlook the way it has been produced and its actual social and ecological cost. We ignore that it is just the external manifestation of something else, another reality we cannot see. Moreover, we reduce all different things to a common denominator, namely, money, their exchange-value. As Marx (1932/1959, p. 61) put it, ‘since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things—the world upside-down—the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities’. By equalising everything as exchange-values, money puts an alienating veil on reality. Everything becomes a number, a price. Cheaper or more expensive. Open to be hired, bought and sold. Social and ecological relations and dynamics lay hidden behind prices and market exchange relations. Marx focused on how whence buying something we do not consider the social relations behind what we are buying. The labour conditions and eventual exploitation lay hidden far away in the factory. Like other economists and social scientists of his time, he was not that worried about Nature, but he could ideally have added the ecological dynamics. How, behind every commodity, there is a human-Nature © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_7

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relation too. Once a product is brought to the market, we, as potential consumers, only perceive the final product and its price. As put by conventional economics, it is that which should guide the decisions of the ‘rational economic agent’, not worrying about the broader implications of our decision and behaviour as consumers. We can just leave it to the ‘invisible hand’ of market competition to drive everything in the right direction, promoting ‘economic efficiency’ and progress. In any case, while purchasing a product, we do not see the network of relations behind its existence, its social and ecological history. We only relate to it externally as a means for satisfying our perceived needs and what we have to give in exchange for acquiring it. Conversely, the sellers only ask for a given amount of money while not being concerned about its origins and relations to the buyer’s life; nor does he know or care about the buyer’s use once it is sold. It’s none of their business! The only thing that counts and interferes in their relationship is their agreement exchanging one thing for another. Marx focused on how this fetishism concealed social production relations and how others appropriated different people’s labour. In other forms of oikonomy, these relations are immediately visible and apparent. Producing self-sufficiently, we experience the effort, pain and time devoted to its production. We know exactly how it has been made and how we related to Nature to do so. In the context of redistribution, the same happens to a slave whose labour force is commanded by the slave-owner and receives the part of the product assigned to him to exist. Or the serf who needs to handle a given amount and percentage of his product to the landlord. Or anyone in our modern societies, who, through taxes, has to pay a proportion of his earnings to the state. Within a plunder oikonomy, a visible exploitative relation occurs once someone acquires others’ wealth and property through force, without consent or illegally. In all these cases, the uses and abuses behind what is being consumed are visible to the eyes. It all changes once the product of our labour is converted into commodities, not disclosing its social origin. Within the context of markets and the social division of labour, we produce for others and acquire from them the satisfiers we need to ‘live and, hopefully, live well’. We do so freely in the markets, exchanging money for objects. But, the commodity form hides how much we contribute to the global product and the proportion we acquire from it at the end of the day. Nor do we consider the differences in how money and the different purchasing powers which manifest themselves in the markets came into being. Whether from hard labour, from plunder or simply from the profits from speculating with bitcoins. Money does not reveal its origin, even less than the products we are acquiring with it. Nor do we ask how this money came into being while selling something. It is as good as any other money. Thus, Marx’s assertion that money ‘confuses and confounds’ everything. The different social power and political relations lay hidden behind the apparent ‘objectivity’, ‘freedom’ and ‘neutrality’ of market relations. The same goes for different ecological and biospheric dynamics. Focusing only on the commodity before us, we do not see Nature’s contribution to the wealth and how environmental costs and benefits are unevenly distributed among different social groups and individuals. We

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do not consider that some bear a disproportionate share of the costs—usually those at the production site, having to inhale polluted air, living in a contaminated environment or having their ecosystems destroyed by commercial interests. We do not see the mangroves destroyed to give way to the ‘Blue Revolution’ and the export industry of tropical shrimp to be eaten in fancy restaurants and gatherings. We do not relate the artistic-looking dish to the destruction of these ‘nurseries of the seas’ performing important ecosystem’s services and leaving local communities in disarray once they lose these commons where, previously, an essential part of their subsistence was obtained in self-sufficient and communal ways. We enjoy our smartphones, unconscious of the mines, factories and labour conditions by which they have been produced. Thus, contemporary ecological economists and political ecologists’ preoccupation with environmental justice and unequal ecological wealth distribution. Some bear a disproportional share of the burden; others free to enjoy their benefits. The scale and market growth significantly increase this ignorance and objectification of social and ecological relations behind commodity fetishism. Seduced by the magical capacities of the newly acquired smartphone or the glittering and seductively displayed fashion goods in the vitrine, we ignore what’s behind them. We miss the large and complex ecological and social production chain needed to produce them in the first place. Thus, the matter of scale (mainly local and small) is central to recovering consciousness and controlling our behaviour. We may assess the social and ecological production conditions of a locally produced product using local materials. But can we possibly determine what’s behind products made in China with African or South American raw materials and German machines? Act knowingly and consider the implications of our behaviour and thus behave as ‘responsible consumers’? But more of that later. For now, let us just reflect a little bit on the meaning of ‘free market’ and the individual’ freedom to act’ if we know that we operate in the dark, unaware of the broader context and effects our acts have on the world we live in and, ultimately, affect ourselves? Is there ‘freedom’ without consciousness? Can we be made responsible for the consequences of our acts if we are not even aware of them and cannot possibly grasp them? Within standard economics, assuming perfect information or information symmetry between buyers and sellers is a common assumption. Without clear and complete information, consumers will not be able to make the best choices for themselves. Nor will it lead to the best collective outcome in terms of global welfare or what economists call ‘Pareto optimality’, as supposed by standard economic thinking and used as proof for the need to expand market freedom. Even less allows for conscious and responsible choices once we simply do not know our acts’ ramifications and implications. Notwithstanding, this is happening in the real markets: people do not have the needed information and understanding to make informed decisions. Not just because of the inherently alienating effect of commodities, but as well, as we saw quoting Akerlof and Shiller (2015), there is a chrematistic incentive for ‘phishing for phools’ and for ‘the economics of manipulation and deception’. Thus, according to standard economics’ own terms, there is a cost in welfare directly associated with increased

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scale and alienations, leading to asymmetric information relations. Producers are duping consumers, and consumers are ‘freely’ leading their alienated lives. Of course, these are not discussions we would have in our classes in economics. Everything was just fine in the abstract models’ world, where we could see the mathematical proof that both output and welfare were being maximised under freemarket conditions. The fact that we were dealing with an inexistent reality and that the ‘markets’, ‘rational economic agents’, ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ we dealt with in our models were far removed from the reality of actual markets and people in the world was not something that we had to bother about. We were reassured that we were doing good and sound science just as other natural scientists do. Nor did we learn about the implications of knowing that wealth and exchangevalue were of a different nature. Already Adam Smith stated his ‘water and diamond’ paradox: although water is essential to life, its exchange-value was much lower than diamonds. He used it as proof of his labour-value theory, once the reason, according to him, is that it requires much more labour to supply diamonds than to provide water to the markets. Notwithstanding, if it showed that the labour necessary to produce something and the use we may derive from the product have no direct relation, it was proof that exchange-value and use-values are completely different and cannot be reduced from one to the other.1 Notwithstanding, if his study aimed to inquire into the cause and origins of wealth and he realised that use-values define wealth while having a paradoxical relation to exchange-values, why has Smith and all economists that followed ended up inquiring only into chrematistics and the cause and origin of exchange-values? Shouldn’t he be inquiring into the ‘causes and origin of use-values’ instead? This is another reminder that even great thinkers like Adam Smith are ‘rationalising’ rather than ‘rational’. We do not see reality as such in objective ways but rather the way we have learned and wish to see it according to our cultural context and personal interests. Markets and the chrematistic exchange-value logic were taking the central stage at the time of Smith, and that is where his gaze was directed to. Despite his understanding that exchange-values and market prices do not give the use-values and wealth of something and his stated aim to inquire into wealth and not into something else. When economics was born, the Industrial Revolution was underway, national markets were being established, and local trade barriers were removed. Thereby, increasingly markets were a fundamental aspect of ensuring a smooth supply of labour, raw materials, energy and capital to industry and providing enough demand to absorb its exponentially growing supply of standardised goods. Something limited local markets and even less self-sufficiency and reciprocity could not offer. 1 Observing that ‘the things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it’ (Smith 1776/ 1937, p. 28).

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Chrematistics, waged labour and the expansion of free-market relations were becoming the new central oikonomic forms at Smith’s time. At the same time, applying his reasoning to the commodification of human labour, that is, waged labour, Smith and later Ricardo, who refined his theories, concluded that wages’ exchange-value too was given by the needed labour to reproduce it, that is, by the labour required to produce the labourer’s subsistence and reproduction. Thus again, like all commodities, in the long term, wages reflected the ‘natural price’. However, local and conjectural fluctuations could happen, paying a market price above or below its correct exchange-value. But, for them, these fluctuations and possible deviations of prices due to local demand and supply conditions were just a reflex of the underlying essence, namely, that all exchange-value is ultimately given by the amount of labour needed to produce something, not by its use-value. The difference in wages merely reflects the different needed previous labour to form different kinds of labour. Specialised labour requires more labour time than non-specialised ones. But all being paid their due. As the reasoning went, market competition would level out all differences in the long term, making that all commodities, be they water, diamonds, labour, bread or wine, are produced and supplied according to the labour cost needed to provide them. If in one sector prices were above the labour value required to (re)produce a given commodity (let’s say diamonds), producers would be attracted to produce it instead of the less profitable commodity they may be producing (let’s say bottled water). Thus, driving prices down until the relative profitability in terms of needed labour in the different sectors is levelled out. Indeed, this is a straightforward logical reasoning confirmed by daily experience once we see people trying to earn as much as possible with the minimum effort. Simultaneously, it gave the needed rationality to the classics arguing that wages were simply reflecting the real exchange-value of labour once, under free-market conditions, labourers were being paid their due. But it is here that Marx gave it a historical twist, arguing that subsistence as such is not a fixed, objective measure but historically changing: what is ‘needed’ and ‘required’ is open to subjective and political considerations. Furthermore, it varies according to the subsistence sector’s productivity gains (thus decreasing the needed labour to provide labourers’ subsistence). Thereby, according to Marx’s argument, it allowed increasing profits by maintaining the subsistence in use-value terms, although reducing its exchangevalue. The distribution between wages and profits, the question of who gets the larger or the smaller share of the product, is not an automatic consequence of a ‘natural law’ but the result of the different actors’ relative bargaining power. Just as was the determination of how long the acquired labour force was to be used. Indeed, Marx simply stated an all too visible historical fact: wages and labour conditions were open to a political dispute between labourers and capitalists. Between buyers and sellers. And, as Marx’s argument went, they were in radically different bargaining positions. Ignoring it, as does modern neoclassic theory and all models I was taught under the ceteris paribus condition, was something Marx despised as being what the ‘vulgar economists’ as he called them would do. To look just at the surface of things without going behind the mystifying veil of the market, ignoring that prices are

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different from values and that which matters, from a global social and ecological perspective, is hidden behind the commodity form. Marx (1867/2015, p. 123) wrote about it in sarcastic ways: ‘we now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself only in the actual utilisation, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for it at its full value. The consumption of labour-power is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or of the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face “No admittance except on business”. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common wealth and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding’. Notwithstanding, this hidden sphere of production remains unseen by the consumer buying the glittering and seductive product in the market. It remains unseen by economists worldwide, too, simply assuming that markets happen in a historical void, in the abstract fantasy world of modern economics where supply and demand curves meet. As modern economists, looking only at the market relations and

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believing out of faith that somehow the ‘invisible hand’ of market competition will drive everything towards the good, we too ignore that the employer will subordinate the use of the hired labour to generate a surplus exchange-value for him, not to improve the lives of labourers who happen to be the bearers of this particular commodity. The higher the profit, the higher the use-value of the used ‘production factors’. Like every good, the owner consumes it according to his aims, the use-value he was looking for. Chickens are eaten and sex workers paid for to have sex and labour force to produce the maximum exchange-value at the minimum cost. Thereby, instead of automatically redirecting individual profit-seeking towards the common good, the invisible hand of the markets will impose on all ‘economic efficiency’, the so-called bottom line. Confronted to market competition, producers need to focus on exchange-values and earn more than they spend. If this goal is not attained, market competition will eliminate the undertaking; if it exceeds, it will prosper and grow. Even narrower is the focus of economists. They look only at what happens in the markets and not even real but fictitious ones. By doing so, they do not have to bother with what lies behind and below these terms. They ignore the political nature of the economic process. Like for an iceberg, the underlying reality is conveniently hidden by economists’ very methodological approach to look at it. It is hidden behind the ceteris paribus assumption. Thereby, economists do not need to be concerned about the human, social, cultural, political and ecological impacts of production nor about the effects these changes have, at their turn, on the oikonomic process. As if the social and political conflict or ecological breakdown resulting from our present oikonomic development models have nothing to do with the oikonomic process nor do they affect it. Although looking solely for monetary profit and done by the producer according to his sole chrematistic interest, it is assumed that the way industrial labour is organised and Nature is used and exploited will somehow best attend to the needs of labourers, Nature and consumers too. Something which is repeatedly proven by the economist’s theoretical models, although unrealistic these models happen to be. To consider this logic’s impact on the working classes and labourers is at the core of Marx’s critique. Arguing, among others, that the development of industrial tools and the machine being at the service of capital’s aims meant that industrial tools are not created attending to the need of the labourers. Instead, it is the labourer who has to adapt himself to the purposes and rhythm of the machine. Labourers execute a production process conceived to be efficient in chrematistic terms, producing the fastest and the most possible at the lowest costs. The production process is not designed by the producers and considers the labourer’s needs while working, as it happens when we self-produce. Once hired, the labour force is to be used by the employer, not according to the labourer’s wishes and will. Given human’s capacity to separate conception from execution, in modern alienated labour relations, these two aspects are separated and follow a different logic. Indeed, the labour process is conceived by some people aiming highest profits and executed by somebody else who has to conform to it if he wishes to ‘earn his living’. Bees have no other choice than to follow their inherited instincts and produce honey the way they always have.

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Humans do have a choice. Thus, the way production is organised and executed is a political decision, open to choose. Nevertheless, once there is free-market competition, the ‘invisible hand’ will impose chrematistic criteria, the so-called bottom line, on all. Marx (1867/2015, p. 249) put it graphically when he wrote, ‘the knowledge, the judgement, and the will, which, though in ever so small a degree, are practised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman, in the same way as the savage makes the whole art of war consist in the exercise of his personal cunning these faculties are now required only for the workshop as a whole. Intelligence in production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the detail labourers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them. It is a result of the division of labour in manufactures, that the labourer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production, as the property of another, and as a ruling power. This separation begins in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labour. It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the labourer into a detail labourer. It is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital. In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers’. Already Smith, writing in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, worried about the effects this could have on human beings and society as a whole. Still, it did not hinder him from basing one of his main arguments about the supposed benefits of the invisible hand on the gains in productivity resulting from the division of labour in the manufacture. Although, as he conceded, it transformed each labour task into a single, repetitive movement, negatively affecting the labourer’s cognitive and emotional needs. Notwithstanding, another example of how we ‘see what we wish to see’, while the benefits of higher productivity resulting from specialisation are often quoted, no one gave Smith credit for his warnings about the effect this specialisation would have on ordinary people’s consciousness and understanding. It may be worth quoting him in length, once the dangers and costs of what Smith feared would happen have increased due to the spread of false narratives through the internet and what The Economist called post-truth politics. As Smith (1776/1937, pp. 734–735) argued, ‘in the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any

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rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues’. Smith (1776/1937, p. 735) further compares the effects of manufacture’s social division of labour with the self-sufficiency and gift-society-oriented practices of what he termed barbarous societies: ‘it is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen in that rude state of husbandry which precedes the improvement of manufactures and the extension of foreign commerce. In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity which, in a civilised society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people. In those barbarous societies, as they are called, every man, it has already been observed, is a warrior. Every man, too, is in some measure a statesman, and can form a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society and the conduct of those who govern it’. No longer needing his intellectual and imaginative powers to produce but simply following others’ designs and prescriptions means that people generally do not need to develop and increase their cognitive abilities beyond a limited threshold. Moreover, by getting ‘ready-made’ products in the market to satisfy our needs, there are few skills required from us in our daily lives. Thus, we live alienated and alienating lives, voting on self-centred pathological narcissists like Trump with their reductionist and straightforward populist discourse. We have further been narrowed down to limited cognitive spaces by the internet and our social networks, increasingly following conspiracy theories even if they are filled with contradictions and little factual support, while buying ready-made goods and services in the market ignoring the impacts of their production and consumption on our world. Indeed, we have increasingly become incapable of ‘forming a tolerable judgment concerning the interest of the society and the conduct of those who govern it’. A direct result of the division of labour Smith still praised and saw as proof of the ‘virtues of the invisible hand’ of the market’s competition. Nowadays, certainly more than at Smith’s time, we can observe situations of people incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation. Particularly on the internet and all kinds of groups discussing different conspiracy theories, flat earthers, etc. Simultaneously, foreign-sponsored cyber-warfare manipulates information and presents ‘alternative facts’ in conjunction with the

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internet algorithms that aim to glue us to the different internet platforms and keep narrowing down our mental space and experiences. Unable to judge ‘the great and extensive interests of the country’, the lack of critical thought is undoubtedly an essential part of the explanation why, all around the world, populist and simplistic ‘black or white’ discourse is finding friendly ears. Even more so when action is required and people look for clear answers to guide them. Thus, tragically and paradoxically, now that our world has become as complex and interdependent as ever, we are becoming increasingly dumbed and short-sighted—a development that jeopardises our wellbeing and possibly even our long-term survival. It could also be interesting to contrast these views of Smith should he have considered human needs in systemic and holistic terms. If, instead of just focusing on higher productivity, he had thought about the whole picture and how it affected all aspects of human life and welfare—looking at how gains in chrematistic terms may have been more than outweighed by losses in other parts of our lives. Just as we do when we produce autonomously, trying to balance our productivity aims and wellbeing while producing. It becomes clear from his argument that although there is an increase in the productivity of manufactured satisfiers like pins, there is a considerable decrease of synergic satisfiers for other fundamental needs due to the social division of labour like understanding, participation and freedom. Something those like Smith, concerned with determining the ‘causes and origins of the wealth of Nations’, should have considered as well. But although the ‘father of modern economics’ thought it relevant to reflect on these issues, his ‘sons’, modern economists, simply decided to ignore them altogether. By sticking to our ideologies and preconceptions, we fail to see reality as it is. We tend to represent it as we wish it to be, thus confirming our prejudices and ideas. In economics, once arguments are made in abstract form and based on models, this failure to see other inconvenient aspects of reality increases, making it even more ideologically tainted and biased. Thus, modern economists believed, and many still believe, that full employment is the natural outcome we should expect in our economy if left to its own. It was only in the 1930s, in the high of the Great Depression, that an alternative view, Keynesianism, emerged. And it is still disputed, despite historical evidence saying otherwise. Moreover, if the theoretical models misrepresent labour and unemployment in quantitative terms, modern economists simply ignore labour conditions in the fabric and how they affect the wellbeing and labourers’ lives qualitatively. As if it had nothing to do with the oikonomy and the wealth of people and countries. Thus, despite the appalling labour conditions in the early phases of modern industrial society requiring the introduction of labour laws to limit them—which can still be found today in many places—it is not something economists are expected to deal with. Chrematistic maximisation of profits, ‘market efficiency’ and growth are the only things we are supposed to care and inquire about. In the same way, despite the over-exploitation of natural resources requiring effective environmental laws to be halted, and despite the financial regulations limiting financing and banking trying to avoid a recurring financial crisis, neoclassic economists still base their models on the

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assumption of free trade and believe, as ‘proven’ by these models, in the automatic and generalised benefit of it—just as Smith and Ricardo did at their time. Then again, we as economists were not asked to bother about these questions happening in the real world. It was in my classes of sociology that I was introduced to Harry Braverman’s (1974/1998) study about The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, and it was there too, as well as in my classes in management, that I learned about Taylorism, Fordism and its effects on both the oikonomy and modern labourers and labour relations. Finally, it was only by myself that I discovered the writings of Simone Weil, born in Paris on 3 February 1909. Her parents came from wealthy Jewish families, providing her with an assimilated, secular, bourgeois French childhood, both cultured and comfortable. She studied at the prestigious École normale supérieure in Paris and later became a teacher while engaging in intense social activism. To learn the psychological effects of heavy industrial labour, she took a job in 1934–1935 in a Renault automobile factory. There, she observed the spiritually deadening impact of machines on her fellow workers and herself. In parallel, she participated in meetings and mobilisations in the evenings. Thus, she managed to go beyond the purely quantitative aspects of modern industrial labour relations in her understanding, having literally put herself under industrial labourers’ skin by becoming one. Moreover, she did so despite her poor health struggles, having died in August 1943 from a heart attack at the age of 34 after having been diagnosed with tuberculosis and refusing to eat appropriately during her treatment as she did not want to have more than those fighting the war at that time. From her experiences in the factory floor, Weil (1937/1951, pp. 191 and 192) concluded that ‘the intensity of the work is not as measurable as the duration, (...) after a certain limit it is much more serious for the human body to accelerate the cadence as Taylor desired than to increase the duration of work’. ‘The succession of their gestures is not designated, in the language of the factory, by the word rhythm but by cadence. That is right because this succession is the opposite of a rhythm. All sequences of movements that participate in beauty, and are accomplished without degrading, lock up moments of stopping, as short as the lightning, which is the secret of rhythm and give the viewer, even through extreme speed, the impression of slowness. (...) On the contrary, the spectacle of manoeuvring on machines is almost always that of miserable precipitation from which all grace and all dignity are absent. It is natural to man, and it is convenient for him to stop when he has done something—even if it is the glimpse of lightning, to become aware of it, like God in Genesis. This flash of thought, immobility and equilibrium, must be learned to be suppressed entirely in the factory while working. Machine manoeuvres reach the required rate only if the gestures of a second uninterruptedly follow one another, almost like the ticking of a clock, without anything that ever marks that something is finished and that something else begins. This ticking of which one cannot bear to listen for a long time the gloomy monotony, the workers must almost reproduce it with their bodies. This uninterrupted sequence tends to plunge into a kind of sleep, but you have to endure it without sleeping. It’s not just torture; if it resulted only from suffering, the evil would be less than it is. All human action requires a reason that provides the energy necessary to accomplish it and is good or bad, depending on

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whether the motive is high or low. Notwithstanding, the work conditions prevent the intervention of other reasons than the fear of reprimand and dismissal, the eager desire to accumulate pennies, and, to a certain extent, the taste for speed records. Everything contributes to recalling these motives to thought and transforming them into obsessions; nothing more elevated is ever called upon. Besides, these motives have to become haunting to be compelling enough. At the same time that they occupy the soul, thought retracts to avoid suffering, and consciousness is extinguished as much as the necessities of labour permit. An almost irresistible force, comparable to gravity, prevents one from feeling the presence of other human beings who are also struggling nearby. Thereby, it is virtually impossible not to become indifferent and brutal as the system in which one is caught. Conversely, the system’s brutality is reflected and made visible by the gestures, looks and words of those around us. After a day thus spent, a workman has only one complaint, which does not reach the ears of men foreign to this condition and would not tell them anything if it succeeded: he found the time long. Time was long, and he lived in exile. He spent his day where he was not at home; machines and workpieces are at home, and he is only allowed entrance to approach them piecemeal. They are the only ones who are taken care of, not of him. (...) Nothing is so powerful in man as the need to appropriate, not legally, but by thought, the places and objects among which he spends his life and spends the life he has in him; a cook says “my kitchen”, a gardener says “my lawn”, and that’s fine. Legal property is only one of the means which gives such a feeling, and the perfect social organisation would be that which by the use of this means and others would provide this feeling to all human beings. Except for a few rare cases, a worker cannot appropriate anything by thought in the factory. The machines are not his; he serves one or the other according to received orders. He serves them, and he does not use them. For him, they are not a means of bringing a piece of metal to take a specific shape. Rather the opposite, he is a means of getting the elements for an operation of which he ignores the relation with those which precede and those which follow. (...) The worker does not know what he produces, and therefore he does not feel that he has created but exhausted himself in a void. He expends at the factory, sometimes to the extreme limit, that what he has best in himself: his faculty of thinking, feeling, and ability to move. He spends them and is emptied when he goes out, yet he has not put anything of his own in his work, neither thought, nor feeling, nor even, if not to a small extent, movements determined by him, ordered by him for an end. His very life comes out of him without leaving any mark around him. The factory creates useful objects, but not him (...). Although essential to the manufacture, the worker does count almost for nothing. That is why each unnecessarily imposed physical suffering, every lack of regard, every brutality, every even slight humiliation, seems a reminder that he does not count and is not at home. (. . .). Time and rhythm are the most critical factors of the labour problem. Of course, work is not playing; it is both inevitable and fitting that there be some monotony and boredom; and besides, there is nothing great on this earth, in any field, without a part of monotony and boredom. (. . .) But it is not less accurate that our thought is made to dominate time and that this vocation must be preserved intact in every human being.

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The uniform and, at the same time, varied and continually surprising succession of days, months, seasons, and years exactly fits our pain and our greatness. All things human that are, to some degree, beautiful and good reproduce this mixture of uniformity and variety. Everything that differs from it is wrong and degrading. The peasant’s work obeys by necessity this rhythm of the world; the worker’s work, by his very nature, is largely independent of it, but he could imitate it. The opposite happens in factories. Uniformity and variety mix also, but this mixture is the opposite of what the sun and the stars provide: they fill in advance time with frames made of a limited variety and ordered in regular returns. Nevertheless, these frames are intended to house an infinite variety of events, absolutely unpredictable and partially deprived of order. On the contrary, the future of the one who works in a factory is empty because of the impossibility to predict and deader than the past because of the identity of the moments that follow one another like the ticking of a clock. The uniformity mimics the movements of clocks and not those of the constellations. It is a variety that excludes any rule and, consequently, any forecast, thus rendering time uninhabitable and unbreathable for man’ (Weil, 1941–42/1951, pp. 207–209 and 212–213). Of course, I had never bothered to consider these aspects as an economist once the labour dynamics and how they affect labourers are ‘external to the market’ and assumed unchanging in time. Not something we could express in an equation, and thus, it was simply left out of our models. But isn’t it too a vital part of our life and wellbeing as producers and not just as consumers? In my case, it was only in my introductory classes to sociology that I learned about all the historical and sociological studies about the working conditions in modern industrial society and all the conflicts which have punctuated until today the development of modern industrial society. From the Luddites to Marx’s critique of modern alienated industrial labour and Engels’ depiction of The Condition of the Working Class in England, these were not issues that are seen to pertain to the field of economics. As if labouring in which individuals may spend the most significant part of their lives is only a matter of wages and ‘the marginal productivity of labour’. We have learned to ignore the resistances and struggles around labour conditions (including the chrematistic costs of strikes and social struggles) as if they had nothing to do with modern industrial societies’ oikonomic processes. Instead, we studied models in which imagined labour supply and demand curves intersected, signalling the ‘full-employment equilibrium point’. As I learned from Karl Polanyi, this is just one aspect of a more profound contradiction of modern free-market society. Markets reduce to the condition of mere commodity realities that are not and cannot adequately be reduced to it. As Polanyi (1944, pp. 130–131 and 71) argued, ‘production is interaction of man and nature; if this process is to be organised through a self-regulating mechanism of barter and exchange, then man and nature must be brought into its orbit; they must be subject to supply and demand, that is, be dealt with as commodities, as goods produced for sale. Such precisely was the arrangement under a market system. Man under the name of labor, nature under the name of land, were made available for sale; the use of

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labour could be universally bought and sold at a price called wages, and the use of land could be negotiated for a price called rent. There was a market for labour as well as for land, and supply and demand in either was regulated by the level of wages and rents, respectively; the fiction that labor and land were produced for sale was consistently upheld. (. . .). But labour and land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists. To include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of market’. The same goes for money, which constitutes the blood circulating within the oikonomic organism, taking nutrients and energy, stimulating parts’ growth and regeneration while eventually irrigating others poorly. It is a fundamental element for keeping markets alive and functioning, having had to be organised into markets, called financial markets. Thus, money could be borrowed and lent at a price called interests, although not being a commodity as such. Money comes into being by a political decision from the central monetary authorities or, when provided and lent by commercial banks, following the banks administrative and business decisions. It is not a commodity being produced for sale. Instead, money is brought into being by political and administrative choice, according to different power relations and interests of the actors who are differently affected by its existence and circulation. But, in the face of this need for markets for labour, land, natural resources and money, the simple assumption that their supply follows the chrematistic logic is simply false and misleading. In Polanyi (1944, pp. 72–73) words: ‘the crucial point is this: labor, land, and money are essential elements of industry; they also must be organised in markets; in fact, these markets form an absolutely vital part of the economic system. But labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. (. . .) Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilised; land is only another name for Nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious. Nevertheless, it is with help of this fiction that the actual markets for labor, land, and money are organised; they are being actually bought and sold on the market; their demand and supply are real magnitudes; and any measure or policy that would inhibit the formation of such markets would ipso facto endanger the self-regulation of the system. (. . .). Now (. . .), to allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of

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this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity “man” attached to that tag. Robed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardised, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive societies. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organisation was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill’. Thus, as Polanyi shows from both a logical and a historical perspective, free markets are fiction, at least for these three ‘false commodities’. Labourers had to be protected by labour laws, land and Nature by environmental laws and regulations, and the money supply by political and administrative means and financial constraints. Indeed, not even standard commodities’ markets have ever been entirely free as supposed by traditional economic models: all kind of taxes, administrative rules, industrial standards, local restrictions, imperfect competition and even cultural and ethical restrictions characterise existing markets. The nineteenth-century revolutions and conflicts in Europe, industrial pollution and the increasing rate at which coal and minerals were being mined, among so many other developments, were all eloquent manifestations of the contradictions of considering short-term profit instead of the broader interests and needs of labourers and Nature. So were the periodic financial crisis and bank runs whence corrupt rulers and avid commercial banks abused money printing and lending. Thus, despite the economists’ general equilibrium models and their depictions of free-market competition’s benefits, social and political struggle always accompanied our modern economy. Markets had to be and became regulated: labour laws, social security, environmental laws, consumer protection, independent central banks and financial laws are just some of the myriad of ways whereby markets are not and cannot be left free, solely subjected to the short-term chrematistic, monetary profit logic. Of course, these regulations and laws did not come into being ‘naturally’ or result from providence but as a clear result of human political struggles and power balances. Thus, they are neither comparable to ‘immutable natural laws’ nor can they be mathematically defined and represented as, for instance, gravity or a chemical reaction between different elements. They change with changing contexts, as do their impacts on various social and ecological realities. More than explained and represented by models, these developments ask to be observed and understood like any other historical development. The French Revolution, the way and rhythm industry spread worldwide, the Napoleonic Wars and the post-war economic recovery in the Cold War are not developments that can be modelled and even less predicted by some linear mathematical function.

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Notwithstanding, economists do as if they were, and, in my attempt to become an economist, I was also taught to do so. Even today, economics is still taught as if the world we live in is not the world economists need to consider to be ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’. Models are yet created. Economists talk about the economic prospects, and Nobel Prizes are still awarded to theories based on the assumption that humans are not humans and nature is not Nature. Just commodities bought and sold in specific markets according to mathematically representable linear functions of supply and demand. Assuming that money comes into being due to a ‘natural law’ and not according to political and commercial changing interests and struggles. Perhaps most tragically of all, while labour and money are considered a central element of the oikonomic process in standard models, although, in an abstract and distorted way, land/Nature is not even considered in most models and ignored altogether for simplicities sake. Except for ecological and environmental economists aiming to evaluate the contributions and effects of the oikonomic process on the environment and the different ecosystems, standard economics since the time of Adam Smith has been blind to Nature. As Georgescu-Roegen (1971, p. 2) put it, ‘the conception of the economic process as a mechanical analogue has ever since dominated economic thought completely. In this representation, the economic process neither induces any qualitative change nor is affected by the qualitative change of the environment into which it is anchored. It is an isolated, self-contained and ahistorical process—a circular flow between production and consumption with no outlets and no inlets, as the elementary textbooks depict it. Economists do speak occasionally of natural resources. Yet the fact remains that, search as one may, in none of the numerous economic models in existence is there any variable standing for Nature’s perennial contribution. The contact some of these models have with natural environment is confined to Ricardian land, which is expressly defined as a factor immune to any qualitative change. We could very well refer to it simply as “space”. But let no one be mistaken about the extent of the mechanical sin: Karl Marx’s diagrams of economic reproduction do not include even this colorless coordinate. So, if we may use a topical slogan for a trenchant description of the situation, both main streams of economic thought view the economic process as a “no deposit, no return” affair in relation to nature’. The cost of this ignorance is now just getting more and more visible. After little more than two centuries of our modern industrial oikonomic development, our ecosystems and our biosphere as a whole are at the brink of collapse. We have forgotten that we are part of Nature and utterly dependent on it in our pursuit of living and living well. Ignoring it is something we do at our own risk.

References Akerlof, G. A., & Shiller, R. J. (2015). Phishing for phools—The economics of manipulation and deception. Princeton University Press.

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Braverman, H. (1974/1998). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. Monthly Review Press. Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971). The entropy law and the economic process. Harvard University Press. Marx, K. (1867/2015). Capital – A critique of political economy (Vol. I). Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1932/1959). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844—Third manuscript. Progress. Online version. Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation. Farrar & Rinehart. Smith, A. (1776/1937). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Random House. Weil, S. (1937/1951). La Rationalisation (notes taken from a conference to labourers given the 23 February 1937). In La Condition Ouvrière. Gallimard. Weil, S. (1941–42/1951). Expérience de la vie d’usine. In La Condition Ouvrière. Gallimard.

Part III

Nature’s Oikonomy

Chapter 8

The Ways of Gaia

In Greek mythology, Gaia or Gaea is the personification of the Earth. Having emerged directly from Chaos, the initial void or abyss, she is the ancestral mother of all life, mother of Uranus (the sky) from whose sexual union she bore the Titans, the Cyclopes and the Giants. Gaia is also the name James Lovelock gave to the hypothesis he developed in collaboration with Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist, stating that life and evolution are not a process happening in isolation but a whole. While in the conventional, modern reductionist view, biological, geophysical and geochemical processes are seen in isolation, Lovelock and Margulis argued that life and Nature must be seen as self-organised wholes. Life and the biosphere result from the changing ways whereby biotic and abiotic processes concur to create the conditions for evolution. As a teenager, I loved reading about cosmology and astrophysics. I marvelled at the evolution of our universe, the life cycle of stars and how, out of the cosmic dust remaining from past catastrophic stellar events like supernova explosions, our solar system was created with a star of medium to small size, our sun, surrounded by a particular planet, the Earth, who happened to be precisely at the ideal distance, with the right size and its axis inclined in a way to promote changing surface temperatures, thus allowing for different seasons to happen. To know that in the early phases of the so-called Big Bang, the initial infinitely tiny point of singularity from which the universe is said to have emerged in an enormous expanding wave, just the lightest of the atomic elements had time to form, hydrogen and helium with traces of other elements. The bulk of the matter we now see around us and the extensive list of chemical elements I was taught in my chemistry classes were not there at the very begging. They had to be first synthesised in the fusion furnaces of past stars, under incredibly high pressures and temperatures where different atoms were pressed together into heavier ones. Among others, I learned that a star was a dynamic balance between the expanding inner radiation and the compressing force of its immense mass and gravity, one holding the other in check. Eventually, gravity takes the upper hand, leading to a collapse of its outer layers towards its core. In some big stars, the resulting rapidly rising heat led to a supernova explosion in which these © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_8

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new formed heavier elements—together with all those created during the collapse and explosion—have been expelled into space, forming these magical interstellar clouds like these beautiful images we can see in whose inner new stars and planetary systems were and still are born. One of these is the one from which our solar system has been formed once gravity started to pull this dust together, creating our sun, planets, moons and meteors. To learn that we were born from the stars, not just spiritually, but literally, made from stardust. It sounded to me, and still sounds, as an awe-inspiring tale of billions of years where all had to happen as it did for you and me being here today. In my biology classes, evolution was explained as the result of life’s biological struggle for survival, with animals adapting to their environment. In the same line, history was described as human societies’ development happening in different places and times. In all these narratives, the physical environment was the background scenery where the play and the action occurred. I was never told that the actors were actually changing the scenario as the play evolved and that both players and the scenario are one part of a larger plot. Just as our heart, liver, bones, skin, hair and body are both the product and the producers of who we are, living beings are both the product and the producers of the environment they are but a part. Living beings transform the environment in which they live and, at their turn, adapt and are transformed by it. Everywhere, life is characterised by interdependency, wholeness, impermanence and self-creation, not something happening separately and in isolation. But this is gradually changing and leading to a completely different view of reality and life on Earth. A picture that is challenging our reductionist scientific approach and, of course, how we understand what the oikonomy is all about. While working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in the 1960s, Lovelock was asked about methods to detect life on Mars, a topic NASA was interested in. Lovelock then went out asking himself a simple question: if someone from another planet wished to assess whether there is life on Earth, what would he have to have been looking for? The answer came to him quite naturally: he knew that what characterised Earth’s atmosphere, seas and land is the coexistence of biochemically reactive substances. Like, for instance, oxygen and methane in the Earth atmosphere. Thus, Lovelock concluded that all that was needed was to look at the chemical composition of Mars atmosphere—something that can be done from Earth—and see whether there is evidence of life processes continuously pumping these mutually neutralising elements into the atmosphere. If there is an active life process constantly regenerating the planet’s chemistry, this would have shown, just as it does on Earth. Otherwise, they would tend towards an inert, high-entropy state. His conclusion was not very popular among his NASA employers, desiring to get funding to send missions to Mars to make in situ studies, and shortly later, he lost his job. Being fired turned out to be an event that allowed him to become an independent researcher, further pursuing his initial insightful hypothesis. Thereby, in the following years, together with Lynn Margulis, who studied the microbiological foundations of the process, he grounded the initial hypothesis on empirical observations and logical arguments to establish that which, after a suggestion of his friend, the novelist

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William Golding, he termed Gaia theory. Even if strongly criticised by his scientific colleagues in the early days, it became a central element of life sciences and, nowadays, climate change: the understanding that life, environment and climate are co-evolving wholes and that you cannot understand, for instance, climate and climate change without understanding the biological, ecological and anthropic (human) processes happening on Earth. Indeed, they are central to the process. As Lovelock’s and Margulis’ understanding showed, life does not just happen to evolve in an environment that suits it but actively creates and regenerates a stable environment, recreating homeostatic conditions. Just as, through our healthy metabolic functions, a vast series of balances are kept in our organism—from our body temperature to the salinity, glucose and thousands of elements whose concentration in our blood and cells is maintained within clearly defined parameters—in the biosphere, a series of homeostatic balances have been held for the whole span of life’s evolution on Earth. Thus, for instance, despite the increase of around 30% of the incoming solar radiation, the temperature on Earth has remained relatively stable during the ages. By converting atmospheric CO2 into organic matter—a significant portion of it being buried down the Earth through plate tectonics to be converted into fossil fuels or even diamonds—the decrease in the atmospheric greenhouse effect has compensated for the increasing sun radiation. Despite the constant washing of salt by the rivers and land waters to the sea, the sea salinity has been stable at about 3.4% for very long geological periods. Just below levels which would be unfitting for sea life and living cells in general.1 The same happens with oxygen, an extremely reactive and, thus, in many contexts, toxic element once it readily combines with other elements, creating new compounds while changing existing ones. Nevertheless, it is vital for aerobic organisms that use its high reactivity to generate internal metabolic energy. Thus, mitochondria act as furnaces in our cells where, through the oxidation of foodstuffs such as glucose, the cells’ energetic needs are supplied. As a result, we have a ‘clean waste’: water and carbon dioxide, which are easily eliminated from the body and are reused by plants in the process of photosynthesis. In any case, the critical point to retain is that oxygen is a highly reactive element, readily combining with gases, minerals and organic matter in the Earth’s atmosphere, crust and waters. Therefore, it would soon become used up if it were not continuously being produced and pumped into the atmosphere by the different biotic processes happening in the biosphere. Notwithstanding, the atmosphere’s actual levels are around 21% and have been kept so for a very long geological period. Moreover, just as in a healthy organism, it is the appropriate level for life’s needs: lower levels, as happens on high altitudes, lower the aerobic organism’s capacity to

1

While fresh water has salt concentration below 0.05%, sea animals and plants, being halotolerant, already represent an adaptation to conditions of high salinity. Although halotolerant and halophilic (not only tolerant but needing salty conditions) life forms are known, above a 5% threshold, they require complex, energy-consuming metabolic adaptations in order to overcome both the osmotic stress and the ion toxicity of salt.

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produce energy, while higher concentrations increase the dangers of spontaneous wildfires and other oxidising processes harming life.2 These are just a few examples of a myriad of elements whose concentration and composition in the environment are maintained fitting for life by the living process happening there and who, conversely, depend on these homodynamic balances to exist. One creates and lives through the other, just as for us, where our body is the product of our inner metabolism and, at the same time, the needed condition for this metabolism to happen. Lovelock was not the first to have this view in the modern Western tradition.3 Already at the time when his contemporaries hailed Newton as a hero and the standard reductionist approach to science was becoming hegemonic, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749–22 March 1832) warned his contemporaries that reality has to be seen as a constantly moving whole, in living and changing ways. Perceiving that the observer is part of the reality he is observing and that meaning is always the result of active action of our consciousness and not just something objectively and linearly perceived by our senses, Goethe’s main aim was not simply to describe phenomena empirically or imply laws of causality directing them from without but to understand them phenomenologically from within: to penetrate and understand the underlying essence of each particular phenomenological manifestation, not by replacing it with abstract mathematical models or theory, but by carefully observing it as a dynamic, ever-changing whole. As Goethe showed, to perceive this movement and the whole, we need to use what he called our ‘exact intuitive imagination’. We need to observe different parts and different moments in a process carefully. Still, in the inner consciousness, we create meaning and perceive what is unseen by the eyes, namely, movement and wholeness. As he perceived, thus anticipating the phenomenological perspective of those like Husserl, Heidegger and post-modern philosophy, senses perception is always thinking, an active process whereby the mind projects meaning to what is being perceived by the senses. There is no such thing as ‘objective observation’: observation is always active. We actively attribute meaning to what we perceive through our senses. We ‘see’ a tree with our inner eye while our physical eyes are just windows letting different wavelengths enter into us to be processed internally as electrical and biochemical impulses. Conversely, thinking, through our self-reflectivity, is always a perception as well. We perceive our inner thoughts and feelings just as we perceive the external world through our senses: actively generating meaning and reality through our

2

Lovelock (1995) postulated that concentrations above 25% or more could lead to wildfires even in tropical, humid regions, ignited by naturally occurring lightning storms, for instance. 3 This living and dynamic perception of reality is as well central to the oriental traditions, like Daoism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and to ancient cultures’ mythology. Not to mention the animistic views and mythology. It is with modern mechanical, reductionist science that this perception has been lost and is now being slowly regained. Unfortunately, not yet within economics.

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consciousness.4 It is a living and holistic process, emerging from a relation between the observer and that which is being observed. Even at the quantum level in purely abstract mathematical terms, as Schrödinger famously showed, observer and observed cannot be separated and, by their relation, both are changed. Just as we cannot understand a piece of music by fragmenting it into separated notes, we cannot know the meaning of a sentence by looking at its words in isolation. Sense and understanding are always context-dependent and related to the whole. In system theory, it is called an emergent property that is always different from the simple sum of the parts. The beauty of a symphony, its effect on the listener, emerges from the whole of its movement and, most fundamentally, from its relation to the listener. The same can be said from the difference between a living and non-living body: in material terms, someone who just died has the same molecules and elements in his body as when living. What is missing is the inner relation between all his different parts and his constant interacting with his environment. What is missing are the metabolic functions that ceased, the myriad of living connections between its parts. What is missing is life. When the great German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 1769–6 May 1859) extensively travelled around Latin America between 1799 and 1804, his descriptions of the wonders and the richness of cultures and life ignited the imagination of the people of his time. He instantly became a world celebrity. Goethe’s ideas had deeply influenced him. He wrote at least 30 volumes from his scientific observations on all kinds of fields: from geography to botany, zoology, geology and arguments about political, social, cultural and oikonomic conditions. His life’s work, Kosmos, in five volumes, written at the end of his life, based on his experiences and the hugely popular lectures he gave in Berlin between 1827 and 1828 to thousands of people, including the leading scientists and philosophers of his time, became an instant triumph. They were published between 1845 and the last posthumously in 1862 from his notes in 1858. He described a world in movement, in evolution. He was as well the first to hint to the existence of active plate tectonics: the idea that even our lands are moving and, how it later came out, mountains are growing in some places and decaying and being washed to the seas in others. Charles Darwin (12 February 1809–19 April 1882) praised Humboldt as ‘the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived’ (quoted in Whitfield, 1998, p. 163). Becoming a great scientific traveller himself, Darwin finally established the idea of evolution and the continuous changing of creation in the heart of our scientific understanding of the world. Even humans had to be seen not as a final creation done once and for all by the Creator but a work in progress. One of the leading advocates of Darwinism in Germany was Ernst Haeckel. A multifaceted thinker, natural scientist and artist, he coined or popularised diverse terms that became

4

Goethe’s phenomenological approach to science and its importance to economic thinking are better explained and developed in more detail in Chap. 1.5 ‘Towards a Phenomenological Approach to the Oikonomic Process’ of my previous book (Stahel, 2020, pp. 141–168).

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essential concepts in this new view of reality: ecology, phylogeny, the idea that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, anthropogony, phylum and stem cell, among many others. All are pointing to the importance of qualitative change, relations, movement and metamorphosis. Thus, he followed the German holistic tradition of Humboldt and the scientific phenomenological approach proposed by Goethe. They were looking into the phenomenon, not in isolation, but its movement and relations. An equally and perhaps even stronger holistic tradition developed in Russia. The conception of life as an evolving whole, beyond Haeckel’s notion of ecosystems, was a central insight and theme developed by Vladimir Vernadsky (28 February 1863–6 January 1945). His main book The Biosphere was published in 1926 in Russia and three years later translated into French. It received little attention in the West until James Lovelock (1979) and Lynn Margulis, although initially unaware of his ideas, were shown the similarities of Vernadsky’s ideas with their own. Interested in defining the general laws that define the chemical processes behind the major geological processes on Earth’s crust, oceans and atmosphere, Vernadsky suggested geochemistry studies as the way to approach them. Although the term was already used by the Swiss chemist Christian Schönbein as early as 1838 and other geologists and chemists during the nineteenth century, Vernadsky and the Swiss mineralogist, Victor M. Goldschmidt (1926), are generally credited to be the fathers of geochemistry. But going a step further, Vernadsky rapidly became aware that he would have to include biological and living processes, as they were responsible for the absorption, transformation and diffusion of matter and energy on the Earth surface. Thus, he originated the studies of biogeochemistry. It was a direct and necessary answer to his observation that the immense majority of the compounds found on the Earth’s crust, in its land, seas and atmosphere, were the direct result of past and present living biological processes. Or, said otherwise, we cannot understand the physicochemical composition of our Earth’s environments without looking at how life processes are constantly (re)producing, (re)generating and consuming them. In the same way, you cannot understand an organism’s bones without looking at the inner metabolic functions and the organism’s external relations with its environment. Bones are inert, just as minerals are. But they result from bio-physicochemical processes. Using the biosphere concept introduced by Edouard Suess in 1875, Vernadsky considered living beings and processes in physicochemical terms as harbourers and transforming matter and energy forces. Not just evolving within a given environment, but actively (re)producing and transforming their surroundings. Thus, Vernadsky argued that the Earth’s evolution and dynamics could not be understood in terms of separate biotic and abiotic processes happening parallel as if on different tracks. It had to be seen as an interdependent whole. Life is both made possible because of the particular geo-physicochemical properties of the environment and, simultaneously, is one of the fundamental forces behind its (re)production. Thus, as Vernadsky pointed out, if compared to the crust of other planets or the inert moon surface, the outer parts of the Earth, including its crust and the lithosphere affected by tectonics, are highly reactive, dynamic complex. He identified that the main elements responsible for the high energetic potential of the terrestrial geophysical

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processes like water, oxygen, carbon and other elements found in the biosphere are both the preconditions and the product of life on Earth. As Vernadsky (1986, pp. 16–18) put it, ‘life annexes a considerable part of the matter of the Earth’s surface. Under its influence the atoms of this matter take part in a perpetual and intense motion. (. . .). If life were to disappear it is obvious that the great chemical processes would likewise disappear, at least on the surface of the Earth. All the minerals in its upper layer of the crust, such as clay, limestone, chalk, ores of iron and aluminium and dozens of others, are continually being created under the influence of life. Should life disappear, the elements of these minerals would form themselves into new compounds and all the known minerals would irrevocably disappear. There would then be no force on the Earth’s crust capable of perpetually giving birth to new compounds. A stable chemical equilibrium, a chemical calm, would be established. (. . .). The perpetually active forces of the biosphere, the heat of the sun and the chemical action of water, would not affect much change, for, with the extinction of life, free oxygen would disappear and the quantity of carbon dioxide would be greatly diminished. The principal agents in affecting superficial changes would thus vanish. Water, also, is a powerful chemical agent, but it must be remembered that this activity is due to life, chiefly to microscopic organisms. The activity is also enhanced by dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide, the products of life. Chemically pure, “dead” water is a substance of indifferent chemical activity compared with natural water. (. . .). Life, therefore, exerts a powerful permanent and continuous disturbing effect on the chemical stability of the surface of our planet. With its colors and forms, its combinations of vegetable and animal organisms and the creative activity of civilised humanity, life not only creates the whole picture of our natural surroundings but penetrates into the deepest and most grandiose processes in the Earth’s crust. Life is therefore not an accidental phenomenon exterior to the surface of the Earth. It is a part of the structure and mechanism of the terrestrial crust in which it fulfils functions of primary importance for this mechanism’. This process’s thermodynamics was first described in the 1950s by the Russian chemist Ilya Prigogine (12 January 1917–28 May 2003). Instead of approaching thermodynamics traditionally, studying abstract passive closed systems, he considered dynamic open systems who manage to maintain their far-from-equilibrium order, that is, a low-entropy state, by actively regenerating their inner order through and through their relations to their environment. It is from the environment that thermodynamic processes and life continuously obtain matter, energy and information and to which they expel it transformed at the end of the process. Indeed, this is how life is sustained, ecosystems function and our oikonomic process works: we do not simply passively respond to external forces as do Newtonian objects, or Carnot’s heat machines do, but actively take in external resources, transform them through our inner metabolism and expel them as waste at the end of the process (Fig. 8.1). By looking at the systems, not as closed but open dynamic systems, he revolutionised thermodynamics and our understanding of life. As I will try to

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Fig. 8.1 The oikonomic process as a dissipative structure

show you here, it is critical to understand the oikonomic process, too, although economists, except for some ecological economists perhaps, hardly noted it. For his outstanding work, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. But then again, economists are supposed to work on their models, not to look at reality. Aren’t they? Prigogine departed from the classical deterministic linear approach inherited from Newton’s mechanics by looking at physical and biological thermodynamic systems as open, dynamic systems. Thus, he solved the long-standing puzzle that the global entropy of the world was bound to increase, although evolution and progress seemed to point the other way. The counter-empirical perception that life was headed towards higher states of disorder, homogeneity and ultimately death, given the unavoidable fate of closed systems. By applying his observation and intuitive imagination to open, dynamic systems instead of artificially isolated, closed systems, Prigogine understood and showed how physical and biological systems create order out of chaos. Open thermodynamic systems are both sources of higher entropy and new orders and far-from-equilibrium, low-entropy states. Thus, he opened the way to see how life—and, for that matter, our oikonomic processes as part of our life processes—is at the source of both dissipation of matter and energy, consuming the resources and low entropy found in the environment to sustain itself, and is creating new forms and wealth, internally generating low entropy, negentropy, states and orders. Like Daoism, where yin and yang are both complementary and opposites, both indissociably related to each other, life and death, autopoiesis and entropy, are indissolubly related polarities too. Looking to the creative, non-linear and irreversible way open systems evolve, Prigogine showed that reality is essentially open to novelty. It is an evolutionary process, and it is through our relations and the way we receive, transform and expel to our environment matter, energy and information that our inner order is

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continuously being regenerated. New things and beings are created; life evolves, not by passively resisting the outside forces like Newtonian objects but by actively reorganising them into new shapes and orders. Thus, he managed to reconcile two apparently contradictory natural laws identified in the nineteenth century: the entropy law pointing to irremediable death and decay of closed systems at one hand and the increasing diversity of life recognised by evolutionary theory. An evolution believed to happen not just on Earth but also the cosmic arena once the universe was seen evolving from an initially chaotic and undifferentiated ‘big bang’ to higher levels of diversity and complexity. Not the other way around. Indeed, the highest entropy was seen to lay in the past, not the future. Prigogine called these dynamic, self-organised systems ‘dissipative structures’. As he said, ‘in this context, the age-old problem of the origin of life appears in a different perspective. It is certainly true that life is incompatible with Boltzmann’s order principle but not with the kind of behaviour that can occur in far-fromequilibrium conditions. (. . .) That is why we have introduced the notion of “dissipative structures”, to emphasise the close association, at first paradoxical, in such situations between structure and order on the one side, and dissipation or waste on the other. We have seen (. . .) that heat transfer was considered a source of waste in classical thermodynamics. In the Bénard cell it becomes a source of order’ (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, p. 143).5 Stuart Kaufmann (1995, pp. 20–21) gives another fine example of this kind of dynamic, self-organised open systems whereby order emerges out of chaos and structure out of random interactions: ‘one of the most startling examples of such a sustained nonequilibrium structure is the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, which appears to be a whirlpool in the upper atmosphere of that enormous planet. The Great Red Spot vortex, essentially a stormy system, has been present for at least several centuries. Thus, the lifetime of the Great Red Spot is far longer than the average time any single gas molecule has lingered within it. It is a stable organisation of matter and energy through which both matter and energy flow. The similarity to a human organism, whose molecular constituents change many times during a lifetime, is intriguing. One can have a remarkably complex discussion about whether the Great Red Spot might be considered living—and if not, why not. After all, the Great Red Spot in some sense persists and adapts to its environment, shedding baby vortices as it does so’. 5

They are making reference here to the Rayleigh-Bénard convection cells which occur in a plane horizontal layer of fluid heated from below. As in the simple case of water put on to boil which anyone can observe in his kitchen, the upwelling of lesser density fluid from the heated bottom layer spontaneously organises into a regular pattern of cells. Like in the example of boiling water in our kitchen, where warmer molecules rise through the centre while others descend at the sides. Because of its simplicity, it is one of the most carefully examined examples of self-organising non-linear systems. These molecular structures are called Bénard cells because of Henry Bénard (1874–1939) the French physicist who first described them and this convection pattern Rayleigh-Bénard convection because of Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919) who first analysed it and showed that the effect is solely due to a temperature gradient. As for Carnot’s original description of what became known as entropy, defining it as the temperature gradient between two sources of heat in a machine.

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Of course, this is still not proper reproduction. We know that the small vortex (re)produced will not grow autonomously to become a full-grown adult vortex. But it does point out that reality is not made up of passive, isolated objects but is a dynamic, interdependent whole. It has a fractal structure, each lower level reproducing and mirroring higher ones’ forms and functioning. This process happens in each organism cell, whose semi-permeable membrane is open to some aspects of its environment while shielding it from others. Thus, each of our cells is a dissipative structure, as are its constituent parts like mitochondria, nucleus, etc. The same at higher levels, in our organism, an ecosystem or the biosphere as a whole. It is how our health is continuously being regenerated, each organ of our organism receiving the matter, energy and information it needs to regenerate itself and, thus, be able to perform its particular function of expelling matter, energy and information again to the organism to support other organs and metabolic functions or, when no longer useful, to be discharged and dissipated into the environment. These are all part of our body’s metabolic process, which, itself, is shielded by a semi-permeable layer called skin and our sensorial openings to the world whereby we receive inputs from the outside to regenerate and recreate ourselves continuously. Simultaneously, as Lynn Margulis showed and is becoming common wisdom, we are not and never have been individuals. Indeed, we are co-evolving, composite beings. Our body contains more nonhuman cells than human ones, in a proportion at the level of 10:1. Thus, the human microbiome (the collection of all the microorganisms living in association with the human body, including eukaryotes, archaea, bacteria and viruses) is the basic composite unit of life and evolution. Although some may be harmful, we could not survive without them and the vital services they provide as a whole. We, too, are a self-organised ecosystem, not simply individuals. As shown by the microbiome project, ‘these microbes are generally not harmful to us, in fact they are essential for maintaining health. For example, they produce some vitamins that we do not have the genes to make, break down our food to extract nutrients we need to survive, teach our immune systems how to recognise dangerous invaders and even produce helpful anti-inflammatory compounds that fight off other disease-causing microbes. An ever-growing number of studies have demonstrated that changes in the composition of our microbiomes correlate with numerous disease states’.6 ‘A human first becomes colonised by a normal flora at the moment of birth and passage through the birth canal. In utero, the foetus is sterile, but when the mother’s water breaks and the birth process begins, so does colonisation of the body surfaces. Handling and feeding of the infant after birth leads to establishment of a stable normal flora on the skin, oral cavity and intestinal tract in about 48 h’.7 More appropriately referred to as the skin microbiota, the skin flora may be made up of around 1000 different bacteria species from 19 phyla, numbering an estimated

6

Human Microbiome Project (https://www.hmpdacc.org/overview/). Retrieved 15/05/2021. http://www.textbookofbacteriology.net/normalflora_3.html retrieved 15/05/2021. Once these populations are continuously changing and it is a dynamic relation, these numbers may greatly vary depending on the individual and the time.

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1 trillion on an average human. Humans harbour more microbial cells in their mucosal surfaces and skin than mammalian cells in the entire body (Foxman et al., 2008). Thereby, the skin must be seen as a complex, dynamic reality for other parts of the organism. It evolves according to its changing environment (the incoming matter, energy and information), the body’s changing inner properties and dynamics and the relation between the myriad of its composing biotic and abiotic elements. As a dynamic, complex reality, it adapts to changing conditions. Although most details of these dynamics are still unknown, they play a crucial role in the skin’s protective immune functions. Similarly, they may, once disrupted or colonised by harmful microbial, lead to immunodeficiency. Being not just a single individual but a complex symbiont, we have become much more resilient and adaptable. While human genes, for instance, change from one generation to the other, the composition of our microbiota is continuously evolving and adapting to different environmental conditions. Like ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole, biodiversity is crucial to ensure health and resilience. We as individuals depend on our microbiome’s biodiversity and these co-evolving partners to survive and be healthy. In a fractal succession, from the cell up to the biosphere, we find how the whole is both the precondition for the parts’ existence and the emergent result of the dynamic and changing interactions between its constituent parts. There is neither a final stable and fixed building block, a-tom (from the Greek root, ‘non’ and ‘to-cut’), nor an indivisible in-dividual (from the Latin root for ‘non’ and ‘divisible’). Reality is made-up from dynamic interactions and emergent properties. Wholes who, just as waves, maintain their identity by constantly changing. From this perspective, we can see that all living beings behave and evolve this way: being nurtured by a flux of matter, energy and information which traverses them is transformed internally by the metabolic functions of the organism or, in the case of hurricanes, whirlpools, termites or our human oikonomic processes, according to its internal structures, laws and organisation regenerating its far-fromequilibrium low-entropy order, to be dissipated and transformed at the other end of the process. Thus, matter, energy and information are being continuously changed and regenerated since the universe’s origin in the inner of stars, supernovas, black holes, termites, beehives, individual animals, ecosystems and yes, human oikonomic activity. Our oikonomic process is part and extension of Nature’s oikonomy. Here too, our oikonomic resilience and wealth result from diversity, cooperation and each factor contributing to the regeneration and transformation of the whole while being sustained by it. Thus, these self-organised, autopoietic dissipative processes are an essential aspect of life and a central element of our oikonomy too. Living beings are not closed objects but open, dynamic realities. Our identity is not sustained by passively resisting the outside forces, the relentless working of time and entropy, but by actively regenerating ourselves through our inner metabolism and structures and our relations to the outside world. We all eat and receive our nourishment, both physical and informational, from our environment. Then, we digest and process it according to our inner self-organised processes to finally dissipate matter, energy and information to our environment at the end of the process. There it may become

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an input for other living beings or living processes which will, at their turn, transform and process them according to their inner working, regenerating their order before expelling them as waste at the other end of the process. Just to be changed and restored into new orders elsewhere. Thus, we can see that our planet, the Earth, is an immense dissipative structure, basically closed in material terms but nurtured by the permanently incoming solar radiation on which all life on Earth depends. Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1 June 1796–24 August 1832), the founder of modern thermodynamics, observed that the heat differential between two bodies is fundamental for obtaining movement. From the polarity between heat and cold, energy’s usefulness, low entropy, is defined. Thus, from the heat difference between the sun and Earth’s surface, that heat moves towards the Earth, nurturing life and the biosphere as a whole: winds, the water cycle consuming more than a fifth of the incoming sun’s radiation, photosynthesis and solar panels. A source of low entropy, which at the end of the process is radiated back to space by the Earth, as dissipated, high-entropy radiation. Thus, although in terms of our solar system as a whole, there has been an increase in the global entropy—the consumed sun’s radiation bringing the sun closer to the end of its stellar life cycle—at the local level, new structures and life forms have been created and regenerated. Thus, we can see the dissipation of the sun’s energy at the source of life evolution on Earth and, of course, our oikonomic process. As for the Daoist view, two polarities, irreversible entropic decay and life’s ongoing development, yin and yang, both nurturing and contradicting each other. One’s existence is intrinsically dependent and defined by the other. Notwithstanding, although Carnot published his ground-breaking monograph Réflexions sur la Puissance Motrice du Feu (Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire) in 1824, showing that an irreversible consumption and degradation was going on in what he called ‘heat machines’, neither Smith nor those economists who followed ever bothered to consider the implications of the entropy law to the Industrial Revolution which was rapidly getting momentum. None asked about the impact on the oikonomic process and the environment of mining coal from the ground and burning it into aches and smokes in industry and transport. Although the steam engine completely revolutionised our oikonomy and even though James Watt was a colleague and friend of Adam Smith in Glasgow University, economists never bothered to look at it as a physical, thermodynamic reality. Only in 1971 GeorgescuRoegen first considered, within the profession, these implications in his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. But, then again, economists except for ecological economists have hardly taken notice.8 Indeed, seen in its physical dimension, our oikonomic process is a thermodynamic dissipative structure: we humans take the resources found in Nature—matter, energy and information—which have been created, (re)produced and regenerated by the different ecosystems and biosphere as a whole and transform them according to our needs (re)producing use-values which, once consumed, may be reused and recycled into new use-values or become waste when no longer of use. Production

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This question is developed more in full in my book Oikonomy (Stahel, 2020, pp. 169–177).

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is permanently nurtured by the flux of low entropy, which is transformed, creating new forms, materials and orders, internally dissipating disorder and decay while dissipating heat and waste into the environment. Just as all living beings do. Thereby, we can see that our human oikonomy not just mirrors but is an integral part and extension of Nature’s oikonomy. It is not akin to the passive movement of objects or moons and planets orbiting in space. It is an active, dynamic dissipative process, dissipating matter, energy and information into waste at the end of the process but dissipating its internal disorder, recreating order and low-entropy use-values to sustain our lives. As Joseph Alois Schumpeter (8 February 1883– 8 January 1950) famously defined, it is a creative-destruction process (Fig. 8.1). Everything flows, πάντα ῥεῖ—panta rhei, Heraclitus the Obscure is said to have said. Like for Daoism, the reality is seen to be in constant movement, and nothing is permanent. Some move faster; others slowly and deeper. Nothing is sustained, but all continuously in the process of regeneration. Atoms, molecules, consciousness and life move from one structure to another, each bit relating and combining to others before being forced out of the relation, entering into new ones. Even at the atomic level, as modern quantum physics came to realise after having been searching for the final indivisible atom, there is no such thing as a stable, separated object: at the subatomic level, there are no unchanging, solid particles, but just quanta as emergent properties of the underlying quantum field. Everything is in a continuous flow and dance, like in the Hinduist representation of the Hindu God Shiva as Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance. These parallels led the Indian government, itself a member of CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva), to gift a sculpture of the God to the CERN in 2004. It reflects the strong parallels between modern physics and ancient Hinduism Fritj of Capra (1975, p. 244) draw in his book the Tao of Physics stating that ‘The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe; the ceaseless flow of energy through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another. (. . .) According to quantum field theory (. . .) the dance of creation and destruction is the basis of the very existence of matter. (. . .) Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. (. . .) For the modern physicists then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomena’. As the Lord of the Dance, Shiva is at the source of the moving universe and, simultaneously, beyond the illusion of duality, good and evil. Thus, he aims to liberate all consciousness from Maya’s delusion of things’ deceiving external appearance. The illusion of stability and the attachment to fixed forms. Not just matter and energy are in permanent movement in the universe, but consciousness too. Human and otherwise. Impermanence too as well a central aspect of Buddhist philosophy. And, as Buddha’s teachings go, impermanence is at the heart of all that exists, attachment at the source of suffering. In this representation, Shiva is at the source of the moving universe and, simultaneously, beyond the illusion of duality, good and evil. Thus, he aims to liberate all

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Fig. 8.2 The standard representation of the circular flow of wealth

consciousness from Maya’s delusion of things’ deceiving external appearance. The illusion of stability and the attachment to fixed forms. Not just matter and energy are in permanent movement in the universe, but consciousness too. Human and otherwise. Impermanence too as well a central aspect of Buddhist philosophy. And, as Buddha’s teachings go, impermanence is at the heart of all that exists, attachment at the source of suffering. Notwithstanding, by sticking to the mechanistic view of reality and reducing it all to ‘objects’, modern economics ended up needing to assume that reality is not as it is, in constant movement and change, but fixed and objectified. Economists, thus, consider Nature as well as human Nature to be unchanging: ceteris paribus. Human free will and response-ability are ignored by assuming mechanical, predictable and regular behaviour patterns. Similarly, it is assumed that there are no environmental, technological, cultural and historical changes. Thus, instead of inquiring into how new wealth in use-values terms is being produced and regenerated, how we relate and affect Nature’s capacity to regenerate, economists keep making abstract representations of the circular flow of wealth in the economy as if it were a closed and reversible process (Fig. 8.2). It is the consequence of applying the mechanistic and reductionist views to look at the oikonomic process. Thus, just as classical physics ignored thermodynamics and the irreversibility of time and qualitative change in Nature, economists ignore how we get from Nature the needed information, matter and energy, transform it through our different production processes, distribute it internally, consume them and finally

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Fig. 8.3 The oikonomic process from a holistic perspective

expel them as waste into our environment (Figs. 8.1 and 8.3). Instead of looking at the relations and movement of our oikonomic process in living ways, modern economics depicted an abstract imaginary world in which money, goods and services are represented in quantitative terms, described as objects circulating in markets. Nature has been walking and keeping its balance for a long while. Little is known about the origin, about the when, the how and even less the why. But we know that we are life looking at itself, living beings aware of being alive. As self-reflective beings, we are an awakening consciousness of the universe trying to understand itself. We are part of the universe’s self-reflective minds, looking through all living beings’ senses and human artistic expression, myths, reason and science to ourselves, using our human-made tools to look both deeper and further into it. Most recently, developing information technologies and artificial intelligence to look for hidden patterns, regularities and movements enhancing our biologically and physically limited senses and mental processes. We are all part of the universe, part of Nature trying to make sense of itself. Much had advanced in the last decades in knowing when and how life emerged on Earth. As shown by Stuart Kauffman, once we abandon the reductionist view of biological evolution and look at life in living, holistic and dynamic ways, a completely new picture appears. Instead of improbable accidents of evolution, the miraculous creation of a God who for some reason decided to create us at his image and resemblance, life and consciousness are an expected outcome of the evolution of a complex, dynamic, open system functioning at the edge of chaos and order. As Kaufmann (1995, pp. 50–51) argued, ‘the vast flowering of all life-forms over the past 3.45 billion years is merely a hint of the possible behaviors of open thermodynamic systems. So too is cosmogenesis itself, for the evolving universe since the Big Bang has yielded the formation of galactic and supergalactic structures of enormous scales. Those stellar structures and the nuclear processes within stars, which have generated the atoms and molecules from which life itself arose, are open systems,

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driven by nonequilibrium processes. We have only begun to understand the awesome creative powers of nonequilibrium processes in the unfolding universe. We are all—complex atoms, Jupiter, spiral galaxies, warthog, and frog—the logical progeny of that creative power’. Indeed, within evolutionary biology, abiogenesis or informally known as the study of the origin of life, the image which emerges is that, as the title of Stuart Kauffman’s book affirms, we are at home in the universe. Instead of life just being an improbable event on Earth where all the favourable environmental conditions happened to be found, it is an expected result of the universe’s unfolding. As is consciousness, as I will come back later. Life did not happen to find, on Earth, a miraculously fitting external environment to evolve. It has created this living Earth and is this environment. Both product and producer of itself. Thus, an incredible richness of life forms has been found in the most unlikely and hostile environments. For instance, in the deep sea, at abyss zones untouched by the sunlight and around hydrothermal vents hosting complex communities fuelled by the chemicals dissolved in the vent fluids. In these places, in harsh contrast to the ambient water temperature around 2  C (36  F), the water emerges from these vents at temperatures ranging from 60  C (140  F) up to as high as 464  C (867  F). But it is there that chemosynthetic bacteria, that is, bacteria able to synthesise new organic compounds from inorganic matter, and archaea—single-celled organisms lacking cell nuclei and thus prokaryotes—abound and constitute the base of the food chain. They support diverse organisms, including giant tube worms, clams, limpets and shrimp. At the edge of chaos and order, the low-entropy flux generated by these thermal differences is at the source of dissipative structures. Active hydrothermal vents are thought to exist on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and it is speculated that ancient hydrothermal vents once existed on Mars. In any case, they are perfect examples of physicochemical, far-from-equilibrium processes, nurturing life’s autopoietic processes due to the high-temperature gradient between the ambient water and the outpouring thermal waters rich in all kinds of dissolved minerals, particularly sulphides. As Kaufmann and others are studying, these are places where the transition from dynamic dissipative structures to creative, autopoietic life processes may have happened. In such regions, too, life is expected to have emerged for the first time on Earth. Although it is hard, if not impossible, to know when exactly life first appeared on Earth, it did so early and under extremely harsh environmental conditions. Early life was simple, made up of unicellular prokaryotic organisms. Moreover, it emerged in a time when strong volcanic, atmospheric and geo-bio-physicochemical processes were profoundly transforming our lands, seas and atmosphere. Thereby, little fossil evidence can be found from these early times. Until recently, the origin of life was dated at least 3.5 billion years ago. But in the last years, scientists found possible evidence dating even further back. From the primitive seas, where the first life is expected to have emerged, microfossils (fossilised microorganisms) within hydrothermal vent precipitates dated 3.77 to 4.28 billion years were found in Quebec’s rocks. They may harbour the oldest life record on Earth, suggesting life started soon after ocean’s formation, 4.4 billion years ago. But even on land, records as far back

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as 3.48 billion years have been found in old geyserite and other related mineral deposits (often found around hot springs and geysers) uncovered in the Pilbara Craton of Western Australia. From the studies in astrobiology, it is known that complex organic molecules occur in the solar system and interstellar space. They are not yet life, but they may provide the starting material for its development. As Stuart Kauffman and others have been researching, there are plenty of examples of what he called autocatalytic processes, meaning far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures where the dynamic physicochemical process itself creates the needed elements for its functioning. That is a process in which the catalysing parts are reproduced by the process they catalyse. In analogous ways, a living cell produces the different components needed for its metabolism to work and keep the cell alive. Or just as in our body, where our organs and the myriads of hormones, biochemical signals, nutrients, cells, bones and homeostatic balances are continuously being regenerated by their combined functioning. Both the product and the co(re)producing elements of this living whole. Forest, too, grows as the habitat of all the life forms existing therein; and as a result of their existence. Both egg and its offspring. Thus, for instance, the Amazon is an incredibly diverse and dynamic self-organised system, producing new organic matter and recycling the existing ones at exceptionally high rates. Even making its rain, once the humid air coming from the sea will meet condensing particles generated by the trees and precipitate as abundant rain. It will then be absorbed by the trees, plants and animals, to be expelled through evapotranspiration into the atmosphere and precipitate as abundant rain again. Humans now talk about ‘circular economy’: something Nature has been relying on since the beginning. Thus, the same water molecule may circulate dozens of times in its trip from the sea up to the Andean mountains to become part of some affluent of the Amazon River to be carried back to the sea. Thus, the forest produces the rain it needs to survive. Notwithstanding, once the forest and vegetation are removed, the incredible fertile thin layer of living, fertile ground soil is washed away, the soil becomes sand, and life dwindles away. As a result, the humid Atlantic air would be blown over the arid land to condense only once it reaches the Andean mountains at the other side of the continent, condensing by becoming denser and colder on its way up. The Amazon forest, thus, produces its soil and humid and rainy environment to be this explosion of life, in harsh contrast to the Sahara at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Ignoring Nature’s oikonomy and how this incredible Amazonian wealth is being continuously regenerated, the forest is being cut down at alarming rates in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘economic development’. It is being replaced by cattle and soya plantations, mining and building huge dams to produce the so-called renewable green energy in some of the most giant hydroelectric plants in the world to power Brazilian industry thousands of miles to the south. Ignoring how these ecological dynamics happening in the Amazon affects the climate of the whole country and even the world and how essential they are for our lives and oikonomy, we are already experiencing in Brazil, even in the far-south, one of the harshest droughts in our known history. Thus, we can see how focusing on the short-term chrematistic

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interests and ignoring how life processes actively sustain and regenerate Nature and ourselves, we may have some immediate monetary profits and even ‘better’ so-called economic numbers like growing GDP, trade balance surpluses and huge fortunes being made in the agribusiness. But, in the long term, it is the road to ecological and oikonomy misery and catastrophe. By looking at how to ‘develop’ and bring ‘progress’, we fail to see that, in the long term, we are all worse off. The rich and biodiverse Amazon forest, regenerating and producing critical environmental services and all traditional communities living therein, having been replaced by pastures, industrial soya plantations, savannah and maybe, one day, Sahara-like desert and dunes. Brazil is already facing the risk of blackouts and electricity shortages due to the low water level of its dams resulting from the drought. Thereby, building thermoelectric plants is now being considered as an alternative. Thus, we can see how the natural water cycle having been disrupted, we have to substitute Nature’s self-organised natural oikonomy with human polluting and disruptive one. Lynn Margulis defined our living Earth as ‘the series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the Earth’s surface’. Ecosystems are made up of interacting biotic and abiotic systems and a myriad of living organisms. Each one of these is by itself a dissipative structure, regenerating its internal order by means and through the flux of matter, energy and information which traverses it. Each ecosystem is receiving matter, energy and information from the outside, transforming them internally and by doing so regenerating its internal order and expelling dissipated matter, energy and information at the other end of the process again. Humans are an integral part of this process, as is our human oikonomy, a subset of the broader Nature’s oikonomy. It is both an extension of it, opening new domains and possibilities, and utterly dependent on it as a product of the whole’s functioning. In this new holistic and living understanding of the evolution of life on Earth, already Vernadsky had gone a step further in his perception by including humans and human consciousness and spiritual life as an active part of the Earth’s evolution. Thus, in the 1930s, he proposed the idea of noosphere resulting from human cognition and self-reflectiveness, permeating and profoundly transforming the biosphere and the geosphere’s geological evolution. He defended the idea that human cognitive processes and culture driving human behaviour were themselves a source of substantial geological changes. This, of course, should be evident if we look at the effects of our modern industrial world on Earth. How, among others, our faith in progress, the free market’s virtues, technical change and pursuit of material progress have wholly altered the face of the Earth in the last centuries. Here too, Vernadsky, taking a holistic perspective, understood that human consciousness and culture are not just the fruit of the evolution of the universe and our planet but also one of its fundamental co(re)producing elements. An integral part whereby our biosphere and the very material substance of wealth is continuously being (re)made and regenerated. Thus, Nature’s and human’s oikonomy, cultural processes and evolution of consciousness are not happening on separate tracks. All these processes are interdependent parts of a larger whole, which evolves as a

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complex, dynamic (re)organisation process, in which the biophysical ones change the geophysical and geochemical processes. These processes, at their turn, are all transformed by the anthropogenic processes and the noosphere, the evolution of human consciousness, values and culture. These ideas and the principles underlying Gaia theory that have become a mainstream approach to climate science are becoming each time more evident. Even among geologists, the idea of a new geological era that our modern development practices have inaugurated is gaining more and more acceptance. By observing how we are affecting our climate, producing and synthesising new materials and biochemical compounds like plastics, CFCs, pesticides, antibiotics and a massive list of new chemical compounds which are profoundly affecting the evolution of our biosphere and our planet as a whole, the idea that we are already living in a new geological era, the Anthropocene, is gaining more and more acceptance among the geological community. An era in which Anthropos, Greek for humans, have become one of the main geological forces defining the future of our world and life on Earth. A geological era provoked by us. But economists still portray markets and the oikonomy as if it were external to the world. We are ignoring that we humans, with our behaviour and oikonomic practice, are actively altering the topography of the Earth. Bulldozing down mountains, building channels, gaining land from the waters by building artificial islands and changing rivers’ flow with our dams, canals and massive irrigation schemes. By affecting climate, at both the local and the global level, we are changing weather patterns. Our agriculture practice and plunder of natural resources affect life’s biodiversity on a massive scale and accelerate the deforestation and desertification of tropical and equatorial areas. We are mining past buried atmospheric carbon in the form of oil and fossil fuels back to the surface, massively burning it and pumping it back to the atmosphere. By doing so, we are reversing millions of years of gradual and slow biogeochemical processes whereby the greenhouse effect of our atmosphere has been reduced by trapping atmospheric carbon in organic matter, maintaining Earth’s homoeothermic balances. Here, as Lovelock argued, living in an interglacial period where the temperature is already higher than the more common glacial periods, it is as if we are adding heat to an already feverish patient. Moreover, the myriad of new chemical compounds we produce daily profoundly alters terrestrial, atmospheric and hydrographic balances, affecting our and other beings lives and wellbeing on a global scale. Thereby, we are still feeding the patient, our sickening Earth, with the same unhealthy diet as before. Our oikonomic practice and logic is at the centre of these developments and has been increasingly so since the dawn of our modern capitalist industrial society. It is a central aspect conforming and affecting this new geological era. Indeed, the way we perceive our oikonomic aims and define wealth, a good life and our identities, our cultural values and believes, are all central dimensions of the noosphere. It is a bitter irony, if not a tragedy, that precisely there where the interdependence of life and the need to understand it are the more profound and relevant, economists keep ignoring it. That a process vitally dependent on Nature’s dynamics and functions, which

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profoundly affects our world, is represented by economists as if it were happening in an abstract void. Our oikonomic development process is a multidimensional process affecting and being affected by the more comprehensive whole. It is both the product and the co (re)producer of the broader cultural, political, historical, ecological and increasingly geological dynamics. But, tragically so, the science called to understand this process, economics, still sticks to the ceteris paribus condition’s artificiality, assuming them all to be unchanging. Now that our oikonomic development practice has become one of the leading forces shaping our biosphere, ecosystems and even the geology of our world, Nature is ignored by economists and their models. Notwithstanding, this ignorance is something that we do at our peril. This ignorance is even more striking given the accelerating pace and prevalence of these changes all around us. Although our oikonomic development process, which Schumpeter defined as a ‘creative destruction’ and ‘destructive creation’ process, is all around to see, economists keep talking about the circular flow of wealth and demand and supply balances. Notwithstanding, our technology, cultural values, social life and even natural environment are not unchanging. Indeed, they are changing at increasingly fast paces. Acceleration is inbuilt and central to our modern, market-competition-centred capitalist societies. In their communist manifesto, already Marx and Engels (1848/1969) saw it clearly: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a continually expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere’. In finances, there is a measure indicating how effectively investment capital is used to produce revenues. It is called ‘capital turnover’ and is expressed as a ratio of annual sales to invested capital. Given that profits are cumulative and calculated as a compound figure, the faster the capital turnover, the shorter the time span between buying and selling at a profit, and the greater the chrematistic efficiency of an undertaking in exchange-value terms. Said otherwise, when ‘buying for selling’, buying something intending to sell it later at a profit, the faster the cycle is concluded, the earlier a new cycle can begin adding a further gain to the previous one. Thus, in the cycle of M1 – C1 – M2 – C2 – M3 – . . . aiming at M3 > M2 > M1, there is a big difference in total monetary profits if the cycle is closed in 1 h, in 1 day

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or during a year.9 Thus, companies and individuals compete to have the highest return rate in a given period: those who manage to do so are selected and grow; those who don’t are left behind. The famous bottom line marks the chrematistic results which have to be attained in a given period; the shorter, the better. Failing to do so is called ‘not being competitive’. Thus, the continuous aim in our modern marketoriented oikonomy is to accelerate everything: from the growth of crops and livestock using growth-accelerating and growth-enhancing fertilisers, hormones and food to accelerating the distribution logistics, product innovation and forced obsolescence leading to new consumptions. Everywhere, there is the aim of accelerating the machine’s rhythm, transports and, nowadays, information. Time is money, it is said, and the faster it runs, the more money is accumulated. Thus, production lines are accelerated, and people have to attend to ‘deadlines’ and production needs at increasing speed—but so does the entropic degradation and dissipation of matter and energy. Thereby, raw materials and ecosystems are consumed and exploited at rising rates, and humans are pressured to accelerate their behaviour and labour. It may sound ironic while being tragic that precisely when change and acceleration are the essences of the oikonomic logic and objectives, the way of looking at it in modern economics is still based on the assumption of stability and unchanging, eternal balance. That economists still base their models of reality on the ceteris paribus assumption. This is the first thing we can see by observing Nature’s oikonomy: Nature is whole and in movement. It is creative and self-organised, autopoietic. So is the oikonomic process, grounded and part of it. We are extending and transforming Nature’s creative and destructive powers as well. We are all both the product and co-reproducing parts of the whole. We are all not just at home in the universe but, without exception, responsible for its regeneration or degradation.

References Capra, F. (1975). The Tao of physics—An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Shambhala.

M1 – C1 – M2 – C2 – M3. . . (Using an initial amount of money M1 to buy a commodity C1 to be sold for a higher amount of money M2 used to buy a new commodity C2 to be sold for even more M3, etc.). The idea of ‘buying for selling’ aiming a profit is the very definition of capital given by Marx. It is not money as such, but the use of money as an investment buying use-values which are not to be consumed, but used to produce even a higher exchange-value is what converts money, machines, human labour force, raw materials, etc. into capital. Commercial goods, stock exchanges, natural capital or waged labour are just ways whereby commercial, industrial, financial, human or natural capital manifest themselves. A possibility to, through chrematistic, enrich the successful owner of this capital, putting it into movement. The faster it moves, the higher are the profits.

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Foxman, B., Goldberg, D., Murdock, C., Xi, C., & Gilsdorf, J. R. (2008). Conceptualizing human microbiota: From multicelled organ to ecological community. In Interdisciplinary perspectives on infectious diseases volume 2008. Hindawi. Article ID: 613979. Goldschmidt, V. M. (1926). Geochemische Verteilungsgesetze der Elemente. Skrifter Norske Videnskaps—Skrifter Norske Vi. Natur. Kaufmann, S. (1995). At home in the universe—the search for laws of self-organization and complexity. Penguin Books. Lovelock, J. (1979). Gaia: A new look at life on earth. Oxford University Press. Lovelock, J. (1995). The ages of Gaia—A biography of our living earth (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the communist party. In K. Marx & F. Engels (Eds.), Selected works (Vol. 1). Progress. (1969). Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos—Man’s new dialogue with nature. Bantam Books. Stahel, A. W. (2020). Oikonomy—The art of living and living well. Montseny Spiral Edition. Vernadsky, V. (1986). The biosphere. Synergetic Press. Whitfield, P. (1998). New found lands: Maps in the history of exploration. Routledge.

Chapter 9

A Matter of Scale

Another author who profoundly influenced my understanding of reality was Leopold Kohr (5 October 1909–26 February 1994). He is not very known by the public, even less within economics, although being an economist and having taught from 1943 to 1955 at Rutgers University in New Jersey and later until 1973 in the University of Puerto Rico, except for a short period in 1965–1966 he taught in Mexico City. He taught economics, public administration and political philosophy. His outstanding contribution was to understand that the social world, like everything else in the universe, had to be understood in its context. That, as everywhere else, in the end, it is all a matter of scale. In Puerto Rico, he wrote his best-known book, The Breakdown of Nations, finally published in 1957 after being repeatedly rejected by different American and British publishers. It resulted in being a path-breaking book. As it often happens once we think about it, his main argument that we have to consider relations of scale not just when looking to the natural world but in the social domain too sounds obvious. Notwithstanding, even then and until now, his ideas about keeping balances and an appropriate scale as a central element for peace and prosperity have not found a willing audience in our growth- and records-obsessed modern world. But gradually, his understanding is becoming more evident, particularly now that a tiny virus has brought our over-scaled and the over-accelerated globalised world to a halt. In 1983, he received the Right Livelihood Award for having been ‘the originator, and for two and a half decades the solitary advocate, of the concept of the human scale and the idea of a return to life in small communities’.1 His ideas would be popularised in the 1970s by two of his students and friends, Fritz Schumacher and Ivan Illich. It was only through their writings that I came to know their source of inspiration and master. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (16 August 1911–4 September 1977) was an economist and statistician, having become famous by creating the slogan’ small is beautiful’ and proposing human-scale, decentralised

1

https://www.rightlivelihoodaward.org/laureates/leopold-kohr/

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_9

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and appropriate technologies. His book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, published in 1973, was ranked by The Times Literary Supplement (1995, p. 39) as one of the 100 most influential books published since World War II. That same year, Illich published his book Tools for Conviviality. In this book, the idea of appropriate scale is applied to modern institutions such as our current school system, the industrial medicine complex and tools like the automobile. In all of them, scale imbalances are at the root of the problems, not the tool or the institution taken separately. As Illich’s argument went, two critical thresholds have to be observed to promote wellbeing and that which he termed convivial tools. The first is reached when a single, particular way of looking after a given need becomes the primary way to attend it. Or, said in statistic terms, roughly more than half of the people attend their need through this specific satisfier. When most people attend schools to learn, they treat their health using modern industrialised medicine or mobility needs by using a car. At this moment, this specific institution or tool becomes dominant and starts to assess its results on its terms. The level of education begins to be equated to the literacy level or the number of graduates and postgraduates in a country; health is evaluated in terms of the number of hospital beds per thousand inhabitants or the index of vaccination; the wealth and development of a society are evaluated by the number of cars, their age or the kilometres of highways it possesses. In all these cases, needs are assessed and increasingly confounded with specific satisfiers until a second threshold is reached in which a radical monopoly is achieved. Illich defined this radical monopoly as a cognitive monopoly, a monopoly of the mind. People confound the means with the ends and believe that the only way to attend to a given need is through this specific tool and satisfier. At this point, this particular satisfier starts to assess its monopoly, denying people access to alternatives. People lose their autonomy and are put in the specialists’ hands and the heteronomously provided satisfiers. Thereby, we start to think about ourselves and society as needy of more schools, hospitals or highways, instead of better understanding, better health or better mobility. Thus, the reproduction of these particular satisfiers becomes the aim to be pursued. School becomes mandatory, public health services are limited to modern medicine, and cars cease to be a luxury to become a necessity. Although often imposed by law and administrative order, it is also internalised by the individuals who cease to believe in their ability or the capacity of the community to take care of itself, looking for externally produced and provided satisfiers instead. As Illich argued, that which is gained by further growth of the system or the tool is more than offset by that which is lost by the loss of alternative ways to attend to that specific need. People no longer learn by themselves, in their families and communities, by working or participating in the daily activities, but spend increasing hours submitted to national curriculums in the classrooms. The result is that people increasingly become disconnected from their local reality, cease to learn by themselves or within their community crucial bits of knowledge and, more importantly, lose their motivation and curiosity to learn more. They become the passive receptors of externally provided information that is decided to be taught by the national

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curriculum, educational specialists and governments. Although spending more and more hours in schools, as assessed worldwide, people’s level of education and general knowledge are at increasing lows. Thus, many US college students cannot place their own country on a blank map, and I remember how, as a teacher in my early career, I had graduate students who, although able to read words and sentences out loud, were unable to grasp their meaning. As a teacher and father of two daughters and a son, it always struck me to see the contrast between my pre-school age-growing children, full of curiosity and interest and asking all sorts of difficult questions, and the passivity of most of my students in my classes, particularly those just starting a career. In our first classes, when I tried to present my idea for the course, instead of asking me about the syllabus and content of what we were going to spend many hours discussing, students were interested in how they would be evaluated and the requirements to approve. They were not questioning what was taught but how they could get their diploma. Knowing is a fundamental human need. Humans cannot rely purely on inherited instincts but have to know and understand our environment and ourselves to survive and prosper. Thus, children eagerly learn to speak, walk, go on a bicycle, eat and behave to satisfy their fundamental needs best. Having studied in a school where no exams were required to move on, studying was more of a personal option than an institutional requirement. Thereby, I learned to focus my energy on my interests. Just as young children do when they do not ‘have to go to school’ but learn following their innate curiosity. Notwithstanding, now that ‘learning’ and ‘education’ have been equated with ‘attending school’, the more years are spent at school, the less motivated individuals seem to learn. Thus, my students expected to earn their diplomas and carry little about what they were learning. Or all these students in economics who accept whatever curriculum is presented to them in exchange for good professional prospects once they have their diploma and can call themselves professional economists. The same has happened once people put themselves in the hands of health professionals to stay and become healthy. By doing so, they have lost sight of taking care of their health, following a healthy diet and lifestyle or resorting to natural and non-aggressive health methods and practices. Instead, they put themselves in the hand of doctors and pharmaceutical industries providing for their health. Thereby, while previously people and communities knew how to take care of themselves, increasingly, they become dependent on externally provided goods and services. Thereby, people attend schools from a young age until adulthood, rush to the hospitals or the drugstore at the first sign of illness and spend increasing hours behind the wheel of their private vehicle commuting to their workplace from their suburban home. Everywhere, specialists assume the radical monopoly on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs. Psychologists and psychiatric drugs provide our psychological and emotional needs; justice is provided by the legal system, professional lawyers and judges; traditions of self-construction and communities getting together to build a community house are lost and replaced by needed architects, engineers and waged labourers. Furthermore, politics is reduced to institutionalised politics and human free will narrowed to our private domain and

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voting our representatives if living in a democracy. At the same time, the public space is increasingly controlled and managed by public servants and professionals. Self-sufficiency and reciprocity are replaced by chrematistics and redistribution and autonomy and conviviality by heteronomy and alienation. Thus, we all came to see what the ‘economy’ is all about through the narrow economist’s perspective, reducing it to chrematistics. Leaving it to the specialist, economists define the ‘wealth of nations’ and individuals in purely monetary terms instead of wellbeing and balance, and we all become poorer as a result. Indeed, as Illich argues in detail, our wellbeing is reduced instead of increased by the further growth of these industrial tools and institutions. Moreover, they reinforce each other reciprocally. Modern pharmaceutical industries make huge profits due to the radical monopoly modern medicine has on our approach to health; current schools, by their very institutional structure and method, educate people to accept the vertical hierarchical structures of modern industrial institutions and power structures and reinforce the idea of needed specialisation and externally defined evaluation tools assessing each ones’ worth and ‘efficiency’. Thus, institutionalised schools support the view that only specialists know: doctors how to heal, teachers how to teach and economists how to become rich. The spread of cars and our automobile culture is an excellent example of how crossed a given limit, growth impairs instead of expanding health and wellbeing. ‘Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city into their image—practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles. They can eliminate river traffic in Thailand. That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive Chevies than Fords, constitutes radical monopoly. What cars do to people by virtue of this radical monopoly is quite distinct from and independent of what they do by burning gasoline that could be transformed into food in a crowded world. It is also distinct from automotive manslaughter. Of course cars burn gasoline that could be used to make food. Of course they are dangerous and costly. But the radical monopoly cars establish is destructive in a special way. Cars create distance. Speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce. They drive wedges of highways into populated areas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remoteness between people that was manufactured for their sake. This monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys the environment for feet and bicycles. Even if planes and buses could run as nonpolluting, nondepleting public services, their inhuman velocities would degrade man’s innate mobility and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel’ (Illich, 1975, p. 66). Many historical studies around the developed world show that the spread and the growing speed and power of automobiles have degraded human mobility instead of improving. As Illich (1975, p. 21) noted, ‘when transportation had passed through its second watershed, vehicles had created more distances than they helped to bridge; more time was used by the entire society for the sake of traffic than was “saved”’.2

2

Ibid., p. 21. In the French version (not translated to the American one), he would continue his argument stating that ‘the average American dedicates more than 1500 hours a year to his car: he is

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Thus, as Sachs (1999, p. 193), quoting Schallaböck (1996) studies, noted, ‘contrary to popular belief—and this is proven by a multitude of studies from different countries—car drivers do not spend less time in transit than non-drivers. Nor are drivers more frequently on the move (. . .). Those who buy a car do not take a deep breath and rejoice in extra hours of leisure. They travel to more distant destinations. (. . .) The time gained is reinvested into longer distances. And, as time goes by, the spatial distribution of places changes and long distances become the norm. People still go to school, to work, to the cinema, but are obliged to travel longer routes. As a consequence, the average German citizen today travels 15,000 km a year in 1996 as opposed to only 2,000 km in 1950’. ‘Swedes on average moved from going 0.5 km from their homes to their working place in 1930 to travel 33 km in 1985. In the USA, the distances travelled increased an average of 22% between 1969 and 1990 while in the UK people passed from an average of 3.6 km to get to their work in 1900 to travel 37 km in 1960’ (Miralles-Guasch, 2002, p. 32, referring to Grübler, 1990 and Oyón, 1999). Thus, something confirmed everywhere, despite higher speed, people have been spending more time commuting than before. A detailed study, covering over a century in the UK, may serve as an example of what happened, even in a much more dramatic fashion, in the still growing megalopolis like Tokyo, São Paulo, Mexico City, New York or Lagos. In all of them, most of its inhabitants spend many hours daily commuting from one place to another at a huge social and ecological cost. Even for Manchester and Glasgow, where the effect has not been as dramatic, as Colin G. Pooley and Jean Turnbull (2000) observed, in the 1890s, people spent an average of 17.7 minutes commuting to work at an average speed of 12.2 km/hour. They did so primarily by foot (59.4% of the time), but as well by bicycle (2%), tram (16.8%), bus (5%), train (9.8%) and underground (5%). Cars and motorcycles were not used at that time. But they would make their entrance later, and, from then on, people were less and less able to go on foot, bicycle or tram. For instance, in the post-war decade of the 1950s, just 13.4% of all people would do so walking, 16% had acceded to do it by bicycle, and just 2.5 would do so by tram. The majority went to work by bus (23.3%), while 18.9% did so by train and 5.5% underground. By then, cars had firmly entered the stage (16.3% went to work by car or by van), and 3% did so by motorcycle. But even so, although the average speed of all had slightly improved (to 15.9 km/hour), the total time spent commuting to work had nearly doubled: people spend, on average, 33.9 minutes doing it. The main reason is that the average distance to work had almost tripled to 9 kilometres compared to the 3.6 kilometres covered in the 1890s. Thus, if we look at the need which was being attended to, namely, daily commuting to work, the situation had worsened instead of becoming better.

seated in it moving or stopped, he works to pay for it, to pay for its oil, tires, tolls, insurance, taxes and fines. Here we are not considering all his activities related to transports: time passed in the hospital, at the mechanical workshop, time spent watching car advertising, time worked to pay for his holiday car travel, etc. He needs, thus, 1500 h to do 10.000 km. 6 km will take him one hour’ (Illich, 1973, p. 24).

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This trend becomes even more evident if we look at the final decade, the 1990s, these authors studied. By then, although the average speed had improved to 25.4 kilometres/hour, the commuting time had risen to 34.5 minutes every day on average. By then, 53% would go to work by car or van and 14.6% by motorcycle, and just 7.9 could do so walking and 6.1% using their bicycle. If we add that cars exhaust gases, accidents and maintenance and replacement costs represent an impairment of other fundamental needs, the picture gets even worse. Yes, cars and motorcycles allow for individual speed and mobility. But they have not improved our collective wellbeing. Everywhere, car-friendly urban space meant to privatise public common space which became available to the private car. Streets as commons and convivial spaces where people sat outside their homes, played, chatted and related have been transformed into no-spaces, transition spaces subordinated to personal mobility. Narrow and curved passages were enlarged and straightened into city avenues connected to highways connecting the new urban suburbs. Thus, the growth of middle- and high-class suburbs for the wealthy urban classes escaping from the crowded, deteriorated and contaminated urban centres in some cases; suburban shantytowns for the poor immigrants and minorities in the rapidly growing thirdworld megalopolis in some others. The more cars allowed people to live further away and commute to more distant places for working, socialising, studying or shopping, the more all these people commuting to the urban commercial and industrial centres crowded the space and pollute the atmosphere both physically and acoustically, thus leading even more people to move further away and become more dependent on cars. Until, as it happened, we become dependent on the radical monopoly in which life without vehicles may be difficult or even impossible. Thus, the global car fleet just keeps growing despite growing worries about climate change, deteriorating urban centres, traffic collapses, increasing death tolls from car accidents and car pollution-related health problems. This self-reinforcing growth is a common feature of all things big or, better said, too big. Something bigness has in it is power. Thus, as Kohr showed, once a scale imbalance exists, there is the temptation to abuse this power to grow further. Until a counter-power holds it in check or it implodes under its weight. The weight the car and the oil industry have in our oikonomy and how we have become dependent on them make it nearly impossible to get rid of them. Rather than the other way around, we keep on growing and pushing them further. Similarly, empires and colonial powers kept expanding over the weak and small, or, nowadays, the giant technology firms keep growing and growing, swallowing potential competitors in their way. From Rome to Hitler, from the nineteenth-century oil barons to present-day Google and Facebook, growth promotes further growth and abuse of power by the big. Kohr even quantifies this process by, similar to Illich, establishing how scale imbalances become a source of social violence and abuse of power. As Kohr (1957, pp. 36 and 26) argued, ‘the same law that causes an atom bomb to go off spontaneously when fissionable material reaches the critical size, seems to cause a nation to become spontaneously aggressive when its power reaches the critical volume. No determination of its leaders, no ideology, not even the Christian ideology of love and peace

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itself, can prevent it from exploding in warfare. By the same token, no aggressive desire and no ideology, not even the ideology of nazism or communism (. . .) can drive a nation into attack as long as its power remains below the critical volume. (. . .). But what is the critical magnitude leading to abuse? The answer is not too difficult. It is the volume of power that ensures immunity from retaliation. This it does whenever it induces in its possessor the belief that he cannot be checked by any existing larger accumulation of power. Depending on the nature of different individuals or groups, the critical volume represents a different magnitude in each different case, giving rise to the idea that there are really other elements than mere physical magnitudes responsible for criminal outbursts. However, as the boiling point is low for some substances and high for others, so the volume of power leading to abuse is low for some individuals or groups and high for others. And similarly, as rising temperatures will in the end bring even the most resistant metals to boiling point, so the rising mass of power will, in the end, brutalize even the best, not necessarily in a subjective sense, but certainly in its effects. This means that, whether we are individuals or groups, once the critical point is reached, we become brutes almost in spite of ourselves. If prison guards and police officials have such a universal record of brutality, it is not because they are worse than other men but because in their relationship with their captives they are nearly always equipped with the critical quantity of power. The moment this is missing, they are as considerate, humble and complying as the rest of us’. ‘Even the most superficial historic survey confirms this relationship. There could be no gentler peoples on earth today than the Portuguese, the Swedes, the Norwegians, or the Danes. Yet, when they found themselves in possession of power, they lashed out against any and all comers with such fury that they conquered the world from horizon to horizon. This was not because, at the period of their national expansion, they were more aggressive than others. They were more powerful. At other times, the British and the French were the world’s principal aggressors. (. . .) The only thing that stopped them in the end was their inability, their lack of power, to go any further. (. . .) Peoples such as the Dutch were peaceful in Europe where their power was subcritical, and aggressive in remote regions where their relative power was critical. More recently (. . .) Germany and Russia emerged as the champion aggressors. But the reason for their belligerence was still the same. Not their philosophy drove them to war but their suddenly acquired power with which they did what every nation in similar conditions had done previously—they used it for aggression. However, as powerful Germany was as aggressive as others, weak Germany was as harmless. The same people that overran the world with the formidable soldiers of Hitler’s formidable Reich, formed externally the most inoffensive societies as long as they lived divided into jealous and independent small principalities such as Anhalt-Bernburg, Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, Saxe-Weimar, or HohenzollernSigmaringen. They had their little wars, of course, but none that would have stamped them as different from the Italians of Parma, the French of Picardy, the English of Devonshire, or the Celts of Cornwall. Where they escaped the power-breeding

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unification of Bismarck, they remained peaceful even through the periods of the two world wars as was demonstrated by the inhabitants of Liechtenstein and Switzerland. (. . .) Clearly, deprived of power, even the aggressive Germans see no charm in a military destiny just as, endowed in power, even the saintly Indians have demonstrated in their bullying campaigns against Hyderabad, Kashmir, and Nepal, that they are not averse to the pleasures of warfare. Only in the face of the seemingly almighty Chinese and Russians do the disciples of Gandhi practice what they preach—love of peace. (. . .). The danger of aggression arises spontaneously, irrespectively of nationality or disposition, the moment the power of a nation becomes so great that, in the estimate of its leaders, it has outgrown the power of its adversaries’ (Kohr, 1957, pp. 36–37). So it does at the individual level and relations where abuses are related to unbalanced power relations once the individual believes in obtaining a reward without having to suffer the cost of having had abused from his superior power. From sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination in workplaces and institutions up to corruptive and plunder-oikonomic behaviour: everywhere scale imbalances are related to power abuses. As Kohr argued, it goes much beyond individual dispositions, values and morals, which may alter the ‘boiling point’ or the ‘critical mass’ required to be willing to perpetrate abuse. As a common denominator to violence and abuse, there is always the scale imbalance that gives the perpetrator the ability to commit the abuse and, at a given moment, stimulates him to do so. Each one according to his melting point, but all eventually melting. This relates the paedophilic practice by those who devoted their lives to God within the Catholic Church, in a time in which no counter-threat stopped them from doing so to a thug shooting a rival on the street on his back. Or the practice of multinational and big national companies in third-world countries where more significant profits can be obtained through bribery and unethical behaviour or simply by following laxer labour and environmental regulations. In the face of external scrutiny, law enforcement and consumer pressure, the same people and companies may subscribe to ‘corporate responsibility’ and strict ethical standards in their home country while behaving in ruthless ways there where they feel big and powerful enough to do so. That is why it is also difficult to stop those willing to kill themselves in the name of a cause perpetrating suicide attacks or simply lose their faith in life and commit a massacre or a mass shooting in a last act of hatred. Being willing to give their lives, there is no counterbalancing force to stop them. A shocking example was given by the Stanford Prison Experiment which ended up out of control, volunteer guards abusing the volunteer prisoners, in what was supposed to be just an exercise. As were the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prison abuses and countless other examples.3 Or both Obama and Trump ordering the killing without trial of foreign citizens labelled as terrorist by them because they

3

See http://www.prisonexp.org/the-story/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_ and_prisoner_abuse

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happened to have the power to do so without fearing potential negative retaliations to their actions. Scale imbalances are positively related to potentially abusive and exploitative oikonomic practices. It is not that companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook and their top executives have lower ethical standards and restraints. It is simply that, due to their power and scale, they are in a position to abuse and, thus, they eventually end up doing it. The same can be said from the growing wealth distribution inequality; the concentration and centralisation of capital and information in big corporations; the increasing power and availability of our weapons and technologies promoting wars, conflicts and shootings; the growing distance of production to growingly alienated and uninformed consumers; the opacity of regimes like China and the increasing distance between the political institutions in the West and the ‘common folk’; the growing political and market unified territories, managed and regulated by distant bureaucracies and representatives: these are all developments positively related to abuse and social conflict. The same relates to the growing power and impacts of our technology and our tools. Before getting to terms with the latest new technology’s effects, there is already another one knocking at our door. Everywhere, accelerated change and growth are generating further change and growth, further scale imbalances wherefrom social, oikonomic, political, ecological and physical abuse and violence may be expected from. Scale balance is a central aspect of natural phenomena. Notwithstanding, as Kohr noticed, we in the social world believe that somehow the human world is not subjected to these laws of scale. While pursuing our chrematistic growth and developing increasingly powerful tools, we are still convinced that we do not need to restraint our growth and keep balances. Until we eventually crush under our weight or, as it happened now, a combined mass of a few kilograms of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus managed to provoke the Covid-19 pandemic bringing our world to a halt. Already Kohr, trying to identify how to measure social scale, pointed to three main factors: absolute number, density and velocity/integration. A significant population spread over a vast and tiny integrated territory may represent a lesser scale than a smaller, densely packed and highly integrated one. Seen from that perspective, we humans have not just been growing in absolute terms. We have increasingly become more densely packed in megacities and conurbations and, moreover, have become increasingly logistically and informationally integrated on a global scale. This allowed, among others, a local virus to enter the world stage in such a short time and with such a huge impact. Or that events happening on one side of the globe reverberate and affect the whole world. But no one looking for ways to avoid future pandemics seems to have listened to Kohr’s warning about the perils and costs of over-scale already more than half a century ago. Nor have those who built the European Union listened to his straightforward assessment of what makes a federation or a confederation viable in terms of scale. Had they read Kohr, they would probably know that a Europe of the regions would be much more feasible and balanced than a Europe of nations where important scale imbalances exist between them, eventually leading to abuses. As Kohr observed, the over 700 years of successful integration of the Helvetic confederation has been built

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on relatively small and mutually balancing cantons instead of linguistic areas whereby the German-speaking Swiss would easily have imposed their will on the others. Similarly, his argument went, a European Union of the regions would ensure that Catalans, Britons, Scots, Prussian, Bavarian, Sicilian and all other hundreds of historical regions of Europe have their say without any of them and even an alliance of regions being able to impose their will on others. Thus, a much more dynamic, self-regulating and immune to attempted abuse European confederation would exist, instead of the actual one in which Germany, particularly when in concert with France, may end up abusing and even, despite its will, become the elephant in the room. In contrast to successful unions like Switzerland or the USA in which cantons and states have a great deal of autonomy, where scale imbalances exist, centralisation and intents of control by the powerful become the norm. Thus, countries whose political and economic capitals have a disproportionate scale, like Paris, London and now Berlin, tend to be more centralised and face more resistance from the regions than those like the USA and Switzerland whose political capitals, Washington and Bern, respectively, are counterbalanced by more powerful oikonomic centres like New York, Los Angeles, Zürich or Geneva. But, then again, none of the architects of the European Union was worried about potential scale imbalances in the building, nor were the powerful and centralising European capitals, from Madrid to Rome, Paris, London and now Berlin, willing to voluntary give up their centralising and potentially abusing power.4 Nevertheless, in the face of the cracks in the building, more unification and growth of the central and centralising institutions is proposed. Confronted with the downturn brought by the pandemic, a ‘new normality’ in which growth can be resumed is eagerly awaited. In the same line, in the face of the growing technological and corporate behemoths from the USA and China, Europe is looking for strategies and a concerted plan to create its own technological behemoths (The Economist fourth November, 2017, p. 72). Thus, everywhere, instead of considering the limits 4

In the appendixes of his book, Kohr (1957, p. 222) compares different existing, past and potential geographical federation, showing successful ones as the USA ‘with 48 states, roughly equal in size and potential strength, no authority in the United States except the federal can rule over all of them’ (p. 218) and Switzerland comparing its actual successful organisation based on small states (cantons) with how it would look if organised around nationalities. On the other side, he showed the troubles with unified Germany where ‘smaller nations were federated with the Great Power of Prussia which—with a population of 40 million—became naturally the dominant power in the federation. Germany was thus ruled by Prussia’. The continuity of the story is well known: Prussia’s growth drive, which became that of Germany’s, ended up in clashing with the other great powers and Two Great Wars. The same would apply, according to Kohr (1957, p. 224), to the European Federation if organised around its ‘great national blocks, unequal in size and strength, (which) would in the end become a federation in the interest of Germany, because Germany alone would be large enough to enforce a federal law, and no law could be enforced without Germany’s consent. Germany would be arbiter and master’. The fact that no one in the European Union seems to be taken into account the possibility of a balanced Europe of the regions instead of the existing one is a powerful reminder how little attention to the scale imbalances is given in the social and political sciences.

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to growth and acceleration, its pursuit and support continue to represent the mantra of our time. We easily forget that development is foremost a qualitative and not a quantitative matter. Organisms and things, in general, may change and develop without growing. They may as well grow without developing once growth without qualitative changes is not development. It is simply growth. Evolution has not to do with more, but with better, with changing qualities. Qualities are emergent properties defined by relations and proportions. Something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or can be evaluated according to specific aims and objectives. Beauty and harmony emerge from the balanced relations and proportionalities of the parts as much as they may be found in the eyes which see. Qualities are given and defined by relations and proportions, not by the elements per se. A great painting is not the result of the number of given pigments spent on it but emerges from how they were used and distributed on the canvas, the context in which it was created, and how it is seen. Nor is the health of an organism given by its size or organs separately, but by how each organ has the appropriate size for its functions and how the different body parts and organs relate to its global metabolism. Legs should be as thick and robust as proper to sustain the body. Not more, nor less. Relatively thicker for larger animals as elephants, proportionally thinner for tiny mosquitoes. So is the relative size of the hearth of an organism as well as the size of stars. Too small a cosmic body does not allow for sufficient gravity pulling matter to its centre, thus igniting the nuclear fusion radiation as a counterbalancing force. Therefore, instead of a star, we have giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn. At the other end, too big a stellar mass means that the intense pull of gravity leads to an equally intense internal fusion process and eventually ends up in catastrophic developments like supernova explosions. Thus, paradoxically perhaps, reducing their lifespan in comparison to smaller-sized ones. Only medium- and relatively small-sized stars may shine on long enough for life to eventually emerge in a medium-sized planet like our Earth. Not too small to not be able to hold its atmosphere, nor too big to smash everything under its enormous gravity, while orbiting the sun not too close to end up overly heated, nor too far to freeze. Due to all these balances, Earth’s climate may hold its dynamic scale balances enough time to finish writing my book. That, of course, assuming I manage to maintain and keep my existential balances healthy while pursuing my own ‘art of living and living well’. . . Life, wellbeing and health are obtained by keeping the proper balances and keeping growth limited while developing further. It is a crucial aspect of the oikonomy, but Illich’s critique nor Schumacher’s proposals were discussed during my graduate studies. Even less has Leopold Kohr ever been quoted to me. Despite Illich’s (1975, p. 30) claim ‘that the economics applicable to a postindustrial and convivial society can neither be ignored nor taken for granted’ and showing that ‘evidence shows that more and more of the same leads to utter defeat, nothing less than more and more seems worthwhile in a society infected by the growth mania’ (Illich, 1975, p. 21). Ecosystems, like stars, are the result of a gentle dance whereby the different elements of the living system are balanced. If we observe nature, indeed the universe

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as a whole or simply a single cell of our body, everywhere we will see that it is all a matter of appropriate scale, of balances. If we have too many individuals of a single species in any ecosystem, they end up being a plague that may destroy it. At the other pole, having too little or removing certain species performing critical ecological services may do so as well. As Kohr (1957, pp. x and 82–85) has argued, ‘only relatively small bodies— though not the smallest, as we shall see—have stability. Below a certain size, everything fuses, joins, accumulates. But beyond a certain size, everything collapses or explodes. (. . .). To judge from the overwhelming variety of forms and substances, which could develop only on the basis of a myriad of aggregations, combinations, and fusions, it is in aggregation and combinations that life finds its true fulfilment (. . .). As a result, things can be too little as they can be too large, with instability adhering to both developmental stages. (. . .) However (. . .) the instability of the too small is not only a minor problem; it is also of a fundamentally different character from that of the instability of the too large. It is a constructive instability for which nature has provided a self-regulating device in the mechanism of growth. (. . .) The instability of the too large, on the other hand, is a destructive one. (. . .) Sir George Thomson has described the phenomenon of the instability and self-destructiveness of bigness in an analogy (. . .): “Atoms of middle weight are stable and inert, but the light as well as the heavy atoms have stores of energy. If one thinks of the heaviest atoms as overgrown empires which are ripe for dissolution and only held together by special effort, or perhaps by a genius, one may think, on the other hand, of the lightest of the atoms as individuals which run together naturally for mutual help and readily coalesce to form stable tribes and communities”. It is always the same revelation: only small things, be they atoms, individuals, or communities, can be combined in search of a more stable existence, and even they will coalesce naturally only up to a point. Beyond that what previously helped to fulfil their form, now bursts it, with the result that, as they continue to grow, they become heavier and clumsier until the only thing they do naturally is—fall apart. (. . .) Stability and soundness adhere only to bodies of middle weight or, to put emphasis where it belongs, to bodies that are relatively small’. ‘Sola dosis facit venenum’, Paracelsus (1538/1965), credited as the father of modern toxicology, has said. ‘All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison’. Something every physician, health practitioner or individual having eaten or drunken too much knows. Thus, a healthy body continuously regenerates its internal balances, keeping the different elements within the right proportions and doses. The same happens in ecosystems and, as we saw, our living Earth as a whole, maintaining its various parts at the right proportions and relations. It is never a matter of absolute size but relative size. Context matters; relations matter. It is not a question of seeing elements in abstract, isolated, as objects. Nor of trying to elaborate universal laws and quantitatively defined linear relations between variables, assuming them to be valid everywhere and at every time as it is done in conventional economics. To perceive balance and harmony, we must

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look at the whole in its changing relations and proportions. Health and wealth are the results of a process of keeping the right tonos and proportionality. As D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1942/1992, p. 24) observed in his monumental study of growth and form, ‘the effect of scale depends not on a thing in itself, but in relation to its whole environment or milieu; it is in conformity with the thing’s «place in Nature», its field of action and reaction in the universe. Everywhere Nature works true to scale, and everything has its proper size accordingly. Men and trees, birds and fishes, stars and star-systems, have their appropriate dimensions, and their more or less narrow range of absolute magnitudes’. As for the different notes in a melody, their value, their right tone, or their discord, are given not by the note itself, but by its place and relation to all other notes of the music it is a part of and contributes bringing alive. Here too, as Kohr remarked and has become a central aspect of system’s theory, there are two primary forms whereby things or systems stand together constituting a balanced whole. ‘One is by means of stable and the other is by means of a mobile balance. When in their proper element, both are self-regulatory. The stable balance is the balance of the stagnant and the huge. It creates equilibrium by bringing two objects into a fixed and unchanging relationship with each other such as a house with its ground, or a mountain with its plain. Instead of creating harmony, it moulds its diverse parts into unity. Being the balance of the rigid and fixed, it could be conceived as a universal principle only if the universe were still, non-moving, lifeless’. This kind of order holds Newtonian bodies together and makes them interact as external objects, following inertial movements until affected by an external force. Dead objects are affected by external causality and subjected, as we saw, to irreversible entropic degradation. They are passive. But, as we saw above and Kohr (1957, pp. 86–87) noted, we live in ‘a moving, breathing, and dynamic universe, maintained in order not by unity, but harmony, and based not on the stable balance of the dead, but the mobile balance of the living. In contrast to the stable balance, this balance is self-regulatory not because of the fixity of its relationships but because of the coexistence of countless mobile little parts of which no one is ever allowed to accumulate enough mass to disturb the harmony of the whole. This means that smallness is not an accidental whim of creation. It fulfils a most profound purpose. It is the basis of stability and duration, of a graceful harmonious existence that needs no master. For little bodies, countless in number and for ever moving, for ever rearrange themselves in the incalculable pattern of a mobile balance whose function in a dynamic universe is to create orderly systems and organisms without the necessity of interfering with the anarchic freedom of movements granted to their component particles. (. . .). The mobile principle of balance, transforming as it does the anarchy of free particles into systems of high orderliness because of the statistic accuracy arising invariably from the chance interactions of bodies that are both countless and minute, is so evidently the device that keeps the universe from disintegrating that it seems extraordinary that so many of our political theorist, apparently on the assumption that the social universe follows a different order, should have come forth with a

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battle cry against it. (. . .) In its place they want unity, though this exists nowhere except in unstable primal particles or in the fixity of death. (. . .). There is absolutely nothing that is not built on balance. (. . .) Everything, everywhere points to balance, nothing to unity. Without balance we cannot even walk’. That is why the Greeks considered the oikonomy, as we saw, an art—the art of living and living well. Like every art, it has to do with finding the right balance at every moment. It is alive, health and harmony being continuously regenerated by finding the right tonos, the right combination. And that is not something given once and for all and thus something that can be learned by simply learning some fixed principles and procedures, a technique, but something that has to be felt, perceived intuitively. As a painter painting, or a musician performing, it has as much to do with the artists’ technical skills as it has to do with his inspiration and intuitive perception of the whole and beauty. That is why Aristotle considered chrematistic centred on an ongoing accumulation of exchange-value, ‘the art of getting rich’ and accumulating money, a minor and unnatural practice. Use-values are necessarily context-dependent and are positive within some ranges, becoming negative out of them. Both too little as too much food and indeed any satisfier will not adequately satisfy our needs. For the ancient Greek tradition, as elsewhere in most traditional societies and spiritual traditions, life and particularly a good life—that which they termed eudemonia—is not based on and derived from ongoing growth, but on keeping the proper balances. But this understanding is precisely that which has been forgotten in the modern world. A development that has made us already cross many ecological and social limits. And more so in our perception of the oikonomy and drive for ongoing chrematistic growth and unlimited progress. Notwithstanding, instead of perceiving that the solution lies in stopping to grow, even in degrowth of that which has already grown too much (Kallis, 2015), economists, politicians and businesses alike are still focused on fostering ‘economic growth’ or relaunching it in times of crisis and depression. By hearing Kohr’s words, we can better understand the foolishness of today’s efforts to maintain our growth path by increasing control, vertical rigid power structures and unity. Instead of limiting growth, decentralisation and restoring dynamic balances, more vertical integration and top-down solutions are looked after. Thus, more national policies, laws and regulations, more limits to individual freedom in the name of the common good. Nevertheless, it is a fragile and indeed impossible balance once life flows from within and cannot be fully controlled from without. Vertical control tries to hold elements into fixed relations and may apply to objects. But life is in continuous change, requiring balance to be continuously regenerated. Like for walking, balance is obtained from a constant compensation of unbalance driven from within. As Illich already pointed out in the 1970s, the increase of the crisis due to growing scale imbalances resulting from further growth of our tools, institutions and chrematistic accumulation may lead to two kinds of answers. On one side, it may lead to a top-down solution trying to control and reinforce these dynamics. On the other, it may emerge from a bottom-up approach by radically changing our

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oikonomic development model from within. The former is akin to keeping the balance at the border of a precipice. The latter requires a profound change in our culture and practice, changing our perspective and going somewhere else. As Illich (1975, pp. 25–26) put it, ‘this world-wide crisis of world-wide institutions can lead to a new consciousness about the nature of tools and to majority action for their control. If tools are not controlled politically, they will be managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster. Freedom and dignity will continue to dissolve into an unprecedented enslavement of man to his tools. As an alternative to technocratic disaster, I propose the vision of a convivial society. A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s equal freedom. At present people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional élite. They transfer power to politicians who promise to build up the machinery to deliver the future. They accept a growing range of power levels in society when inequality is needed to maintain high outputs. Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions. Justice is debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares. The individual’s autonomy is tolerably reduced by a society that defines the maximum satisfaction of the maximum number as the largest consumption of industrial goods’. Institutionalised schooling, modern industrial medicine and agriculture or, in global terms, GDP growth are still the pillars of contemporary development strategies. Thereby, our efforts are directed to foster further growth instead of focusing on development and qualitative balances. Needs are limited and are only adequately satisfied within narrow ranges. Only capital and perhaps cancer cells may believe that they can grow forever and increase their prospects by doing so. But they can’t. Nothing can go on growing forever. That is something which we immediately see when we observe Nature’s oikonomy. Every ecologist will identify excessive growth of any element of an ecosystem as a source of ecological distress. The same happens for biologists and medicine students looking for metabolic balances sustaining health and life. Ecology and the oikonomy follow the same principles, the latter being supported and grounded on the former. But we, economists and the public at large, by dissociating the oikonomy from Nature, have lost sight of that which traditional societies always knew and experienced in their daily practice: not only is Nature the source of our wealth, but it is based on balances and thus have to be our social, oikonomic and ecologic relations. But, by ignoring Nature and seeing ourselves as separate from it, not just economists in their model, but our modern culture at large has forgotten this essential fact: everything has its proper place in the universe and its limited range in which it may develop healthy and balanced. We have lost sight of the importance of scale and proportionality, the importance of ethics and aesthetics guiding our behaviour.

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As Ivan Illich, together with Matthias Rieger (Illich & Rieger, 1997a, p. 18), argued, ‘Kohr’s certain “appropriateness” strikes one as a powerful intuition only when it is understood in the context of a historical fracture. In this rupture, the world we inhabit finds its origin. Kohr insists on the correlation between a certain size and the harmony that shines forth in appropriate proportions. Outside this configuration lies Nemesis. (. . .). This concept, which one can understand as “the just measure”, “reasonableness”, or “proportion”, the Greeks named tonos. These differences in meaning invite one to look at its history. (. . .) To look at tonos as the foundation for understanding cosmic relations in Western thought; it is also central in a 2000-year tradition of making sense of oneself and of the world. Then one can see that if the common welfare is not built on a tonos, a certain tension, a proportion between humans and nature, the energy tax idea, together with other economic alternatives, slides into adaptive utilitarianism, systems-oriented technical administration or diplomatic environmental gossip’. This cultural change, which Illich sees as central to the rise of our modern world, has hardly been noticed. ‘A hundred years before the French Revolution, proportion as a guiding or orienting idea, as the condition for finding one’s basic stance, began to be lost. Up to now, this disappearance has hardly been recognised in cultural history. The correspondence between up and down, right and left, macro and micro, was acknowledged intellectually, sense perception confirming it, up to the end of the seventeenth century. Proportion was also a lodestar for the experience of one’s body, of the other, and of gendered relations. Space was simply understood as a familiar cosmos. Cosmos meant that order of relationships in which things are originally placed. For this relatedness, this tension or inclination of things one to another, their tonos, we no longer have a word today. One cannot even imagine the experience of Dante, emerging from hell, rejoicing in the harmony of four new stars, having moved into the realm of justice, temperance, fortitude and prudence (Purgatory, Canto I). Today, one is confined to the positivist symbol of a scientific paradigm. (. . .) We want to recall that tonos which was silenced in the course of Enlightenment progress as a victim of the growing mathematising of science and the desire to quantify justice. Therefore, we face a delicate task: to retrieve something like a lost ear, an abandoned sensibility. Perhaps we can achieve this with music’ (Illich & Rieger, 1997a, pp. 18–19). Notwithstanding, it was central to the rise of our modern world, our belief in unbounded progress and, nowadays, as Kohr argued, our growth mania. ‘Plato would have known what Leopold Kohr was talking about. In his treatise on statecraft, Plato remarks that the bad politician is one who confuses measurement with proportionality. Such a person would not recognise what is appropriate to a particular ethos, a word that originally implied a dwelling place. (. . .) Like any boy, Plato was taught gymnastics and music—the refinement of body and spirit. Techné musiké comprised reading, writing, singing and playing the lyre. His teacher demonstrated proportionality to him with a monochord, a rectangular sound-box with a single stretched string. He was taught how one divides the string harmoniously (. . .).

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The teacher divided the string’s length from two-fifths to three-fifths, thus producing two harmonious sounds (. . .). Music was development in the art of proportionality; this included an opposition to hubris, a firm moderation, and shame acting as the guarantor of a proper mixture of judiciousness and desire. Music was the essential blending of beauty, truth and goodness. (. . .) What for us are words the Greeks called logoi—that is relationships. And what we understand simply as intervals between two tones, would be understood as ana-logia, as the concord of the strings’ (Illich & Rieger, 1997b, p. 5). For ancient Greece, as for their contemporaries in the oriental traditions, it was all a matter of balanced relations and keeping the right tonos. ‘Until well into the seventeenth century, the idea of cosmos—already familiar to the Greeks—remained unquestioned. Kosmein means to line up two armies, the shores of a river, to match heaven and earth or, on one side, the world/macro-cosmos and, on the other, the human/micro-cosmos. This cosmic understanding of being, referred to as “The Great Tradition”, came to an abrupt end—the cosmos is discarded. (. . .). In medieval philosophy, temperament referred to the combination of qualities in a certain proportion, determining the characteristic nature of something. So, in physiology, one sought to balance the four cardinal humours of the body—the sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic temperament—in order to achieve the proper relative proportions. Temperament always implied a due or proportionate mixture, a proper combination. “To temper” was to bring something to its proper or suitable condition, to modify or moderate something favourably, to achieve a just measure. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, “to temper” came to mean (. . .) to adjust the intervals of the scale in instruments of fixed intonation, such as the piano. This was a radical departure from the earlier meaning and signalled the effective disappearance of the ancient notion of proportion, in music and in other areas of modern life. (. . .). Up until the late eighteenth century, a country doctor saw his task as making a diagnosis based on an anamnesis—relating one’s life history—in which the disharmony in the sick person’s humoral relationships became evident. (. . .). As in medicine, so also in architecture, proportionality disappeared. Around 1700, the rule of the Golden Mean as the tonos regulating both groundplan and elevation was lost. Functionalism overpowered proportionality in drawing, planning and, later, design. The doctrine of the orders in architecture, which had defined the conception of harmony in the shaping of columns for 2000 years, was dethroned as the practical guide in the space of a few decades’ (Illich & Rieger, 1997b, p. 7). The same process can be observed in the oikonomic sphere with the rise of modern national and later global markets and free-market oikonomy reducing values to prices. As Illich and Rieger (1997b, pp. 7 and 8) further showed, ‘Around this same time, a process comparable to modern acoustic temperament occurred in economics. The geographic identification of the economic and political spheres began in France, to be followed elsewhere later. The nation state became equivalent to a market. This trend was greatly enhanced by the standardisation of measurements. Until then most of the bushels, barrels, kegs and tuns, the morgen and a cord of wood were different on this and that side of regional boundaries, as also the

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product measured—whether grain, wine or lumber; all were rooted in a local ethos. The tempering of these magnitudes required the unification of measurements, creating modernised commodities. These, in turn, presupposes the growing convertibility of currencies. (. . .). In ethics, values are as opposed to an immanent proportion as are the sounds of Helmholtz. Like them, values run counter to tonos, the specific tension of mutuality or reciprocity. As timbre separated from tone, so that one could play a violin’s part on the piano, so an ethics of value—with its misplaced concreteness—allowed one to speak of human problems. (. . .) People could demand solutions. To find them, values could be shifted and prioritised, manipulated and maximised. Not only the language, but the very modes of thinking found in mathematics could norm the realm of human relationships. Algorithms’ purified value by filtering out appropriateness, thereby taking the good out of ethics’.

References Grübler, A. (1990). The rise and the fall of infrastructure. Heidelberg: Physica. In United States Federal Highway Administration (USFHA—1990). Nationwide personal transportation survey: Summary of travel trends. Federal Highway Administration. Illich, I. (1973). La Convivialité. Seuil. Illich, I. (1975). Tools for conviviality. Fontana/Collins. Illich, I., & Rieger, M. (1997a, September/October). The wisdom of Leopold Kohr. Resurgence, 184. Illich, I., & Rieger, M. (1997b, November/December). Beauty in proportion. Resurgence, 185, 5-8 Kohr, L. (1957). The breakdown of nations. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Miralles-Guasch, C. (2002). Ciudad y Transporte—El binómio imperfecto. Ariel. Oyón, J. L. (1999). Transporte público y estructura urbana. De mediados s. XIX a mediados s. XX: Gran Bretaña, España, Francia y Países Germánicos. Ecología Política, 17, 17–35. Paracelsus. (1538/1965). Das Buch Paragranum—Septem Defensiones—Vol. 2. In Die dritte Defension wegen des Schreibens der neuen Rezepte. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Pooley, C. G., & Turnbull, J. (2000). Commuting, transport and urban form: Manchester and Glasgow in the mid-twentieth century. Urban History, 27, 3. Sachs, W. (1999). Planet dialectics—Explorations in environment & development. Zed Books. Schallaböck, K. O. (1996). Verkehr und Zeit. In J. Rinderspracher (Ed.), Zeit für die Umwelt. Sigma. The Economist. (2017, November 4). Schumpeter—Making Europe great again. The Economist, p. 72. The Times Literary Supplement. (1995, October 6). p. 39. Thompson, D. W. (1942/1992). On growth and form. Dover.

Chapter 10

Learning to See Again

By looking at reality in reductionist and decontextualised terms, modern economists manage to convert everything into prices and quantifiable costs. They speak of ‘externalities’ when something has an impact that is not rightly reflected by the market price. Like when a river is polluted by industry and its fishes perish from it, or when we, as a consumer, do not pay for the social and environmental costs resulting from the production of our smartphones in far-away places. Undeterred by the changing nature of reality and the uniqueness of each context and fact, environmental economists will measure the environmental costs of a given activity in chrematistic terms. As if a value can be reduced to prices and an imbalance in a process can be adequately represented once and for all by assigning a cost to it. The value of something is a relational property. It is given to it by someone else or evaluated in terms of external criteria. Thus, continuously changing as changes reality and context. In the 1990s Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (1994b) published a paper in the Journal of Ecological Economics asking themselves what is the worth of a songbird? By introducing the concept of ‘post-normal science’, these two philosophers showed that there are always different levels and valid perspectives in every complex, dynamic, open system. Thus, as they argued in another article that same year (1994a, p. 575), ‘no single perspective from within a subsystem of fewer dimensions can fully encompass the reality of the whole system’. Said less technically, our vision is always selective, and a picture is never the whole picture unless all possible potential perspectives are included. Nor can we assess the value of something from a reductionist view. And here, as Jorge Luis Borges (1975) in his short story On Rigor in Science argued, the only utterly exact map would be a map the size of the territory itself. Lewis Carroll (1893/1982, p. 727) had already graciously made this point: “What a useful thing a pocket-map is!” I remarked. “That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?” “About six inches to the mile.” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_10

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“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I enquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

But this ‘using the country itself as its map’, observing the harmony or disharmony of the whole, can only be made intuitively, by using our imagination and perception not in reductionist, but in living and opening ways. Thus, as Goethe already argued, to understand reality in its deepness and changing nature, you have to use what he termed ‘the exact intuitive imagination’. We cannot observe change and metamorphosis, nor can we apprehend the whole of reality with our senses at one glance. Reality is always whole and changing. Thereby, taking reality as its map requires another way of seeing. Images reinforce this way of seeing and approaching meaning by filling the gaps in our perception and inner mental maps. Acknowledging movement as inherent to all that exists, we do not apprehend it by closing reality down in a concept but by leaving our perception open and following the paths opened by the image. Like in the use of poetic language, pointing beyond the literal meaning of words. This can be seen in the Japanese haikus tradition, where three short descriptive phrases about an observation are put together to render visible both the unique and universal transcendence of a concrete moment and place.1 The opposite of what I was taught and what ‘objective science’ is supposed to be. By relying on the objectification and mathematizing of reality, modern scientific tradition aims to capture reality in a simple mathematical formula, reducing it to numbers. Thereby, it is ignored that it is us, as observers, who give meaning to fact. Through our perception and inner processes, we as observers affirm and create reality. It is through our active observation, giving sense to what we see, that reality is brought into existence. It is only in our mind that a tree becomes a tree. That is what was meant in Genesis when we were told that God asked Adam to name all he had created. Through language and our self-reflective consciousness, we become co-creators of reality. But this can be done in two different and complementary ways. By doing it through the intellectual-analytical mode of consciousness, that is, analysis and logic, it is done by imagining an explanatory framework and model. When done in holistic and living ways, it is done through observation and what, in oriental meditative tradition, is called ‘an empty mind’. Here, we use the intuitive mode of

1

Traditionally, haikus follow a pattern of 5,7,5 syllables only and although referring to very concrete and simple observations, may awaken in the reader the universality of the inner experience experienced by the writer. Like in the classic Haiku ‘The Old Pond’ by Matsuo Bashō An old silent pond A frog jumps into the pond— Splash! Silence again.

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consciousness, and it is achieved by seeing into the phenomenon through our exact sensorial imagination. In the former, it is done by turning away from our observation and creating a reduced map of reality. Like Newton did by reducing all to the inertial movement of passive bodies captured by his mathematical ‘laws of movement’. It was primarily achieved by diligently working on his desktop, just as economists create their models, reducing reality to objectified abstract theories instead of observing actual historical facts as historians do. Notwithstanding, by basing our observation on previously held ideas or replacing them with new ones, we impose on reality something not there. Contrary to that, we may observe it in its depths and essentiality by making a living and active engagement and dialogue with the phenomenon. Not just externally and fixed. As Henry Bortoft (2010, pp. 59, 73–75) argued by presenting Goethe’s way of science, ‘discovery in science is always the perception of meaning, and it could not be otherwise. The essence of a discovery is therefore in the nonempirical factor in cognition’. (. . .) The mind organises experience by imposing an organisational framework. This may be at a relatively superficial level, such as the social-linguistic organisation of our daily lives. Or it may be at a level that is much less immediately accessible, such as the way in which we impose a temporal framework on our experience, organising it into a linear sequence of moments. We impose this framework intellectually on nature, with the result that we imagine nature as being organised in a linear, temporal sequence, whereupon it becomes possible to describe motion and change quantitatively. (. . .) But the unity which Goethe perceived (. . .) is not a unity that is imposed by the mind. What Goethe saw was not an intellectual unification but the wholeness of the phenomenon itself. He came to see the wholeness of the phenomenon by consciously experiencing it, and this experience cannot be reduced to an intellectual construction in terms of which the phenomenon is organised. (. . .) The perception of this unity is an experience of seeing the phenomenon in depth. But this depth is not an extensive dimension. It can be approximated by saying that the phenomenon is experienced as ‘standing in its own depth.’ (. . .) The experience of seeing this unity is the theory for Goethe, for whom the term ‘theory’ was much closer to the original Greek theoria—which simply means ‘seeing’. (. . .) The effect of this shift from the intellectual to the intuitive mind is that the phenomenon becomes its own explanation. (. . .) In the terminology of modern philosophy, Goethe’s intuitive way of science is a phenomenology of nature, where this term must now be understood in the sense in which it is used by Heidegger. He returns to the Greek word phainomenon, which he says gives the fundamental meaning of phenomenon as ‘that which shows itself in itself’. (. . .) Combining this with the interpretation of the meaning of the Greek word logos, Heidegger tells us that phenomenology, as a method of investigation, means ‘to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself’. (. . .) But it is possible to be more specific about this phenomenology. The effect of phenomenological disclosure is that the phenomenon becomes its own language.

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This is the concrete language which things are. It is important to realise that ‘language’ is being used literally here and not metaphorically. This confusion can arise because language is usually identified with the verbal language of the intellectual mind, which is a consequence of being restricted to the analytical mode of consciousness. In fact, this is really only a special case of language. As well as the meaning that belongs to the intellectual mind, which is verbal, there is the meaning that belongs to the intuitive mind, which is nonverbal and can only be perceived in a holistic mode of consciousness. Nevertheless, both of these are linguistic. While there can be meaning which is nonverbal, there cannot be meaning which is nonlinguistic (. . .). We can only approximate this verbally, in an imperfect way, by saying that nonverbal language is the concrete language which things are when they are experienced as being their own language. (. . .) In view of this, Goethe’s intuitive way of science can be recognised as a concrete illustration of Gadamer’s principle of universal hermeneutics that ‘being that can be understood is language’. The philosophy of Goethe’s science can therefore be identified more precisely as the hermeneutic phenomenology of nature. The difference between Goethe’s phenomenological way and the mainstream of mathematical physics from Newton onwards was summarised memorably and concisely by Cassirer: ‘the mathematical formula strives to make the phenomena calculable, that of Goethe to make them visible’. (Quoting Gadamer, 1989, p. 474; Heidegger, 1962, pp. 51 and 58; and von Aesch, 1941, p. 74, pointing to the ideas of Cassirer). We still use ‘I see’ to mean that we understand something, although not necessarily suggesting that we can render this understanding verbally, in words. In some cultures, people greet each other, expressing ‘I see you’. It means a seeing that goes much beyond our eyes, expressing that we recognise the other in his human essence and dignity. This seeing goes much beyond the external seeing with our eyes and beyond the verbal language. Here we approach again the ancient oriental wisdom and perception of reality so magnificently stated in the opening verse of the Tao Te Ching or Dàodé Jīng: ‘The Tâo that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tâo. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. (Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all things’ (Lao Tzu, 1997, p. 1). By reducing value to prices and, as standard economics does, reality to models, we fail to see the truth in its wholeness and movement. Nevertheless, we may manage to approach the dynamic, complex and open essence of reality through ‘the exact intuitive imagination’, thus, seeing that which cannot be named. Like the fox in Saint-Exupéry’s famous tale said to the Little Prince: ‘it is only in the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye’. Through our inner feeling and connection to the other, quality and essence may empathically be perceived. Thus, we may see the ‘value’ of something instead of reducing it to prices or a quantitative measure. It requires us to maintain our observation alive, not closing and reducing reality to concepts, ideologies, or mathematical formulas. Of course, some patterns repeat themselves: we perceive reality by classifying it according to our preconceptions and stereotypes. Words themselves are always a

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reduction of reality and individuality to a single category. Each human is different and unique, it is said, as is each apple. But as humans, we are all humans, as apples are apples and no peas. As such, they can be summed up, quantified, and numbers express their common threats. Thus, mathematical invariances can be observed and described, as can an underlying mathematical reality that applies to various phenomena. But this is just a particular aspect of the phenomenon, not its wholeness. Even less, it is essential nature. In my studies in public administration, I had the chance of following a course with Izidoro Blikstein, a linguist and semiologist. He told us about a movie by Werner Herzog based on a fact, namely the appearance in the German city of Nuremberg on 26 May 1828 of a mysterious teenager with a minimal vocabulary and a letter in his hand claiming that he had been risen out of contact with the world. He later claimed to have grown up in a small dark cellar, his only contact with the outside world being the found rye bread and water next to his bed each morning. Herzog used this story to picture the society of this time and, simultaneously, use it as a mirror to look at ourselves and our culturally defined beliefs. To show how we take for granted a reality that is seen differently from another perspective—that of Kasper Hauser. Indeed, Kasper Hauser was constantly reversing the accepted and assumed facts as seen by the others. Thus, making him so challenging and uncomfortable to those around him. Blikstein used it to write a small book about semiology and how we create meaning. One scene in the movie, which I have often used in my classes, shows this clearly. It is, to me, a powerful reminder of how the world we see is not the world out there but the result of the way we learned and came to see the world in culturally and individually specific ways. In this scene, Herzog describes how Kasper Hauser is visited by a logician who comes to see whether he had improved in his cognitive skills after many years of living and learning from the local schoolmaster and his wife, to whose care he was given. Then, the logician decides to ask Kasper Hauser for a logical quiz. I used to propose the same quiz to my students to know whether they too had appropriate cognitive skills. You, reader, can try it also, to assess your skills if you like. It goes approximately like this: ‘There is a village whose inhabitants, without exception, are pathological liars. They always lie, being unable to tell the truth. But there is another village in which it is the opposite. Its pious inhabitants cannot help but to always tell the truth. They never lie’. After explaining the structure of this thought experiment, the logician went on proposing the quiz: ‘You are walking on a path, aiming to visit this latter city, once you rather be surrounded by truth-tellers than liars. By reaching a bifurcation from which two paths depart, one leads to the liars’ village, the other to the truth-tellers. But there is no indication, and you do not know which path to take. But, fortunately for you, there is precisely an inhabitant of one of these two villages coming towards you from the left path. Thus, you decide to ask him. But, not knowing whether he is from the lying or the truth-telling sort of villagers, which is the right question you should ask to make sure not to miss the right path and end up in the village of the liars?’

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At this point, Kasper Hauser is given time to reflect on it. I used to give my students a convenient time, too, although many gave up even trying to solve it right from the start. I suspect some did not even bother to pay attention to the whole of it, dedicating themselves to thinking about more pleasant things instead. As a reader, you have the luck of taking the time you wish, without external pressure, to solve it if you like. Thus, take your time or just go on to read the solution. In the case of the movie, shortly after having enunciated the quiz, the logician affirms that the question is too complicated for Kasper Hauser to answer and proposes to skip the whole exercise. But then he is interrupted by Kasper Hauser, claiming to know the solution. The logician, looking at Kasper Hauser, do not believe him and goes on explaining: ‘It is impossible for you, at your cognitive level, to think the right answer. Even skilled logicians struggle with it. It is only by asking the person which path he would indicate to go to the village of the truth-tellers if he were coming from the other side that, due to a double negation, both the liar and the truth-telling wanderer would end up giving you a right clue, namely that of taking the other path than the one being indicated. Because if he were a liar, he would lie about the identity of the other and take him as a liar too, thus saying that he would indicate the path leading to the liar-village he was coming from as the correct one. But, if he were a truth-teller, he would know that the one coming from the other path would be a liar and would as well falsely indicate the other path as the true path to the truth-telling-village. In both cases, the path to the village of the truth-teller would be the one not indicated by the answer’. Notwithstanding, undeterred by the logical answer, Kasper Hauser becomes very excited and claims to know another solution, a hypothesis that the logician denies claiming that there is only one logical answer to the quiz. But Kasper Hauser insists and ends up saying: ‘I would ask him “are you a frog?” The liar would say yes, the other would say no, and immediately I would know which way to go’. The logician gets upset and argues that this is not a valid answer because it is not based on logical reasoning. Usually, at this point, my students and maybe you, reader, maybe ask why have not you found the same simple and straightforward solution to the quiz. Instead of complicate reasoning, simply ask whatever verifiable silly question and see whether the coming wanderer is a liar or not. At least, this is what I asked myself, unable to find this easy solution while watching the movie for the first time in a theatre. In all these years, I never had a student who gave me Kasper’s simple solution. Just one who came with the logician’s answer. Maybe because he remembered it from similar quizzes he was told in the past, or perhaps because he had advanced logical skills. I do not know. In any case, I hope you, dear reader, did better than my students and me. But if not, do not blame yourself. We all look at the world and give meaning to it according to our learned ways to look at it. Thus, we often fail to see that which is right in front of us. Namely that liars lie, and there are many and sometimes easy ways to identify one. Indeed, the real question in this scene is to ask ourselves why, once hearing the question, we try pretty complicated reasoning or just give up right from the start instead of relying on our ability to identify a

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Fig. 10.1 The semiotic circle

pathological liar once we see one? What has made us lose the perception of reality and miss an answer which, maybe as a child, we could have easily thought? The answer, I was told by Izidoro Blikstein, lies in the way we see reality and our cognitive process works and evolves. We have been confronted with this kind of question before, and we have learned that this is a logical quiz asking for a logicbased answer. Thereby, once we hear it, our mind immediately starts looking for logical reasoning to solve it. Or, if we have a self-image of being unable or unwilling to do complicated logical reasoning, we just give up right from the start. Something we learned from our past experiences instead of observing the question as it is. In his book, Blikstein presents the semiotic circle to understand how we perceive and represent reality (Fig. 10.1). Our senses perceive reality as just a series of unrelated perceptions. A chaotic series of perceived colours, smells, tastes, textures, sounds. Just as it happens to a newborn child, unable to distinguish his mother’s face from the background wall. They arrive as nervous signals to our brain, and it is there where they are put together as an image, a coherent whole. They become a signifier, a sign of something, like a ‘tree’, an ‘apple’, or a ‘logical quiz’. But here, it is essential to remember what Renée Magritte, the great Belgian surrealist painter, told us: this is not a pipe, ceci n’est pas un pipe, as he famously wrote below a pipe he painted on a canvas. The painted pipe is just an image, a representation of something else, not the thing itself. In the case of Magritte’s painting, it is just an artistic representation of a pipe, not a pipe as such. To be sure, we just may try to put some tobacco in it and smoke it to be convinced

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that it is not a pipe. Thereby, he went on naming this painting The treachery of images. Images may make us think that our representation of reality is reality itself when it is not. Here I liked to show another painting by Magritte, significantly called The Human Condition. Indeed, Magritte made a series of these paintings, all with a common motive, namely a window open to the outside world and, overlapping the external landscape, a canvas on a triode on which, apparently, the exact representation of that which is outside is being painted. I used to ask my students why he called it ‘The Human Condition’ and thus an expression of ourselves when no human being can be seen represented on it? Was it because he was a surrealist? But he was not known to be a Dadaist. Then again, what is it about our essential ‘human condition’ that he is trying to represent? Like his pipe, which is not a pipe, what we see through our senses is not ‘out there’, reality itself, but an internal representation of it. We always paint an inner image of what our sense organs perceive—each one according to his skills and preferences. Sometimes we do it full of details and grace, others hastily and sketchy. But in both cases, we can never be sure that what we see represented on the canvas is a truthful representation of reality out there. It is through our internal representation that we try to grasp its reality and essence. Each artist would paint the landscape seen through the window differently. Each one is trying to highlight certain aspects of it, each following his particular style and moods. It is our shared human condition. As when I asked my students whether they were hearing what I was telling them, just as I may ask you, reader, whether you are reading what I have written so far. The answer, of course, is no. You are not reading and entering in touch with what I wrote, but with your internal representation of what I wrote. It is you, reader, who convert into words the light that impacts your retina, excites some special sensors called cones and rods there and then send electrical signals to your brain through your nerves, where meaning is given to these signals. You do so inside your brain, in your inner room, thus bringing what I wrote inside, rewriting it your way. Every reader writes a book inside himself while reading. Reading and perceiving is not a passive but an active process. Sometimes our eyes just wander over the text we are physically reading, but our consciousness is wandering and creating a reality somewhere else. Then we turn back our attention and start anew or simply accept some blank pages in our inner book. In and through our consciousness, letters are organised into words; words become phrases, and meaning emerges. When a book is read, we read our internal representation, not the external one we may be holding in our hands—eventually leading us to ‘see’ something new and react one way or another. Each one represents it differently according to taste, mood, and interests. According to the way we have learned to perceive, to see, and to read. You will also read a different book each time you read it anew, as you will see another river each time you step into it. Not just because the river has changed—in the case of the book, it remains primarily unchanged—but because you have changed as well. Just as different artists will paint the same motive differently, the meaning conveyed in this book will differ according to each reader and the context and moment in life it is being read. It is our human condition. We convert our perceptions into signs, into

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representations of reality. Notwithstanding, they are not facts, just as Magritte’s pipe is not a pipe. As a second step, as self-reflective, language possessing animals, we may convert our perceptions into words and narratives, naming reality. This inner consciousness will inform our praxis, whether consciously transforming our perceptions into verbal descriptions or just intuitive or subconscious images. Thereby, these internal representations of reality materialise into action, just as you may have done whence I proposed the logical quiz a few paragraphs earlier. Through this praxis, we give meaning to reality in what is called semiosis, the meaning-making process. We learn to classify and separate different elements we perceive from their background into separate identities from our experiences. This particular identity is attributed to its denotative meaning and its connotative ramification and relations to us and our lives. Thereby, we ‘see’ things in terms of their separate identities and implications, labelling them, naming and valuing them. Thus, we ‘see’ ‘trees’, ‘apples’ or perceive ‘love’ and ‘hatred’. To each of these separate concepts, we attribute a denotative and a connotative meaning. We denote it by naming and labelling it as a distinct unity and attribute a subjective connotation, evaluating it according to our own beliefs and values. Thereby, through language and words, we can create an external narrative about reality, and we become self-reflective. Just as a writer may describe his characters and their environment, their deeds and sufferings, we do so by creating a narrative about the world and ourselves. We create an abstract self-image about who we are and about the world. Words and signs/images, in general, both point to something, denote something and evoke certain qualities and implications to us. They have a denotative and connotative dimension that differs from person to person and among different cultures. We order reality according to traits of similarity and particularities, identity and differentiation, according to our experiences and subjective perceptions through this process. React both emotionally and rationally in different ways to that which we ‘see’. We generate ideological narratives, theories, and concepts about reality. We ‘see’ a chair and proceed to sit on it according to our understanding of the context in which we are. We behave according to them, establishing a semiotic framework whereby we perceive reality—our cultural and personal lenses. This way of perceiving reality, rapidly classifying our perceptions according to our previous experiences and stereotypes, has an important biological function. Not only is it fundamental to ‘perceive’ and to make sense of reality, but it allows for expediency, rapidly being able to react and behave, saving time and energy. Our brain is the most energy-consuming organ of our body. For an average adult, around 20% of the total, even when in a resting state. Much more while intensively thinking or feeling. Thus, rapidly perceiving reality through our cultural lenses, preconceived ideas, and stereotypes saves energy while allowing for more rapid behavioural responses. Had we to ‘see’ truth anew at each moment, it would be not just impossible (we humans need years before we learn to speak and start to make sense of that what we ‘see’ while growing up), but extremely dangerous if confronted with potential dangers. It is better to run away scared from a lion,

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although following a stereotyped perception of a lion than to try to figure out whether a particular lion we see is a danger to us or not. Or just a background shadow while walking in the wild. The cost of falsely taking something as a threat that ends up not being one is lower, from an evolutionary perspective, than mistaking it as harmless, which happens to be a risk. Notwithstanding, excessive prudence ends up not living our full potential out of fear. Around 98% of our behaviour, we do in an automatic, subconscious way. When driving a car, we perform a vast array of things while possibly listening to music or someone else we are conversing with. It works perfectly fine once our subconscious mind is much faster and can process much more information than we manage to do consciously. But it is based on learned, past experiences. As long as they adequately represent reality and reality does not change abruptly, it allows us to adapt our behaviour to the requirement of our environment. But, then again, acting automatically and, as an example, out of fear and rampant ignorance, exaggerating the dangers we see, is as well a long-term hazard. We may be losing opportunities or just spending unnecessary energy to protect ourselves. Thus, careful observation and greater awareness are just or even more critical to our long-term survival and wellbeing. Anyway, just daily, without our preconceived images of reality, we would not know where to sit before performing extensive and intensive studies and inquiries into all we are perceiving. Nor would we know how to behave once entering a classroom or a church. Indeed, we would not know how to read or what to do with what we have learned to ‘see’ as a book if we had not learned to believe that it is in our interest to read it. Our subconscious and our learned experiences may be powerful allies. But they may as well lead us astray. We have to find a balance between our conscious, self-reflective understanding of reality and ourselves; and our subconscious, automatic behaviour allowing us to act and behave daily. Our selfreflective consciousness enables us to retrospectively observe ourselves and our reality, thus enlarging our understanding and awareness. By recognising situations where our subconscious behaviour did not respond to the requirements and opportunities of the moment, generating unbalances and possible conflicts and contradictions, we may take responsibility for our actions and change them by reconsidering our beliefs and perceptions. Thereby, by assuming our fault for having acted out of a lack of consciousness, by not rightly perceiving our own needs or those affected by our behaviour, we can enlarge our consciousness and assume, willingly, different behaviour strategies. Thereby, by taking response-ability, we expand our freedom to respond to what we ‘see’. Learning is how we create preconceived ideas and perceptions about the world. It helps us to behave and adapt to a specific culture, society, and environment we were born into. Thus, humans grow to become Vikings, Wall Street brokers, Tuaregs or economists. But, it may also be a source of misunderstandings and misbehaviours once we stick to and take for the reality that which is just our learned, partial perspective on it. We may get stuck in preconceived ideas and subconscious automatic behaviour patterns. Thereby, we no longer evolve and adapt to the everchanging world and unique contexts and realities we may encounter. Neither my

References

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students nor I discovered a simple solution to the logical quiz presented to Kasper Hauser in the movie because we all had gone through this kind of logical quiz and tests before. Thus, instead of relating to the question in a new and attentive way, we resorted to our inner image of this kind of test, hoping to find an answer to them; or just give up right from the start. Thus, we immediately look for quite complicated answers to discover whether someone is a liar or not instead of just observing him and what he answers. That is why oriental ink wash painting masters would spend hours, sometimes months or years, attentively watching something before trying to represent it in a few rapid brush strokes. That is what is meant by achieving and practising an empty mind: look at reality with an entirely open gaze, a mind devoid of concepts and preconceived stereotypes which keep you in the cage of your inner world and consciousness. To free ourselves from our learned techniques and ways of ‘seeing’ reality, opening ourselves to life.

References Borges, J. L. (1975). A universal history of infamy. Penguin Books. Bortoft, H. (2010). The wholeness of nature—Goethe’s way of science. Floris Books. Carroll, L. (1893/1982). Sylvie and Bruno concluded. Chapter XI The man on the moon. In The complete illustrated works. Gramercy Book. Funtowicz, S., & Ravetz, J. (1994a). Emergent complex systems. Futures, 26(6), 568–582. Funtowicz, S., & Ravetz, J. (1994b). The worth of a songbird: Ecological economics as a postnormal science. Ecological Economics, 10(3), 197–207. Gadamer, H.-G. (1989). Truth and method (2nd Rev ed.). Sheed and Ward. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Harper and Row. Lao Tzu. (1997). Tao Te Ching (James Legge, Trans.). Dover. von Aesch, A. G. F. (1941). Natural science in German romanticism. Columbia University German Studies.

Chapter 11

The Evolution of Consciousness

The most rapid and direct behavioural answers we have are instinctive—inherited ways of perceiving reality and responding in predetermined ways. A newborn instinctively sucks at a breast as soon as he is born, just as we instinctively may react to a threat with violence or running away. I remember driving in the dark to pick up my mother in a countryside airport around a hundred kilometres from São Paulo. It was a little bit after 4 am. I was driving uphill on a dark, secondary road, at over 80 km/h, as I was afraid of arriving late. From time to time, I noticed some mist on the road I took for simple morning fog. But then, suddenly in front of me, appeared a truck without rear lights, heavily expelling exhaust smoke and very slowly and painfully working its way uphill. My feet pushed the brake pedal with all strength even before I consciously perceived what was going on. I stopped centimetres from crashing into the truck and was trembling all over my body. Lucky to be alive, I still do not know how my reflexes worked. But it is clear that my instincts saved me, and once I recovered from the scare, I had time to figure out why I did what I did and hopefully learned from the experience. This kind of instinctive, inherited behaviour we started to learn a long time ago. Indeed, since the dawn of life, our biological ancestors began to behave in autonomous ways, adapting to their environment and trying to survive. All living beings’ survival is dependent on perceiving their surrounding environment to inform their behaviour, adapting and transforming it to satisfy their needs and sustain their lives. That is a common feature of life, from the tinniest unicellular being up to a giant whale. For the first 2 and a half billion years, life on Earth has been unicellular. Indeed, up until around 500 million years ago, no big multicellular living being, plant or animal, existed on Earth. But it has been during this long period that most strategies to ‘live and hope to live well’ have been set in place, including our perception and the ability of the universe to look at itself through all living being’s eyes. Initially, the environment was perceived in relatively predetermined ways, triggering an automatic and unconscious response to this perception.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_11

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The way it started on Earth may be exemplified by Synechocystis, single-celled photostatic cyanobacteria, which recently has been studied in more detail by Nils Schuergers et al. (2016). They have found that the whole body of the bacteria acts as a lens, focusing incoming light rays on a point on the opposite cell wall. Thus, ‘knowing’ where the light comes from propels the bacteria across surfaces using protuberances called pili, moving opposite the illuminated cell walls. Within this unicellular being, ‘eye’, ‘leg’ and ‘centre of cognition’, or perception, knowledge, and action, go all in one. But the critical point is that although seen from the outside, it may look as if the cell knows where the light is and responds to it; its behaviour responds to an internal process, not the exterior light. Its characteristic behaviour is moving opposite the illuminated cell wall, not moving towards the light source, although both end up being the same. But it is always an inner knowledge or interpretation of the incoming information by the organism. It moves not because of the existing light ‘out there’ but because of the perceived light ‘in there’. This is an important distinction which we may as well remember if we wish to increase our inner freedom and range of behaviour once, unless Synechocystis, we may choose to move or not independently from the processes going on at the back of our retina. Synechocystis can easily be fooled or simply unable to adapt to changing environmental conditions requiring new behaviour strategies. It will always respond in the same way to its inner reaction to incoming light. But we may perceive that circumstances have changed or that there are circumstances in which we do not need to move towards the light. Or even perceive that there is just a scientist trying to fool us. We may choose to act differently, despite the same incoming light stimulus. Each time we blame someone else or an external circumstance for ‘having had’ to do something or behave in specific ways, like when we say ‘you made me cry’ or ‘I had to lie to you’ or any other ‘had’ we may use, we are surrendering from our responseability and from perceiving that it is in our hands to respond differently. Our response is always based on an inner perception and not an outer reality. As Maturana and Varela repeat in their study about the biological roots of consciousness, external reality may enter an organism as a disturbance and ‘trigger’ a response by changing the inner autopoietic and homeostatic processes. Light penetrates Synechocystis and triggers a response. But it is not the cause of it. Synechocystis’ behaviour has to do with its inner nature and biology. By understanding that whatever we do responds to internal metabolic processes, our inner autopoiesis, we acquire the possibility to assume the responsibility for perceiving and responding the way we do. By becoming aware of these internal processes, we increase our consciousness and potential range of action by better knowing ourselves and our needs. We raise our freedom. In his non-violent communication approach, Marshall Rosenberg calls it ‘taking responsibility’ and, particularly, taking responsibility for our feelings once we understand that all our feelings are an expression of an internal process and not because of something happening ‘out there’. Some incoming stimuli may have triggered this internal process, but they respond to our inner perception and needs. It responds to our inner life and not something provoked by someone else. It is our responsibility, not that of others. Our feelings and our emotional response to things

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happening ‘out there’, as for the Synechocystis, result from our inner patterns and how each of us responds to these external stimuli. By realising this simple fact, we may take responsibility for our reactions and behaviour—a first and fundamental step into becoming more conscious and taking our lives into our hands. Rosenberg argued there is a conscious or unconscious perception/interpretation of reality and an unmet need behind every feeling. Thus, every emotion and feeling is a door to our inner self. By looking at our feelings and taking responsibility for them by understanding that they result from our internal processes, we may perceive both our needs and our particular way of seeing and evaluating reality. We just have to listen to them, make them more conscious, know ourselves. That is precisely why each person will respond differently to the same external reality. Each one may be experiencing different needs at this moment, and each one will perceive this reality differently. We may blame someone for ‘feeling hurt’ or ‘feeling threatened’ by him. But once we realise that there are no such feelings as ‘hurt’ or ‘threatened’, we become aware that this is just how we perceive a given reality and label it. Going a step further, we may recognise that we feel scared, angry, or in pain because we believe that someone or some circumstance is threatening or hurting us. It is not the sudden appearance of the truck in front of me which scared me or even less ‘made me feel threatened’. It was my instinctive perception of an existential threat that made me shiver all over my body, accelerated my heartbeat, and brought my consciousness to a state of intense alert out from the still sleepy mood I was while driving and hearing the music in my car. Of course, the truck happened to have no rear light, was going very slowly, and the road had no artificial illumination. But it was me who happened to be driving far too fast and who ignored the smog signs I perceived on the road. By recognising this and assuming responsibility for it, I may choose to go more attentively and prudently in the future. At a somewhat subconscious or unconscious level, we continuously interpret and evaluate reality and our situations. Some occurrences we may perceive as being hurtful or threatening. Thus, our need for security and wellbeing make us experience negative feelings like angst, anger, or despair. These feelings trigger a behaviour response that aims to recover our inner balance and inner ‘peace of mind’. We increase our response-ability by taking responsibility for our feelings and acknowledging that they respond to our inner perception of reality and needs. That is, our freedom to choose among different strategies to face these situations we perceive as hurtful or threatening. Or to look at them in different ways. By becoming aware of our inner needs, we may look for an alternative, proactive behaviour strategy to attend to them. In both cases, we will observe a gradual shift in our feelings due to our changing consciousness and our attendance or not of our felt needs. Until, eventually, we feel satisfied and in peace. Once our inner balances are restored, these pleasant feelings do not require further responses or just relaxed and proactive behaviour, which regenerates these feelings of calm or inner joy and peace. The perception of reality happens at different levels. At a first level, we find instincts. They are biologically inherited and, thus, we are born with them. Plants are known to answer many physical stimuli, notably the circadian rhythms, temperature, and incoming light. Some react to touch, like, for instance, some flowers responding

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to pollinating insects or carnivorous plants trapping their prey. In his fascinating book The Hidden Life of Trees, the German forester Peter Wohlleben describes how plants actively perceive their environment, communicate, and even care for one another and their relatives. Thus, just to give a few examples, ‘when it comes to some species of insects, trees can accurately identify which bad guys they are up against. The saliva of each species is different, and trees can match the saliva to the insect. Indeed, the match can be so precise that trees can release pheromones that summon specific beneficial predators. The beneficial predators help trees by eagerly devouring the insects that are bothering them. For example, elms and pines call on small parasitic wasps that lay their eggs inside leaf-eating caterpillars’ (Wohlleben, 2017, p. 8). Thus, trees taste the parasitic insect while being tasted by them. Having a sense of taste, they as well have a sense of smell. Acacia trees in the African savannah that are being eaten by giraffes perceive the threat and start pumping toxic substances to their leaves which fend off the giraffes. But not just that: as Wohlleben (2017, p. 7) described, ‘the acacia trees that were being eaten gave off a warning gas (more specifically ethylene) that signaled to neighboring trees of the same species that a crisis was at hand. Right away, all the forewarned trees also pumped toxins into their leaves to prepare themselves. The giraffes were wise to this game and therefore moved farther away to a part of the savannah where they could find trees that were oblivious to what was going on. Or else, they moved upwind (. . .) (to) find acacias close by that had no idea the giraffes were there’. Giraffes may stop eating the toxic leaves due to their bad taste and the related unpleasant feeling, or simply out of instinct. Humans, becoming aware of the game being played, may decide to start eating acacia leaves starting from the ones downwind to avoid those upwind being warned. Plants and trees also produce and communicate, internally, electrical signals that, nevertheless, move in a very slow tempo of less than an inch per minute. It communicates the whole tree internally and with other trees and even other species, like earth fungi. Indeed, the fungus, which spreads like a network through the living soil of forests, connects all plants and the whole forests, transmitting signals from one to the other. Sometimes, trees connect directly to others through their roots. ‘Tree roots extend a long way, more than twice the spread of the crown. So, the root system of neighbouring trees inevitably intersects and grow into another. (. . .) Fungi operate like fibre-optic Internet cables. Their thin filaments penetrate the ground, weaving through it in almost unbelievable density. One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these ‘hyphae’. Over centuries, a single fungus can cover many square miles and network an entire forest. The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping the trees exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers’ (Wohlleben, 2017, p. 10). Through their roots, plants may send nutrients one to another and even, as Wohlleben discovered, remaining neighbouring trees may feed and keep alive the stump of long fallen trees for centuries to come. Thus, trees take care of their dead. Just as unicellular beings connect their different sensorial and motive parts, one signalling to the other what to do, in a multicellular organism, each part is part of this

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larger interdependent and interconnected whole we call an individual. Individuals, forests and, indeed, our biosphere are not just interdependent but interconnected and intercommunicated wholes. Each part ‘speaking’ to each other, each part ‘hearing’ and interpreting what the other is saying to it and, finally, behaving accordingly. An inner metabolic dialogue and dance where the movement of one is answered by the other. One learning and adapting to the others moves and, sometimes, the other’s false steps. We can imagine the sequence in evolutionary terms. A tree whose leaves are being eaten by an insect liberating a biochemical substance in the air. In time, some predators of this insect may learn that this specific element in the air is related to the presence of their preferred food, thus increasing their survival chances. A selfbalancing feedback loop is established: insects feeding on leaves, predators feeding on these insects, thus protecting the plant from overfeeding. Thereby, a dynamic balance emerges, which, in the long run, ensures the survival of all. It is in the interest of the insects, too, because, if unchecked, they would multiply until their large population would eventually destroy the plants, they feed on to survive. Each element of the equation is necessary to preserve the overall dynamic balance for the dance to continue. Predators are helping the long-term survival of their prey’s population by avoiding their unchecked growth. Aldo Leopold, the father of modern bioethics, realised it when he first learned to ‘think like a mountain’, taking a long-term perspective on reality. Building on his own experience, he recalled how he arrived at this understanding: ‘we were eating lunch on a high rimrock at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank towards us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willow and all joined in a welcoming mêlée of wagging tails and playful maulings. (. . .) In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second, we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something only known to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view. Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. (. . .) In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

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I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence, we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea. We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with a pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars (. . .). A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. (. . .) Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men’. (Leopold, 1968, pp. 129–133). Like Leopold observed in the 1930s in the USA, here in Catalonia where I presently live, like elsewhere in many parts of Europe, the eradication of wolves, long seen by the European popular culture and herders alike as the great enemies, has resulted in unchecked growth of wild boars. They have to be routinely chased by humans for their populations to be kept in balance. They can now be seen in big cities looking for garbage food, provoking road accidents, and carriers of different diseases that may migrate to humans. They, too, generate increasing damage to managed and unmanaged ecosystems, requiring human intervention to be fixed. They cause extensive damage to agricultural resources, including row crops, forests plantations and vegetable gardens close to forests. By having removed the wolves, humans have to perform their task of keeping their population at bay at a considerable cost. But unlike wolves, which usually would have more success chasing the weaker ones, thus exerting a selective evolutionary pressure over the wild-boar’s population by removing the more fragile specimens, humans superior chasing techniques allow us to kill even the strongest best-adapted ones. Indeed, these represent a greater trophy for the hunter and are, thus, more likely to be chased. Indeed, ecologists have long known that there is a mutual long-term benefit among predators and prey, each pushing the other to improve. Preys learn to avoid their predators; predators enhance their skills to catch their preys. Due to competition, preys need to remain healthy, strong and clever to escape, and predators must find new ways and techniques to surprise their targets. Simultaneously, individuals of the same species eventually discover the benefits of mutual aid and collaboration, improving each ones’ prospects like in the example of the Acacia trees or human groups. Moreover, predators keep the prey’s population in check and are compelled to cooperate too. Thus, as an example, in some cases in the wild, it has been observed how cheetahs, usually chasing larger games relying solely on their speed, sometimes would get better results when two or three of them focused on the same target. With time, cooperative chasing behaviour may emerge, just as it happens with lions or wolves

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Something we may learn from the way Nature’s oikonomy works: it is a dynamic dance between the elements of the whole, keeping each of its constituent part’s growth checked by the others, ensuring its balances. Not through a central authority or some submitting others to their will and needs, but by how the satisfaction of one of the parties’ needs are held in check by the other satisfying its own needs. Seen from this larger perspective, symbiosis and not competition whereby one element keeps growing at the expense of others ensures the survival of all. Something which modern man, immersed in our fight against Nature and focusing on our short-term chrematistic interests, has forgotten. Symbiosis, as we already discussed earlier, starts with us as what we call ‘individual’. Indeed, our different organs collectively cooperate to sustain our organism, and we rely on a multitude of other beings who are part of ourselves to be alive. As Gilbert et al. (2012), inspired by Margulis, put it: we have never been individuals. Our body contains more non-human cells than human ones. Thus, the human microbiome (the collection of all the microorganisms living in association with the human body, consisting of various microorganisms including eukaryotes, archaea, bacteria, and viruses) becomes the fundamental, composite unity of our human evolution. Non-human cells ‘in an average human body number ten times more than human cells, for a total of about 1000 more genes than are present in the human genome. Because of their small size, however, microorganisms make up only about 1 to 3 percent of our body mass (that’s 2 to 6 pounds of bacteria in a 200-pound adult). These microbes are generally not harmful to us, in fact they are essential for maintaining health. For example, they produce some vitamins that we do not have the genes to make, break down our food to extract nutrients we need to survive, teach our immune systems how to recognize dangerous invaders and even produce helpful anti-inflammatory compounds that fight off other disease-causing microbes. An ever-growing number of studies have demonstrated that changes in the composition of our microbiomes correlate with numerous disease states’.1 As a result of evolution, most of the co-evolving microorganisms with whom we are associated are beneficial or neutral to us, although some can still become pathogenic. But then again, there is a dynamic dance between those pathogenic and parasitic microbes and our immune system, counteracting and keeping their attack in check. Should they prevail, both the individual and the pathogen would perish. Conversely, once a balance is found, the larger organism, seen as a selforganised micro-ecosystem and its parts, will survive and be selected by evolution. The better so, the more they happen to cooperate and follow their shared goal of being a prosperous and healthy larger unit. Thus, cooperating individuals become part of a larger symbiotic co-evolving organism. A good example is a lichen, a composite organism composed of algae or cyanobacteria (or both) living among fungus filaments in a symbiotic relationship. It presents emergent properties that cannot be found in its parts alone, which evolve, grow, and reproduce as a whole. Although some of its photosynthetic partners (algae

1

Human Microbiome Project (https://www.hmpdacc.org/hmp/overview/). Retrieved 15/05/2021.

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or cyanobacteria) may survive independently, they nevertheless fuse into a symbiotic organism whose qualities are highly enhanced. Lichens are highly adaptable and resistant. They ‘occur from sea level to high alpine elevations, in a very wide range of environmental conditions, and can grow on almost any surface. Lichens are abundant growing on bark, leaves, mosses, on other lichens, and hanging from branches living on thin air (epiphytes) in rain forests and in temperate woodland. They grow on bare rock, walls, gravestones, roofs, exposed soil surfaces, and in the soil as part of a biological soil crust. Different kinds of lichens have adapted to survive in some of the most extreme environments on Earth: arctic tundra, hot dry deserts, rocky coasts, and toxic slag heaps. They can even live inside solid rock, growing between the grains. Some lichens do not grow on anything, living out their lives blowing about the environment. It is estimated that 6% of Earth’s land surface is covered by lichen. (. . .) When growing on mineral surfaces, some lichens slowly decompose their substrate by chemically degrading and physically disrupting the minerals, contributing to the process of weathering by which rocks are gradually turned into soil. (. . .) In addition to distinct physical mechanisms by which lichens break down raw stone, recent studies indicate lichens attack stone chemically, entering newly chelated minerals into the ecology. The lichen exudates, which have powerful chelating capacity, the widespread occurrence of mineral neoformation, particularly metal oxalates, together with the characteristics of weathered substrates, all confirm the significance of lichens as chemical weathering agents. Over time, this activity creates new fertile soil from lifeless stone. Lichens may be important in contributing nitrogen to soils in some deserts through being eaten, along with their rock substrate, by snails, which then defecate, putting the nitrogen into the soils. Lichens help bind and stabilise soil sand in dunes. In deserts and semi-arid areas, lichens are part of extensive, living biological soil crusts, essential for maintaining the soil structure. Lichens are pioneer species, among the first living things to grow on bare rock or areas denuded of life by a disaster’.2 We call this close association between fungus, algae, or cyanobacteria ‘lichen’ as if it were a single species. Similarly, I call the close association between my human organism and millions of other organisms ‘me’. Nevertheless, by doing so, I may easily forget that I can only exist and survive as a composite being. Indeed, my adaptability is significantly enhanced by relying on the genetic variation of all these beings inhabiting my body. While the genetic information in each of my cells is unchanging, my genetic information as a composite being is continuously changing and adapting to new circumstances. Just as the biodiversity of an ecosystem. Indeed, by changing the internal and external conditions in which we live, new balances and symbiotic compositions making up ourselves will emerge and be created. Like for

2

Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen, retrieved 11/02/2016, quoting Australian National Botanical Garden (10 October 2014); Chen et al. (October 1999); Gadd (March 2010); Jones and Shachak (30 August 1990); Sharnoff (2014); and Speer and Waggoner (May 1997).

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standard ecosystems, we are the more resilient and adaptable, the more biodiverse we are. Lichens would perish if the cooperation and symbiosis between their constituent elements were to break down. Similarly, in a fractal succession from the cell up to the biosphere, we find how the whole is both the precondition for the existence of the parts and the emergent result of the dynamic and changing interactions between its constituent parts. There is neither a final stable and fixed building block, a-tom, nor indivisible individuals, but dynamic interactions and emergent properties. And they are maintained and enhanced only as long as the force that binds them together, cooperation and love, overcome those which may pull them apart: competition and hate. For sure, attrition and competition resulting from differences are essential elements keeping the movement alive. Polarity is a crucial feature of reality. Still, ultimately, all parts have to follow and dance to the same music and rhythm and learn to adapt and respond to the other needs. The social division of labour and cooperation within each cell is mirrored by the social division and cooperation in society, ecosystems, and the biosphere. Nowhere may this be more evident than for social insects and, indeed, ourselves, humans. We are what we are in our consciousness, language, behaviour and, indeed, oikonomic practice because of our relations and adaptations in the realm of our social domain and culture. Just as social insects cannot survive for long once removed from their group, humans who grew up removed from human society, although eventually managing to survive, lacked basic human skills. Several feral children have been reported in different places and times, giving us real-life examples that have provided a different picture than the Mowgli-like romanticised narratives we have seen in literature and cinema. Growing up with other animals, they adapted their behaviour to those with whom they grew up. Some, like Dani Sanichar, discovered at the age of six living among wolves in Uttar Pradesh in India, although later living for over two decades among humans, never managed to speak and remained severely impaired from a human perspective for his whole life. Another known example is Oxana Malaya in Ukraine. She was born as a normal child but, having been neglected by her alcoholic parents, she went to live among dogs in the backyard of her house at the age of three. When authorities found Malaya, she was 7 and a half years old, but she could not talk, lacked many basic skills, and physically behaved like a dog. She ran around on all fours, barking, sleeping on the floor, eating, and taking care of her hygiene like a dog. Having been removed from her parents’ custody and brought to a foster home for mentally disabled children, she eventually learned to speak fluently and suppress her dog-like behaviour. Notwithstanding, her early social experience marked her demeanour and cognitive abilities for the rest of her life. We are what we are because of others and our relations to them. We are not and never have been individuals separately. Our wellbeing and life are tributary of others and Nature’s oikonomy at large. Our consciousness is the emergent property of our life experiences and inner mental processes. Thus, is perception and consciousness at all levels. Everywhere, more minor component elements ‘perceive’ and ‘respond’ to other factors they relate to in

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their environment and, emergent higher unities are formed from these relations. Thus, there is a cell consciousness, an individual consciousness, a collective social consciousness of ants, humans, and trees. Like in the movie Avatar and traditional people, there is a collective consciousness at the ecosystem’s Nature’s level. Each one is nurtured by the matter, energy, and information he receives, while, according to the way he processes and transforms them internally, promoting and sustaining the whole—both product and the co(re)producing part of the whole. We are all a nod in the web of life and consciousness, both product and co(re)producing actors in it. As Maturana and Varela (1987, pp. 211–212), in their study of the biological fundaments of consciousness, described, ‘in the case of insects (. . .) cohesion of social unity is based on trophallaxis, the flow of chemicals between individuals, the exchange of chemicals between organisms. In humans, social unity is based on ‘linguallaxis’ (a linguistic trophallaxis): a linguistic domain constituted as a domain of ontogenic coordination of actions. We human beings are human beings only in language. Because we have language, there is no limit to what we can describe, imagine, and relate. It thus permeates our whole ontogeny as individuals: from walking to attitudes to politics’. Ants will continuously scrutinise each other with their feelers, spread scents along their paths and instinctively react to perceived pheromones, touch, and sound. Thus, they ‘know’ who the other in front of them is, where to go, how to behave, and what to do. We perceive signs and meaning through language and, thus, our capacity to selfreflectively describe both ourselves and the reality out there. Like ants spraying a scent on their paths, leading others to follow, the uses and significances given to words by those using them are reinforced by others who follow along the same tracks, thus consolidating shared pathways that become part of a specific culture’s accepted use. Like ant paths weaving a network covering the forest grounds, some words spread like a network of meanings amidst reality, shedding light on some of its parts while leaving others in the dark. Ant paths connect the nest to the occupied space and potential food sources; words connect our cognition to the world, giving meaning to it. They direct our consciousness to specific ‘food for thought’, illuminating it while leaving other parts unspoken, unrepresented. Bees communicate to each other not just with biochemical signs but by performing a series of dance-like movements telling them about newly found sources of pollen, their importance, distance, and direction for some others to follow. Thus, like ant colonies behaving like a superorganism spreading their arms, picking hands, and moving legs on the ground of the forest to reach their food, bees work as a coordinated organism collecting pollen from sometimes kilometres away to be processed into honey, their home, and new bees. Eventually, they reproduce when they have enough surplus food to split into two. Thus, they grow, prosper, and reproduce collectively as a superorganism just as we humans may do by coordinating our behaviour and collaborating among ourselves through our social division of labour and our oikonomic practice. Through language and the way meaning is associated with given words, collective, culture-specific understandings emerge. Thus, as we saw, economics emerged as a specific and limited understanding of the oikonomy. Among the whole forest

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and the whole reality, words allow us to name and thus our consciousness to accede to just a specific part of them. Vast tracts of forest remain in deep shade, unexplored beyond our reach. But this, of course, does not exclude strayed or lost ants who, serendipitously, discover new food sources, eventually opening the ways for new paths connecting us to new meanings and understandings. While other tracks, ideas, and cultural beliefs are lost once the food source is exhausted and abandoned. Nor does it exclude philosophers, poets, or thinkers, among others, from widening the scope of language, going beyond a word’s established pathways, leading our individual and collective consciousness towards new territories. Thus, learning and evolution happen. Abstract language creates a further degree of dissociation and separation, mediating between our sensorial perception of reality, our internal representation of this reality and our behaviour. Words are just socially agreed on conventions pointing to something else. They are signs pointing to signs. Thus, to participate in this communicative domain, individuals need to learn to speak first. Thereby, through our communicative interactions with others, we learn the associated meanings given to certain words. Based on this understanding, in what has become known as the linguistic turn, first in philosophy and then in the realm of the social sciences, it has been established that human identity, particularly human cognition, happens through language. Thus, human behaviour is open to varying meanings and socially, culturally, and individually differing behavioural responses. Words always refer to a part of reality: a tree is not a forest; a leaf is not a tree. But, moreover, their denotative and connotative meaning is as well culturally and socially specific. We do not understand the same under the label ‘economy’ as did, for instance, Aristotle. Nor, at least this is my hope, will you, reader, after reading this book, compared to the meaning you gave to the word before reading it. Moreover, abstract sign language allows us to describe ourselves self-reflectively. It enables us to create a conceptual identity and character, constituting a further way to trigger and direct behaviour. We develop a self-image, an ego, which we project into the world and which we may eventually believe ourselves to be. ‘I did this because I am. . .’, thus predetermining our behaviour according to who we believe to be in the self-reflective domain of language. Thereby, according to our inner narratives, belief systems, theories, and ideologies about ourselves and how we perceive the world, we may inhibit or enhance inherited instinctive behaviour and emotional ones. We see ourselves and others as being a given character that performs assigned roles in society. ‘I’m a teacher, thus. . .’. Or ‘I’m a student and am expected to. . .’. Or ‘I’m a good husband and respected member of society, thus entitled to. . .’. Thereby, we may act according to reason and social norms, virtualising or repressing instinctive and emotional responses. This is how self-reflective narratives and beliefs open new behavioural domains. Language is not neutral and just a tool whereby humans (and other language possessing species) communicate and relate socially. It is a way whereby we actively engage, interpret and connect to our environment. It is indeed a central element whereby conscious reality is constituted through narratives. Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralism, pointed out that definitions of concepts cannot exist independently from a linguistic system defined by

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difference, isolating parts of larger wholes in separate identities and realities. Or, to put it differently, a concept cannot exist without being named and, thus, differentiated from all that it is not. Thereby, language is not just how meaning and reality are apprehended, but the very way this reality and meaning are created and separated in differing identities. Language, by affirming given aspects in excluding all those others that it does not, fragments and divides reality. Thus, differences between meanings structure our perception, each one manipulating symbolic systems his way. We would not even recognise a tree as a tree without simultaneously recognising that a tree is not everything else, thus represented as non-tree. By learning to speak a language, we learn how social and cultural groups establish meaning, how certain stereotypes and preconceived ideas and identities are attributed to certain aspects of reality and become part of a shared identity. What we think of as ‘reality’ is, from this perspective, a convention of naming and characterising, a tradition which is itself called language whereby not only our cultures are continuously being (re)created and evolve, but our own identities and consciousness are based upon. It may be essential to remember here that language has a non-verbal, intuitive dimension too. We use words continuously and follow internal verbal narratives and thoughts but may find it hard to define specific terms precisely. Particularly abstract concepts like love and freedom may be tough to determine verbally, although we may have a clear understanding of them. But the point is that language and thus consciousness and awareness go beyond words. The way language structures our consciousness and perception can be seen each time we observe a newborn unable to identify the elements of his environment as separate from each other and even different from himself. Gradually he starts to differentiate the incoming perceptions as independent identities and wholes. He starts to create reality and meaning through the projection of his mind on the observed phenomenon. Then, while growing and engaging in the language of his milieu, learning to speak, in conjunction with his non-verbal perception of reality, the capacity to identify separated elements and identities emerges. Through language and abstract thought, we name reality and create narratives about us and the world. Thereby, conscious memories and our self-reflective identity are established. Through language, individuals develop their unique and separate identities and personality. Using language, we perceive the world and behave in it, transforming and co(re)creating it through our behaviour and not least by our communicative behaviour and use of language. Thus, becoming part of the language where languages and meanings are continuously being (re)created by and within a linguistic community. Here too, language is both the product and the co(re)producing element of the different individuals, personalities, and the broader reality. In the same way, we self-reflectively create the image of ‘I’ and, by doing so, ‘not me’. A sense of self emerges, which opens a new domain for behaviour’s plasticity. While instinctive behaviour is inherited and follows relatively linear cause–effect patterns, language opens new behavioural domains, allowing individuals to behave according to their subjective perceptions of reality, identity, inner consciousness, and belief systems. We act in certain ways, not because of instinct or feeling, but according to an idea or concept. Thus, as said, our thoughts become words. Words

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manifest as deeds, and deeds become a habit. Habit hardens into the character that will, to a great degree, define a person’s behaviour and destiny. Because of my understanding of the world and image of myself, I behave and respond to both my inner and outer circumstances the way I do. Thereby, in the same way that ants follow certain behaviour patterns out of instinct, we do so out of our character and an image of who we are. But, while instincts are biologically transmitted and encoded, thus varying only from one generation to the other, ideas are culturally and individually variable. They are changing according to context and personal experiences. They are open to change and, sometimes, even rapid change. Moreover, language and ideological narratives allowed humans to enlarge their collaborative social networks significantly. By generating an identity shared by others, like nationality, gender, age, religious or political beliefs, and professional activities, we become part of a larger community of people with whom we may collaborate without even knowing them. Social insects are continuously reaffirming their commonality through biochemical signals and means. Within social mammals like apes or wolves, social bonds and hierarchies are continuously being reaffirmed by the member’s relations and emotional responses. Notwithstanding, humans may create large social groups and movements just based on an ideology. Based on this shared beliefs and ideologies, we may experience instinctive feelings of belonging to a large community without the need of even knowing or relating to the other members of this community. Instead of being instinctively or emotionally driven, it is the other way around: our thoughts determine our feelings and direct our instinctive behaviour according to an ideology. Kings do not need to continuously reaffirm their alpha status if they manage to convince others about their moral rights, nor do we need to be reminded of our place in the social hierarchy if we have already made it part of our self-identity. Thus, while for insects, the ‘us’ and ‘them’ are given through instincts, other animals create bonds based on feelings, we humans separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ through language. In social insects, while the individuals follow instinctive, linear response patterns, collectively, they learn and enhance their collective consciousness. Thereby, new emergent collective behaviour and non-linear patterns can be observed. Those ant colonies whose collective behaviour best answers and adapt to their environment and prosper in their ‘art of living and living well’ being selected, those who do not eventually become extinct. Thus, ants evolved into the most varied adaptations, ranging from small groups of just a few dozen predatory individuals living in natural cavities; to colonies of millions spreading over a large territory. They, collectively as a superorganism, managed to solve complex problems like building body bridges to cross small water streams or engage in what could be called agricultural practice. ‘Leafcutter ants (Atta and Acromyrmex) feed exclusively on a fungus that grows only within their colonies. They continually collect leaves which are taken to the colony, cut into tiny pieces and placed in fungal gardens. Ergates specialise in related tasks according to their sizes. The largest ants cut stalks, smaller workers chew the leaves and the smallest tend the fungus. Leafcutter ants are sensitive enough to recognise the reaction of the fungus to different plant material, apparently detecting chemical signals from the fungus. If a particular type of leaf is found to be toxic to the fungus,

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the colony will no longer collect it. The ants feed on structures produced by the fungi called gongylidia. Symbiotic bacteria on the exterior surface of the ants produce antibiotics that kill bacteria introduced into the nest that may harm the fungi’.3 Notwithstanding, being based on instinctive behaviour, they may be fooled by humans making poisonous food previously unknown to them and which they diligently will carry into their colony, thus killing the fungus and jeopardizing their own survival. Other ants herd small sap-sucking insects, called Aphids, and other hemipteran insects who secrete a high-energetic sweet liquid food source, called honeydew when they feed on plant sap. In some cases, the aphids secrete the honeydew in response to ants tapping them with their antennae. The ants, in turn, keep predators away from the aphids and move them from one feeding location to another. When migrating to a new area, many colonies will take the aphids with them to ensure a continued supply of honeydew. Ants also tend mealybugs to harvest their honeydew. Species in the genus Macrotermes arguably build the most complex structures in the insect world, constructing enormous mounds. These mounds are among the largest in the world, reaching a height of 8–9 metres (26–29 feet), and consist of chimneys, pinnacles, and ridges. Another termite species, Amitermes meridionalis, can build nests 3–4 metres (9–13 feet) high and 2.5 metres (8 feet) wide. The tallest mound ever recorded was 12.8 metres (42 ft) long found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The sculptured mounds sometimes have elaborate and distinctive forms, such as those of the compass termite (Amitermes meridionalis and A. laurensis), which builds tall, wedgeshaped mounds with the long axis-oriented approximately north–south, which gives them their common name. This orientation has been experimentally shown to assist thermoregulation. The north–south orientation causes the internal temperature of a mound to increase rapidly during the morning while avoiding overheating from the midday sun. The temperature then remains at a plateau for the rest of the day until the evening.4

These are just some examples of this new image of life that is emerging. Evolution leads to different ways whereby matter, energy, and information are combined in changing forms to create the spectacle and diversity of our world. Eventually leading to more intricate and self-conscious choreographies and dances whereby different beings relate and transform themselves and their environment, as for us humans. But we are all a product and co-regenerators of the moving whole. Multicellular and, as we saw, multi-individual organisms and superorganisms react instinctively to a wide variety of environmental factors and others’ behaviour. Thus, for instance, gazelles may sense a lion waiting in ambush, activating their sympathetic nervous system and a series of metabolic functions (like higher blood irrigation of their limbs, and higher alertness). But the specific running directions and chosen strategies trying to escape an attack will vary each time, adapting to the specificities of each case and random variables present both in the external circumstances and the way, internally, their autopoietic processes try to find new balances, as will the attacking lions.

3 4

As explained in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant (retrieved 13 December 2021). As described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid¼54808 (retrieved 13 December 2021).

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Table 11.1 Emotional and motivational energy Emotion/state Peacefulness/Peace of Mind Joy/Euphoria Anger/Aggression Sadness/Suffering Depression/Apathy

Associated motivational energy Relaxed/Very High—Extended in time High/Very High—Extended in time High/Very High—Concentrated in time Low Very low/Null—Extended in time

Moreover, reacting both to the incoming threat and the escape route chosen by the neighbouring gazelles, a collective herd behaviour emerges, both an emergent property of the sum of individual behaviours and co-defining, recursively, each individual’s strategy. A behaviour strategy that goes far beyond the individual and cannot be reduced to some simple, maximising linear behavioural functions. Again, we may find the working of the polarity between chaos and order, randomness, and predictability. Complete predictability would make the gazelles an easy prey for the lions, as would an entirely unstructured and chaotic escape. Through evolution, their selective adaptive learning is traduced into both ordered and random, creative behaviour patterns. In addition to the instinctive, automatic behaviour patterns, there are feelings and emotions in some animals, particularly mammals. Some of them may channel instinctive behaviour; others may lead to a particular mood or state of the individual, which his behaviour will reflect in more mediated ways. Deriving from the old French word emouvoir (‘to stir up’) stemming from the Latin emovere ‘move out, remove, agitate’ assimilated form of ex- (‘out’) + movere (‘to move’),5 emotions are intimately related to behaviour. They move an organism towards or away from giving situations and things. Emotions may be pleasant or unpleasant (at varying degrees and shades of intensity), activating greater or lower power behavioural responses. A higher degree of behavioural activity will be shown when angry, scared, excited, joyous, or euphoric. Behavioural responses may be dampened or deactivated when calm, relaxed, serene or otherwise tired, bored, depressed, or sad. That is why emotions and feelings, intimately related to how our unmet needs and their eventual satisfaction are experienced, drive human behaviour. As Max-Neef argued, unmet needs manifest a lack and the positive motor for action. By being related to a need and how we perceive—consciously or unconsciously—a given reality, needs to drive our efforts, looking for ways to satisfy them. Indeed, needs manifest themselves through our feelings. The need for subsistence makes us feel hungry; the need for security eventually makes us feel scared or alert. Table 11.1 summarises this by listing five feelings that may cover the larger spectrum, although being just a tiny sample of the feelings we humans experience. As Marshall Rosenberg reminds us, having a broad palette to describe and identify

5

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term¼emotion

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our inner emotional states and empathically with others is crucial to enriching our lives and bringing more depth to our relations. But, as a summary, these five may suffice. It is up to you, reader, to do the exercise of placing other feelings in that list if you wish. But they all can be classified the same way, according to the motivational energy they provoke and how long this energy lasts. At the lowest level, people feeling depressed may end up in a state of apathy and, although having some fundamental needs not being satisfied, may find themselves incapable of action. Therefore, it may be self-perpetuating and usually related to a high level of dependency and need for external support to compensate for the person’s lack of internal motivational energy. In extreme cases, lacking external support, severe depression may result in death due to a lack of the ability to generate behavioural strategies necessary for the individuals’ fundamental needs satisfaction. Not just for security (defending themselves); or understanding (being able to comprehend their state and the potentialities found in their environment or alternative behavioural strategies); but even to attend to basic subsistence needs, once, at its deepest level, a lack of desire and motivation to feed is displayed. It is no coincidence that these feelings are related to perceptions of victimhood and dependency, blaming others or on external factors, the individual conditions from which the person does not see a way out, except by hoping these external conditions to change. Sadness is still associated with a low level of motivational energy but higher than depression. In its different nuances of sorrow, melancholy, gloom etc., the individual is in a state of unhappiness where both dependency on and longing for external support may lead to behavioural strategies to attend to their unmet needs or change their state of mind. Notwithstanding this, it is still related to a low motivational and behavioural energy, once the psychological energy is inward-bound to the individual suffering and grief. Thus, individuals in this state of mind may require or long for external support to get by. They are hoping for external conditions to change to solve their problems and attend to their needs. A higher level of energy is projected outward in a state of anger, leading the individual to aggressive behavioural strategies to change and transform the outer reality. Certainly, aggression may as well be directed inward, despairing, or blaming oneself—but here too, it is an objectified, external judgement of oneself directed at changing those aspects which the individual sees as unacceptable or inadequate in himself. It is different from sadness or self-pity, where the person mourns and lingers in his suffering, identifying with it. When in anger, rage, fury, or ire, people may display a high energy level, which tends to be short-lived and concentrated in time, directed to an external or internal objectified reality which the individual aims to change. All these primary emotional states are related to a dualistic, fragmented perception of reality. Through it, the individual sees himself as separate and in opposition to the source of his feelings—even if this source is seen as internal, although objectified, like ‘personality trait’, ‘weakness’, or other personal aspects the individual attributes to himself. People attribute these feelings to external or internal factors they cannot control from this fragmented and separated perception of reality. Thus, they see these feelings as something they are not responsible for once factors beyond

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their direct control are seen to have provoked them. Individuals see themselves as victims of external circumstances or in solid opposition to them. Here, as Marshall Rosenberg (2015) in his analysis showed, unmet fundamental needs are associated with thoughts related to ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’, to the intellectual–analytical mode of consciousness whereby reality and its aspects are analysed, judged, and labelled as positive or negative. Thoughts like ‘life is being hard and unjust with me’, ‘this is unfair’, ‘I’m stupid’, or ‘they are authoritarian’, and ‘the system is rigged’, are at the ground of these depictions of ‘victim’ and ‘culprit’ and thus dynamics of victimization or indignation. By not taking responsibility for his feeling, the individual sees these external factors or elements he has no direct control over as those who need to be fixed. Here, by depicting reality and other people as separate and fragmented, our intellectual mind makes objectifying and judgmental assessments based on dualities of ‘rights’  ‘wrongs’, ‘good’  ‘evil’, ‘useful’  ‘detrimental’. Simultaneously, seeing the ‘problem’ as external and objectified, they are associated with a need to right factors beyond the individuals’ reach and responsibility. Sometimes, individuals may transition from one level to another according to their perception about their capacity to promote change and react. While in rage, an individual may still believe in his ability to change them, thus projecting his concentrated energy to this effect and responding to these external circumstances. These kinds of mindsets and feelings often fuel revolutions and radical extremism. Perceiving an external enemy or an unjust event that needs to be fixed, once empowered by a charismatic leader or a strong ideology, people may manifest intense behavioural energy collectively channelled to overturn these external circumstances believing to be healing the world. But, when not considering themselves able to fix these circumstances for which no personal responsibility is taken once ‘they are somebody else’s fault’, individuals may suppress their anger. They may end up feeling sad or even depressed in a state of apathy and fear, in a state of helplessness. Notwithstanding, as it happens in revolutions or religious extremism, individuals may be ready to follow a charismatic leader or revolutionary ideology, pointing to a way out once they find one. In all these cases, the inner emotion is related (although only on a subjective level) to an external reality. For there to be a victim, there has to be an abuser. Thereby, a shallow, objectified reality is blamed for the inner emotions and individual behaviour. Cause and effect relations are assumed, which effectively leads the individual not to take responsibility for his behaviour, once external factors are blamed and deemed to have ‘caused’ our response. ‘I am sad because of’, ‘I had to strike back because I had been challenged by’ or ‘you made me do this’. . . These are just some of the common explanations and justifications which we can find in these cases. Our emotional state and behaviour are attributed to something external and out of our control, thereby effectively placing ourselves in a place of lack of liberty and response-ability. It may be worth noting that one of the main aspects of Marshall Rosenberg’s approach to non-violent communication is to take responsibility for our feelings. We do so once we understand how our and the other people’s emotions—and therefore

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our emotion-driven behaviours—are not the result of external circumstances but spring from our inner state dynamics. That is our unmet needs and ways of interpreting and understanding reality. As we discussed previously, external aspects may trigger an inner response, but it is the inner autopoietic processes that lead to concrete outcomes. Reality (including our internal reality) is always perceived and created by how we relate to the world. It is not something to be found objectively ‘out there’, but something represented subjectively by our inner consciousness. By taking responsibility for our feelings and emotions, we attain a higher degree of consciousness and understanding and, thus, a higher level of freedom once it is up to each individual to choose one strategy or another to communicate or look for ways and strategies meeting needs. We are the ones seeing and creating a representation of the world and, thus, the ones able and responsible for improving our consciousness and seeing the world otherwise. By taking response-ability for our feelings, we increase the range of potential behavioural responses we may take by not depicting ourselves as having acted in a certain way because we had to do so. As responsible, free individuals, our actions are always options and not causal consequences of other factors, and thus we choose to respond in given ways or not. As long as we blame ‘external realities’ for the inner state and feeling we experience, this kind of behavioural strategy and discourse are, by themselves, divisive sources of tension, if not outright conflict. There, where the alluded ‘culprits’ take it personally and react in the same judgemental analytical mode of consciousness, two basic patterns can emerge: first, accepting and reinforcing the label by blaming oneself (‘I am a bad person’ and ‘I am guilty’), leading to feelings of sadness or even depression; and second, by rejecting blame and responsibility by the other or ourselves, blaming the other instead, in a defensive counter-attack: ‘You are lying because you were the one who. . .’. These kinds of dynamics may lead to self-reinforcing mutual blame, misunderstanding, and outright conflict. Simultaneously, projecting on the other, our inner behavioural energy comes from this friction and contradiction with the external world. Thereby, people trapped in this kind of representation of reality and feelings may display a subconscious behaviour pattern reproducing these contexts. Thereby, their self-image of victimhood or saviour may be reaffirmed, fuelling their identity and behaviour. Unlike depression, sadness and hatred, peacefulness and joy are based on the holistic mode of consciousness and an empathic relation to our outer and inner reality. By taking an empathic approach both to our own needs and that of the other, a space of dialogue opens wherein synergic and (co)evolutionary behavioural strategies may emerge. In this mode of consciousness, we approach ourselves and others in living ways, connecting to that which is alive and not to a concept or abstract representation of reality. In this way, a dialogue space may open by not objectifying reality and establishing a subject–subject relationship. We let each phenomenon present itself and manifest out of itself. Thereby, by taking responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, recognising them as a manifestation of ourselves and our inner living processes, we may act not as a reaction to external or internally objectified circumstances but out of choice and our own will. Moreover, by recognising the other’s right to look for their ways of ‘living and living well’ and

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how we are what we are through and by means of our relations, we may recognize the commonality that binds us together not just to other individuals but to all living and non-living reality. Thus, assuming our responsibility and by empathically connecting and understanding both our own needs and those of others, we may look for synergic strategies and ways of satisfying them once we realise that, as interdependent and symbiotic beings, the best way to attend for our own needs is by others being able to exist and blossom too. We have already seen Rudolf Steiner’s ‘fundamental social law’ stating that ‘the wellbeing of a community of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work; that is, the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, and the more his own needs are satisfied, not as the result of his work but as the result of the work done by others’. Thus, in a context of interdependency, it is by understanding the needs of others and our own that we may best satisfy them collectively, finding that which, in game theory, is called win–win strategies. In the same way, as it happens in our organism, in social species, or, as we saw, in ecosystems and the world at large. Natural selection favours stable homeostatic balances of the larger wholes. Thus, the constituting parts of a cell cooperate in providing stability to the cell. Cells form organs, organs an organism. The lover levels’ stability and survival always depend on the homeostatic and symbiotic balances of the higher ones. The stability and homeostatic balances of the ecosystems will ensure the long-term survival and wellbeing of the individual species inhabiting it, just as it is from the homeostatic balance and stability of the biosphere as a whole that life on Earth progresses and evolves locally. By becoming conscious of the inherently interdependent nature of life, we may establish cooperative, synergic, and mutually enhancing relations with others and our environment. We may find ourselves in what Maturana and Varela in their conclusions about the biological basis of our human consciousness called ‘love’: the acceptance of the other at our side to establish a broader domain of existence wherein both parts fit co(re)creating our shared world. As they argued (Maturana & Varela, 1987, pp. 246–247), ‘biology also shows us that we can expand our cognitive domain. This arises through a novel experience brought for through reasoning, through the encounter with a stranger or, more directly, through the expression of a biological interpersonal congruence that lets us see the other person and open up for him room for existence beside us. This act is called love, or if we prefer a milder expression, the acceptance of the other person beside us in our daily living. This is the biological foundation of social phenomena: without love, without acceptance of others living beside us, there is no social process and, therefore, no humanness. Anything that undermines the acceptance of others, from competency to the possession of truth and on to ideological certainty, undermines the biologic process that generates it. Let us not deceive ourselves: we are not moralising, we are not preaching love. We are only revealing the fact that, biologically, without love, without the acceptance of others, there is no social phenomenon. If we still live together that way, we are living indifference and negation under the pretence of love.

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To dismiss love as the biologic basis of social life, as also the ethical implications of love, would be to turn our back on a history as living beings that is more than 3.5 billion years old’. Love leads us to comprehend and cherish the relations that bind us together and acknowledge interdependence from a non-dualistic perspective. This approach, by connecting to the other and the outer world empathically and dwelling, as we saw, in the depths of the phenomenon instead of resorting to an external instance to evaluate and judge, allows, in Heidegger’s (1962, p. 58) definition, ‘to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself’. By connecting to others and ourselves in that way, accepting reality as it is, let it be, we live not in reaction but out of our inner life and impulses, in a state of inner joy and peacefulness. We may find this kind of emotional state whence a community gathers together to voluntarily work and create together, or when we do something autonomously, out of our inner motivations and interests. Not resorting to the analytical mind judging and evaluating from the outside and, instead, connecting empathically allows us to understand better the idea of being present, that is, being in the ‘here and now’. It is achieved by connecting empathically to what is living within us and what is alive and wanting to manifest in others. Neither look for past theories, ideologies, and understandings nor do we project our anxieties or longings into the future. Just being here and now, dwelling and rooted in reality. By doing so, we accept that ‘things are as they are’ and let fact speak by itself. Thus, a different kind of understanding and consciousness, a state of mindfulness, emerges. Therefore, by taking full responsibility for ‘what is’, including our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, we may realise, as Rudolf Steiner argued, our human potential for freedom: freely and responsibly acting instead of reacting. This state of consciousness is associated with a very high motivational energy level. Moreover, it is not dependent upon nor relies on external conditions. It springs forth from the individuals’ self-realisation and connection to the flow of life in the here and now, proactively connecting to his own and others’ inner needs. As Manfred Max-Neef already argued, needs manifest themselves in their dual nature: both lack and potential for individual and collective behaviour, aiming to fill this lack. It is by experiencing a need that we act to fulfil it. By not being a reaction to something external but a connection to something internal, the individual assumes these two kinds of emotional states as acts of his own will, consciousness, and desire. Thus, taking full responsibility for it. As master Yoda, in a contemporary mythological depiction of this ancient wisdom, would say: by connecting to the force, we connect to the endless source of life. Moreover, as Luke was further taught, we find this connection inside ourselves by closing our eyes, not focusing outside. In this state of mind, behaviour is still fuelled by needs. Still, it expresses itself differently: once the individual’s fundamental needs are met, the individual, in a meditative connection to reality, experiences calm and serenity. In a state of ‘peace of mind’, this motivational energy is at rest and no externally perceptible behaviour is manifested as no need for action is required. But this is not a state of apathy or low energy as we saw in forms of depression, but a state of full presence and feeling of inner strength and power. Once a need arises, people will act not with anxiety or fear

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but with determination and joy. It is motivational energy that springs out from a feeling of connectedness and the knowing to be doing the right thing—the satisfaction of doing that which is being asked to be done at this very moment. Thus, in the same way as feelings and the behaviour energy of individuals can change from depression to aggression, going through sadness and anger for those objectifying realities and projecting out; in this state of mind, individuals may move from peacefulness to joy and back again. Needs are always in a constant cycle of deprivation and gratification, accompanying and driving life’s rhythms of activity and rest: acting in joy, resting in peace. Thus, by taking full responsibility for our behaviour and our need, not blaming or expecting changes from others, individual behaviour and the fulfilment of our requirements are driven by this serene and intense motivational energy. Out of our own life’s power and potential. Not out of negative and unpleasant feelings of sadness or anger; but in a spirit of joyfulness and confidence. In this state of mind, we are not analytically fragmenting reality or blaming external factors for our behaviour. Karl Gustav Jung is often quoted from a letter in which he wrote that ‘who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes’. Indeed, by using what Goethe called ‘the exact intuitive imagination’ and selfreflectively looking inside, by looking in a living way to the moving whole, we may expand our consciousness and attain that which in the oriental traditions is called enlightenment or awakening. A state of mind in which we may experience the inner interconnectedness and impermanence of life. Translated into behaviour, it leads us to realise which in the Indian religions and later Buddhist tradition is called ‘following’ or ‘fulfilling your dharma’.6 That is maybe why Buddha is represented in two primary forms in the different Buddhist iconographies: meditating in a quiet and peaceful position or joyfully laughing and dancing. In both cases, his behaviour is driven not in reaction to external conditions but in serene confidence and consciousness of ‘doing the right thing’.

Although there is no direct correspondence in the Western language, it is related to the Greek logos or the Chinese Tao or Dao we quoted already. In Hinduism, dharma signifies behaviours that are considered to be in accordance with the order that makes life and universe possible (in opposition to Maya related to illusion, fraud, deception, or magic that misleads and creates disorder, or what we could consider alienation and alienated behaviour). This idea of a ‘right way of living’, following your dharma, is represented in Buddhist practice by the The Noble Eightfold Path consisting of eight practices: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi (meditative absorption or union). As for the Greek logos, and the Chinese Dao, in Buddhism dharma means as well ‘cosmic law and order’, being applied to the teachings of the Buddha who renders this cosmic order visible. In that sense, it may be important to note that in Buddhist philosophy, dharma is also the term for ‘phenomena’, thus clearly linking it to our present discussion. Here too, as for the opening of the Tao Te Ching we already quoted saying that ‘The Dao that can be named is not the real Dao’, in the Buddhist Diamond Sutra it is stated that no dharma is the dharma. Trying to connect it to the phenomenological approach, we may state that ‘the phenomena which can be depicted and described by the intellectual mind is not the real phenomena’. Nor is ‘the oikonomy which can be discussed and argued about in a book the real oikonomy’. . . Each one has to discover it intuitively and experience it internally by himself. 6

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Phenomenological understanding is both immediate and intense. It leads, thus, as well to a behaviour that is both immediate and intense. In contrast, human mechanistic behaviour, based on reaction to external or internal unconscious circumstances, lacks response-ability and freedom, thus narrowing the range of unpredictable behaviours once the cause–effect between the incoming cause and the resulting behaviour is identified. By taking response-ability into our hands, we do not ‘have’ to act in a certain way but ‘choose’ to do so. Simultaneously, conscious of a given reality, this behaviour is constrained within the narrow range of ‘rightful behaviour’, living following the dharma. Thereby, somehow paradoxically, the content of potential behaviour outcomes is limited at both extremes—predictable mechanical behaviour and free, conscious-driven behaviour. The first case, the behaviour assumed by standard economic theory, is a simple, linear cause–effect relation, which can be mathematised and thought universally valid. In the latter case, it is a living, complex and dynamic context-dependent response to the changing environmental conditions as perceived by the individual at each moment. This kind of behaviour and response cannot be known in advance or universally defined but springs from every context and specific moment. Thereby, although narrow in their range, these different ways of behaving are radically distinct. The former, reactive behaviour is reducible to external, a priori definable relations (like emotional reactions of depression, sadness, or anger triggered by external events or, in case of ideology-driven behaviour, fundamentalist and orthodox adherence to a set of rules and values). By contrast, the latter, proactive behaviour, is given by each moment according to what the Greeks termed kairological time, the ‘time of opportunities and events. It is the time of right times, the right times for things to happen’ (Gault, 1995, p. 155). We may, thus, explore this idea a little bit further. By differentiating kairological from chronological, externally given clock-time, Richard Gault (1995, p. 155) provides us with an example that shows this difference in a nutshell. It does, as well, show the difference between these two kinds of behaviours: ‘If we feel a hunger coming and consequently announce, “It is time for lunch”, we refer to a kairological time. By contrast if we declare, as we more commonly do, “It is one O’clock, lunchtime”, we are responding to an imperative of chronological time: the clock determines the activity’. Both ask for a narrowly defined answer. But while one is externally given and definable, the other emerges from the inner autopoietic (re)organisation dynamics of the individual and springs forth from life’s creative flow, modelling itself according to the dialogue and the dialectical coupling of these two dimensions: the inner need and the external conditions to attend for it. The better and more profoundly we perceive our internal needs and our life’s potentialities wanting to manifest, and the more profoundly we understand the needs and purpose of those elements and beings we relate to empathically, the more our behaviour can be life-enriching. Balancing both, in synergic ways, our different inner needs and, externally, the satisfaction of our own needs and the needs of those who, together with us, constitute the larger whole we are but a part of. In this case, behaviour is born at every moment out of deep presence and inner alignment. It can clearly be understood in its terms a posteriori, whence we empathically may realise

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the needs of the subject that have manifested and the effects of individual behaviour on the larger whole. But it is not predictable in advance. As Gault (1995, p. 156) noted, ‘today forecasting and planning are so common that it is difficult to appreciate their relative novelty. In kairological time planning is inconceivable. Those dwelling in kairological time cannot determine in advance the right time to do this or that. They await the unknown future and prepare to respond to it. Response is vital, since the kairological future delivers, not a pre-determined, fully formed present, but opportunities and challenges. It is the human response to the possibilities which emerge from the future that actually yield the present’. This response to the needs of the moment is meant by being responsible: acting following the dharma. In oikonomic terms, it means managing our home according to its logos: an oikonomos in accordance with the oiko-logos, as we saw in our introductory chapter. From this perspective, we can better understand Thomas Merton’s understanding of Gandhi’s approach. As he stated in his introduction to Gandhi’s selected texts on non-violence, ‘in Gandhi’s mind, non-violence was not simply a political tactic which was supremely useful and efficacious in liberating his people from foreign rule (. . .). On the contrary, the spirit of non-violence sprang from an inner realization of spiritual unity in himself. The whole Gandhian concept of non-violent action and satyagraha is incomprehensible if it is thought to be a means of achieving unity rather than as the fruit of inner unity already achieved’ (Merton, 2007, p. 10). By developing our consciousness, the truth within ourselves, we know how to behave in every situation. Nonviolence, thus, is not to be seen as instrumental to our goals, to some kind of external belief system or political ideology. It is the result of our choices following our inner consciousness, our inner truth. Thus, more than practising and preaching non-violence, Gandhi followed satyagraha, ‘holding on to truth’ or ‘adherence/love to truth’, which was his highest aspiration. His non-violent behaviour was the result of satyagraha, not the result of political calculations. As he stated, ‘I claim to be a votary of truth from Childhood. It was the most natural thing to me. My prayerful search gave me the revealing maxim “Truth is God” instead of the usual one, “God is Truth”. That maxim enables me to see God face to face as it were. I feel Him pervade every fibre of my being’ (Merton, 2007, p. 40). As preached by Gandhi, non-violence is a deeply felt inner consciousness that has to be experienced internally by each individual and not just a theory or political ideology that can be mechanically adopted strategically by others. The same, of course, applies to other fields of behaviour like oikonomics: we behave in ecological sound ways not because of a theory or ideology, but out of our understanding and consciousness that human’s oikonomy is embedded and tributary of Nature’s oikonomy. It depends on it. The same happens whence applying the ‘fundamental social law’: we give each one according to his needs and provide according to our capacity not out of moral duty, but out of the consciousness that this is the right thing to do. As we saw in Goethe’s phenomenological, living approach to reality, understanding results from the dialogue and understanding between our inner and our outer kairological reality. It is not just an external ‘objective’ knowledge applied to different contexts and realities. Consciousness and behaviour, like reality itself, has to be living and dynamic, continuously being re-enacted. Thus, as Merton

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(2007, p. 10) continues, ‘indeed this is the explanation for Gandhi’s apparent failure (which became evident to him at the end of his own life). He saw that his followers had not reached the inner unity that he had realized in himself, and that their satyagraha was to a great extent a pretense, since they believed it to be a means to achieve unity and freedom, while he saw that it must necessarily be the fruit of inner freedom. The first thing of all and the most important of all was the inner unity, the overcoming and healing of inner division, the consequent spiritual and personal freedom, of which national autonomy and liberty would only be consequence’. Gandhi is, as well, a clear example of the immediacy and intensity of this kind of consciousness and understanding and the vital, enduring motivational, behavioural energy associated with it, different from anger and aggression’s bright but short flame. Gandhi’s was both a vigorous and relentless, undeterred activism. At the same time, it was serene and persistent. It represented not just an outburst of hatred fuelled by resentment, but an ongoing manifestation of his inner consciousness and way of being. Another example of the nature of this kind of motivational energy can be found in Julia Butterfly, who, as an activist, camped for more than 2 years on top of a giant red pine, which she called Luna, in her attempt to stop commercial logging practices against these ancient trees. Having resisted through winter’s snowstorms and aggressive harassment practices by the loggers on top of the massive tree on her small platform, she stated: ‘I believe in prayer, but ultimately the biggest power in prayer for me comes from the willingness to accept the answer (. . .). I had no clue what I would do, but I knew that I was meant to do something. Even though I didn’t realize that I was about to launch a two-year struggle, a deep and compelling sense told me that I had to walk the path I’d chosen—or rather, the path that seemed to have chosen me. There was a calling, and I would not be at peace until I fulfilled it’ (Hill, 2000, pp. 10–11). As she stated in an interview, ‘I tell people the only thing extraordinary means is “extra-ordinary”. Extraordinary people are ordinary people who come up against something that calls out their greatness. And they choose to say yes to that calling, even if they do not know where it is going to lead them or how it is going to end. But they cannot choose to walk away. I call it the “choiceless” choice. We could choose to not say anything. We could choose to walk away. But to do that would kill off a piece of ourselves. So even though we could say “no” we have to say “yes”’.7 Julia’s, as Gandhi’s, or Mandela’s in his cell, was foremost an internal calling, a progressive gaining of consciousness and inner freedom resulting from her very practice, from which her non-violent resistance emerged. A behaviour not derived from an adherence to an analytical theory and calculus learned from the past, nor an instrumental projection into the future. Her behaviour resulted from her inner presence and consciousness of the kairological requirements and openings of the

7 Available 24/09/17 at https://www.peakprosperity.com/podcast/85294/julia-butterfly-hill-livingmeaning

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present. ‘This, then, is the second crucially important principle that we discover in Gandhi. Contrary to what has been thought in recent centuries in the West, the spiritual interior life is not an exclusively private affair. (In reality, the deepest and most authentic Western traditions are at one with those of the East on this point.) The spiritual life of one person is simply the life of all manifesting itself in him. While it is very necessary to emphasize the truth that as the person deepens his own thought in silence he enters into a deeper understanding and communion with the spirit of his entire people (or of his Church), it is also important to remember that as he becomes engaged in the crucial struggles of his people in seeking justice and truth together with his brother, he tends to liberate the truth in himself by seeking true liberty for all. Thus, Plato taught “to philosophise and concern oneself with politics is one and the same thing, and to wrestle with the sophist means at the same time to defend the city against tyranny”. So true was this, that Socrates would not turn his back on the equivocation of his fellow citizens and their betrayal of truth, even when their hatred of reason meant his own death’ (Merton, 2007, p. 11, quoting Koyré, 1945, p. 108). Theory and praxis are not separate realms, nor are the ‘inner’ realm of individual consciousness and understanding and the ‘outer’ reality or environment in which we are supposed to live. These are interdependent, living, and changing dimensions. Our praxis and individual life stories inform our ways of seeing and understanding. Conversely, our praxis and unique life stories inform how we perceive and interpret ourselves and the world. As we saw, theoria means seeing and seeing is not a passive perception but an active doing by the seer. And once we see clearly, we know what to do, and hardly anything will be able to stop us. Just as when Julia Butterfly understood the nature of the call she had received. Although narrowly limited in their range, these two behavioural polarities—one mechanical and predictable, the other fluid and connected to the kairological movements of being and consciousness—open an entire range of behavioural responses to reality. Thus, from all that was said, we may observe more behavioural plasticity emerging from and through evolution—with the appearance of life, moving from the strict and universal natural laws to the instinctive behaviour of animals and the phototropic behaviour of plants. Further, we have the blind adherence to past theories and changing ideologies; passing through the whole range of emotiondriven responses, up to the commitment to the dharma where action flows from the deep understanding of both our inner fundamental needs and self, and the needs of the others with whom we are inexorably connected and (co)evolving symbiotic partners. Thus, summarising these discussions, we may see how, at an instinctive level, the path between incoming stimuli and the behavioural response of the organism follows narrow, predetermined paths. One step before, we are indeed in the domain of the unvarying natural laws found in the realm of physics and chemistry. Oxygen binding to hydrogen always in the same way if, at the same pressure and temperature conditions, massive bodies move one towards the other inexorably attracted by gravity. Oxygen and hydrogen ‘perceive each other’ chemically, and they behave accordingly, as do bodies responding to the gravitational push. It becomes more

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complex but still follows causal paths in cases like Synechocystis or, when tapped with a small rubber hammer by the doctor, our knee stretches involuntarily as a reflex movement. This instinctive and preconditioned behaviour is central to keeping us alive. It regulates the bulk of our metabolic processes and many rapid reflex responses, particularly in extreme situations where little time for processing the information and reflecting is available. This gives it both its strength and weakness. Being unconscious and part of our inherited way of being, it cannot adapt to changing situations. Being the result of inner unconscious biochemical processes, it may evolve from one generation to the next. But, as an automatic response, it is not open to individual learning and adaptation, leading individuals to repeat similar response patterns during their lives. Just as the same plant always responds in the same way to incoming light. This kind of behaviour can be seen in the example given by Maturana and Varela (1987, p. 125) of a frog whose eye has been carefully rotated by 180 degrees as a tadpole and then left to develop normally. Once grown, ‘we cover its rotated eye and show it a worm. The tongue goes out, and we see that it makes a perfect hit. We repeat the experiment, but this time cover the normal eye. In this case we see that the frog shoots out its tongue with a deviation of exactly 180 degrees’. Here, as for the unicellular beings and plants, in the case of the frog, there seems to be no plasticity, and a strong causal relation may be assumed: given a directional light source, the direction of the growth of a plant can be predicted, as can the direction in which the frog’s tongue is expected to be thrown out once an insect moves on a given angle to his eyes. Seen from the outside, once the relations between different organisms or those organisms with given elements of their surroundings become recurrent, communicational domains open up and can be observed—a connection whereby one element’s behaviour responds to the other’s behaviour. Thus, living beings ‘respond’ to their environment, and a causal link may be assumed. Sun’s movement in the sky is answered by a circadian rhythmical behaviour of living beings; the change of seasons by migrations of animals, sprouting, flourishing, and withering of plants. But each living being has its specific way of perceiving and answering its environment, has its inner ‘circadian clock’. Newtonian objects respond to outside forces in linear and robust ways according to simple laws of cause and effect. Chemical elements bind together according to their specific properties and constantly react in the same way under the same environmental conditions. Thus, even without knowing the ‘why’ or even the ‘how’, well-established ‘chemical laws’ and future outcomes may be predicted from pure empirical observation and repetition. New molecules and chemical substances present emergent properties related to the whole, which hardly can be predicted a priori. But, once observed, they can be expected to repeat in the same way. A water molecule presents properties that can be found neither in hydrogen nor in oxygen, taken separately. Nor can they be linearly inferred from their characteristics taken in isolation. They are a property of the whole. But once observed, we may predict with great confidence what will happen if we mix oxygen and hydrogen at normal conditions now and in future. We can study the properties of the resulting water molecules and their effects on other elements of

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the environment, thus establishing a theory of what happens whence these two elements are brought into a reaction. Once we enter the biological domain, a new set of potential structural couplings of different factors and new emergent properties appear. New plasticity and openness can be observed far beyond the universal and unchanging causality observed in the physical and chemical domain: living beings respond differently to external effects, according to their own inner, changing, and evolving autopoietic processes. But, not all potential responses allow the organism to endure and strive in a given environment. Thus, natural selection, by choosing those who successfully manage to maintain the organism’s identity in the face of environmental demands—in what Maturana and Varela termed their ‘structural coupling’ to their environment in the domain of their interactions—selects successful adaptions while disregarding those who fail to adapt. Thus, evolution is an adaptive learning process whereby new forms and wholes emerge. By transmitting their structure to their offspring, they create a lineage along bifurcative paths, branching into separate evolutionary paths from a common ancestor. These evolutionary paths can be described retrospectively, but no universal predictive law can be established in advance. As for those crucial decisions, we take directing our lives one way or another. Looking back, we may understand their effect and how they made us become what we became. But we could not know precisely what would happen at the moment we took them. As for all historical processes, these unique and creative ways of organising matter, energy, and information can be observed and understood but not planned or deduced from existing ones according to clearly defined causality laws. While atoms and molecules in given environmental conditions always bind in the same way, life forms relate and respond to given situations in a myriad of changing and evolving ways. Learning, thus, is a phylogenetic process modulated by natural selection. It is a dance between individuals and their environment, a dialogue between living beings and their surroundings. Through this dance, one transforms and is being changed while attempting to follow the tune and hold the rhythm. Keeping that which Maturana and Varela termed their ‘structural coupling’. Here, as Lovelock (1995, p. 239) put it, concluding his second book, ‘when the activity of an organism favors the environment as well as the organism itself, then its spread will be assisted; eventually the organism and the environmental change associated with it will become global in extent. The reverse is also true, and any species that adversely affects the environment is doomed; but life goes on’. Thereby, from organisms in which, as we saw, symbiotic processes allow individuals and their composing elements to prosper, ecosystems, and even the biosphere as a whole, co-evolutionary processes emerge. Homeostatic balances between the parts endure, while those that do not create stable relations degenerate and eventually collapse. This necessary feedback between the species’ behaviour and their environment requires species to adapt to the environment they are co(re)producing and altering. It requires the different elements of a living whole to dance to the same tune: organs in accordance with each other sustaining the organism, species supporting the balances of an ecosystem. Thus, once we look at the whole in its movement, we perceive that evolution and natural selection are not just a matter of the survival of the fittest but of

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achieving a co-evolutionary balance between the parts and the whole. There is no survival of the best in the long term if, to survive, the individual species is overexploiting its environment and attending its own needs at the expense of those of the other co-evolutionary partners participating in the continuous regeneration of the whole. Indeed, being too fit and able to impose unrestrained needs at the expense of others is the road to disaster and the collapse of the whole. Precisely what is happening now, where homo sapiens is thriving and expanding as no other species has done before and, by doing so, putting our future at risk. It is not a matter of a linear ‘survival of the fittest’, but of the emergence of successful structural coupling strategies between the part and the larger whole it belongs to. As Theodore Roszak (1992, p. 68) argued, referring to our self-reflective potential, ‘what (...) is the measure of sickness for society as a whole? While many criteria might be nominated, there is surely one that ranks above all others: the species that destroys its own habitat in pursuit of false values, in willful ignorance of what it does is “mad” if the word means anything’. It is undoubtedly a species that has chosen a dead branch of the evolutionary tree. As we will come back in the next chapter, environmental history shows how societies and civilisations that failed to establish mutually enhancing, symbiotic relations with their natural environment finally declined, collapsed, or were supplanted by others. History, thus, is a learning process whereby some structural, mutually enhancing human–nature relationships thrive and others do not. Conversely, understanding history, both the natural history of evolution and our history and evolution as a species, is how we may learn from the past and better understand our current development practices and behaviours. It is also a way to enhance our self-reflective consciousness and know our dharma, know the right thing to do, the right oikonomy to follow to ‘live and live well’. Natural selection and the persistence of local structural couplings are based ultimately on preserving mutual benefit relations. Those behaviours that best respond to the environmental requirements, preserving, and enhancing the structural coupling of the individual and species to their environment without impairing it or, even better, those who change their environment in ways that improve their own ‘art of living and living well’ by strengthening both the resilience of the ecosystem as a whole and its health, are those who best will survive in the long run. Thereby, through evolution and natural selections, living beings learn to speak the language of their environment and the language of each other. Just as our heart and circulatory system known to respond to the needs of all other organs of our body or within a cell, its different parts work together to keep the cell alive. Thus, we may observe a process of growing consciousness once organisms learn to better ‘understand’ their environment and give the behavioural responses that maintain and enhance the structural coupling between both. From that perspective, we can see that individual behaviour, and thus the consciousness on which behaviour is based must be empathic and mutually supporting to have long-term perspectives. Self-centred, short-term gains by individuals, at the expense of the other co-evolving elements of its environment, have no evolutionary future both for the individual nor the species or group it pertains to. Of course, this is

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a lesson we should learn once it applies to the social and oikonomic world too: in the short run, selfish individuals or groups may gain by over-exploiting their environment or their fellow humans. But destabilizing their environment or generating social imbalances and polarization impair the long-term prospects and hopes of all. Natural selection favours those individuals able to maintain their identity by giving the correct behavioural answers without impairing the survival of their fellow (co)evolving beings and without destroying or disrupting the organisation of their environment in a way that they can no longer adapt to. Thus, a balance is established between the frog able to feed on the flies, which, in their turn, can escape the frog’s tongue and learn to better survive in their environment. A co-evolutionary parallel pattern whereby frogs feed on flies and the fittest flies learn to reproduce and thrive before being eaten by the frogs. Frogs represent a selective pressure that improves and amplifies the flies’ behavioural responses in the long term using their predatory behaviour. So do the flies increasing skills and strategies to avoid being eaten by the frogs, putting selective pressure favouring those frogs who ‘learn’ to be more skilful hunters over those who do not. Moreover, if both contribute to their shared environment through their behaviour, contributing to its overall dynamic balance and the internal (re)cycling of information, energy and matter, enhancing its resilience, both species may thrive. In the long term, a (co)evolutionary balance between predator and prey is established: one nourishing the evolutionary learning process of the other. Once the survival of the individual depends on the successful maintenance of this structural coupling with its environment over time, interdependence and symbiotic relations are established. In this process, as summarized by Maturana and Varela (1987, p.117), there is no predetermined outcome nor linear deterministic certainty, but a complex, everchanging dance and dialectic between the parts and the whole. ‘Evolution is a natural drift, a product of the conservation of autopoiesis and adaptation. (. . .) There is no need for an outside guiding force to generate diversity and complementarity between organism and environment. Nor is that guiding force needed to explain the directionality of the variation in a lineage, nor is it the case that some specific quality of living beings is being optimized. Evolution is somewhat like a sculptor with wanderlust: he goes through the world collecting a thread here, a hunk of tin there, a piece of wood here, and he combine them in a way that their structure and circumstances allow, with no reason other than that he is able to combine them. And so, as he wanders about, intricate forms are being produced (. . .). Thus, too, with no law other than the conservation of an identity and the capacity to reproduce, we have all emerged. It is what interconnects us to all things in what is fundamental to us: to the five-petal rose, to the shrimp in the bay, or the executive in New York City’. As said by the poet Antonio Machado in his Singings, Walker, your treads are the path and nothing more; walker, there is no path, the path is made when walking.

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When walking the path is made and when looking back you see the path that never has to be trodden again. Walker, there is no path, Only wakes in the sea...

We could even go one step further, not that poetically, to affirm that not just the path, but the walker himself is being, autopoietically, (co)regenerated by the very act of wandering. In this process, chance and necessity, chaos and order are intimately coupled. Necessary polarities, negating and defining each other. They are sides of the same coin: life/death, symbiosis/competition, evolution/extinction. An adaptive learning process whereby organisms and their behaviour evolve with time, irreversibly changing and giving birth to new life forms, consciousness, and freedoms: new response-abilities. Those preys able to successfully escape being decimated by predators, thus transmitting their acquired characteristics to their offspring; those predators not over-exploiting their environment, participating in the co(re)productive autopoietic dynamic of their very home, their oikos, surviving in the long term. From the first chemical autocatalytic, self-organised processes, some became generalised and endured. Just as Jupiter’s atmospheric vortexes existed for centuries or millennia, up to autopoietic life processes able to self(re)produce their identity through their offspring, giving birth to a stable succession as living species. Some manage ‘the art of living and living well’ for more extended periods, other branches of evolution eventually ending up in dead-ends and becoming extinct. Along these paths, more complex behaviour patterns and more behaviour plasticity emerged. Through the existence of a nervous system, coupling sensory and motor cells and organs, and genetically transmitting these neuronal couplings to their offspring, animals’ instinctive behaviour increased the plasticity of life and the possibility of a species-centred learning process. A succession of inherited behaviour patterns, open to change and evolution according to changing environmental conditions and thus changing selective pressures, is created through reproduction. These behaviours may be instinctive due to automatic more or less rigid inner responses to incoming perceptions and elements. But, going one step further, they may trigger feelings and emotions, leading to a further degree of complexity and behavioural plasticity in some higher animal species once another filter between perception and behaviour is introduced. Instinctive behaviour is relatively unchanging for the lifespan of individuals, constantly reacting in the same automatic way to given realities. Notwithstanding, it may change and evolve from one generation to the other due to the species’ evolution. Alternatively, feelings and emotions resulting from the existential experience of the individual may change during the individual’s lifespan. It allows for a cumulative individual behavioural adaptive learning process once the individual responds to his inner feelings and emotions, triggered by specific external conditions and internal needs. Here too, those behavioural patterns that enable successful coupling of the individuals to their environment lead to mutually

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supportive, progressive co-evolutionary processes, while those who do not lead to regressive and destructive cycles. Once emotions are intimately related to our long-term memory, they become an essential individual growth and learning instrument. But they, too, risk becoming fixed and rigid. From each individual’s life experience, while trying to avoid pain and fulfil its needs, specific behavioural patterns and strategies associated with certain feelings develop, while others are avoided. Thus, a unique, individual emotion-response pattern is established. Some species will display the same emotional response pattern acquired in their early life for the rest of their lives. Conversely, some perceived situations will lead us to feel in particular ways, experiencing emotional patterns developed in the past, thus triggering an automated behavioural response. For us humans, around 95% of our behaviour is subconscious. Most of it has been acquired and learned from our past experiences and how we lived them. Being subconscious, we may experience a given emotion without being conscious of the associated need asking to be satisfied or our subconscious assumptions and representations. Indeed, our behaviour may be reflecting past experiences and not the actual, present moment. At the same time, it is that which allows us to, for instance, let a key on the desk, cook, or drive a car while our conscious thoughts are elsewhere. Or manoeuvre a ball with our feeds while thinking to whom we shall pass the ball while playing football. Nevertheless, by self-reflectively becoming conscious of our feelings and thoughts, we may act differently by increasing our presence and awareness, thus changing our behaviour patterns. Thus, processing new experiences and perceiving reality in new ways may change our associated feelings and, therefore, our behaviour. Conversely, if failing to become aware of them, individuals may repeatedly repeat emotional patterns learned in their infancy without further adapting to changing conditions and realities. Our conscious mind and self-reflective intelligence allow us to develop our emotional intelligence and change our behaviour once we revisit and review our perceptions and needs. Thus, while a frog may continuously miss his target following his instinctive, inherited behaviour pattern, once his eye position has been changed, a basketball player may improve his pitch driven by his felt emotions: changing it when failing to basket the ball and feeling disappointed, repeating his tactic and ways of throwing whence experiencing joy and enthusiasm from successful attempts. In the same way, a dog may learn to convince his human partner to take him for a walk in the park by wagging its tail at the door and barking if this strategy brought him the desired results and pleasurable feelings in the past. But, as for instinctive behaviour, these learned emotion-driven behaviours may become fixed and predictable. Adults may try to satisfy their needs by crying, assuming a victim’s behaviour or, conversely, childish, aggressive behaviour if they have learned to attend to their needs this way in the past and continue to project into external factors their frustrations and expectations. Or they may grow up and review their behaviour and enlarge their consciousness assuming the responsibility for their behaviour and feelings, looking to reality with new eyes, thus, taking higher behaviour plasticity and freedom.

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In any case, through our emotions and feelings, a higher degree of behavioural plasticity and learning practice associated not with the species but with the individual is established. Here too, successful emotion-response patterns, which enhance both the individual and his environmental dynamics, improving stability and the dynamic maintenance of given communicational (co)evolutionary dynamics, will persist in the long run. At the same time, those who do not may perish, whether by the incapacity of the organism to satisfy its vital needs, whether to the changes brought to the environmental dynamics in a way that the structural coupling of the individual to this new environment is no longer possible. Thereby, through feeling what happens, as Antonio Damasio (2000) put it, organisms may learn to adapt to different and changing conditions while choosing those strategies leading to positive feelings and dropping those which lead to negative ones. Thereby, individuals may fine-tune their adaptation process and enhance their survival by behaving in ways that ensure their structural coupling to their environment, preserving their inner order and identity and environmental stability. As an example, we may think of couple dynamics. Individuals in a couple may learn from their failures associated with negative feelings, changing their behaviour and responses to each other according to the changing moments, requirements, and moods of their relationship. It is fundamental to adapt to different circumstances once they move from an initial friendship and passion towards taking care of children or their respective careers while living under the same roof. Thereby, learning to respond to each other’s needs and requirements may increase their mutual understanding and relationship while navigating together through life. Conversely, the inability to do so may subsequently end up in a failed marriage. Here too, the pressure of natural selection acts as a force towards higher consciousness and emphatic understanding between the couple, once mutually beneficial behaviours enhance the long-term perspectives of both of them. Contrary, individual behaviour, which ends up favouring one side at the expense of the other, may end up impairing both. The price to pay for this higher plasticity and adaptive learning potential is a slower, still unproven mediated behaviour. While inherited instinctive behaviour has been selected by evolution, emotionally driven changes in behaviour have first to prove themselves and possibly require further modifications and adaptations. A hatching sea turtle may rapidly and automatically run with hundreds of others to the sea, while newborn humans may take years to learn how to walk and then cross the street. Not only are emotions related to different ways of processing the incoming information and environmental stimuli received by each species and each individual’s differing senses, but the associated emotional response is also open to each individual’s way of experiencing and living these emotions according to differing identities, self-images, and cultural contexts. Moreover, our behaviour being mediated by our feelings, it responds much slower to our perceptions. Notwithstanding, although faster at the individual level, instinct behaviour changes only very slowly from one generation to another, being unchanging during the lifespan of each individual. Thus, it may prove beneficial in evolutionary terms in

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stable environmental conditions, providing for proven and rapid behaviour responses, but less so in changing conditions and long reproductive periods of the species, which slows the evolutionary selective learning process. Turtles will never learn how to cross a busy street and fail to adapt to rapidly changing conditions in their habitats. They may struggle to survive once their traditional nesting sites are altered by human occupiers, as will the hatchling whose instinctive behaviour is duped by artificial light. Therefore, species may rely on different behavioural mechanisms, whether fast and stable or changing and adaptive responses are required. In a famous experiment, Hitoshi Sakano and his team showed that smell might follow two distinctive circuits along the path from nose to brain: one for innate fear, another for the learned kind. Moreover, they observed that the same scent could activate both circuits. Thus, ‘when a scent—noxious or pleasant—hits the nose of a mouse or any mammal, it activates a combination of olfactory neurons. Mice boast about a thousand types of these neurons, which reach from nose to the brain. The combination of cells activated, like the notes in a piano chord, determine the scent experienced by the animal. The olfactory neurons are located in a special structure in the nasal cavity called the olfactory epithelium, which has two major regions: dorsal and ventral. The olfactory neurons in each region differ at the molecular level, but until now, no one had much idea how the regions differed in their wiring’ (Callaway, 2007). To study it, the researchers engineered a strain of mice that had no olfactory neurons in their dorsal epithelium, thus making them rely only upon the ventral circuit to transmit olfactory perception to their brains. They then tested the mice for their response to a handful of smells, good and bad. Typically, it had been observed, ‘mice were drawn to smells of peanut butter and mouse urine; but couldn’t flee fast enough from the scents of rotting food, fox glands, and the urine of snow leopards. But mice without these neurons showed less interest in the sweet smells and little aversion to spine-tingling ones, the team report in Nature. The mice could still detect these smells, the researchers found, and could learn to hate the odours if researchers made the mice sick while delivering the ‘nasty’ smells’ (Callaway, 2007). The team concluded that the dorsal olfactory neurons transmit innate fear responses to the brain, whereas the ventral neurons convey learned aversion. ‘The team could also see a difference in the brain. In normal mice, a scent secreted by a fox’s anal gland, called trimethyl-thiazoline, stimulates the brain to make adrenocorticotrophic hormone, a sign of stress. The fearless mutants showed no such stimulation in response to the scent’ (Callaway, 2007). Instead of preparing for escape, they just went on exploring their environment. Another thing this study showed is that innate and learned behaviour are not mutually exclusive, but overlapping processes once a single scent may activate both circuits. According to each individual’s ontogeny and phylogenetic heritage, along with each particular context and intensity of perception, one or other circuits may take the upper hand. In some species and some individuals in certain circumstances, certain smells will trigger innate responses, while others may trigger learned behavioural responses. The brain simultaneously processes a series of information

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following different circuits and paths until one of the ongoing neuronal activities overtakes the process and starts the signals leading to a behavioural response. While a particular ‘odour-tune’ is transmitted to the brain, ‘visual-’, ‘auditory-’, and ‘touchtunes’ are being sent as well. Simultaneously, at least in humans, the autonomous, inner dynamics of consciousness confers meaning on reality, although sometimes subconsciously, leading the conscious self to elaborate narratives that may make sense of it once the behaviour has happened. Thus, as an example much explored by perfume producers, a series of pheromones and scents may provoke instinctive attraction. However, the individual may rationalize this attraction through a narrative highlighting some visible or consciously perceptible traits of the other person instead. We may even convince ourselves of acting out of perfectly rational motives while being unaware of the complex and unconscious biochemical dynamics affecting our behaviour and perception from within. Therefore, our behaviour emerges from a complex dynamic of inherited instinctive cognitive and behavioural patterns, along with inner feelings which are combined, diverge, amplify or dampen each other, depending on the dialogue between the incoming sense perceptions and the internal cognitive processes and movements of consciousness. In his approach to science, Goethe argued that perceived reality is always the inner image resulting from this interplay between our sense’s perceptions and our mental processes and our changing inner moods and feelings. The image in our inner consciousness may produce nerve signals that travel out, triggering internal metabolic processes and observable behaviour changes. For example, perceiving danger or an emergency may lead to fear, anger, or stress, resulting in a series of inner changes in our blood pressure and circulation, our hormones and alertness, preparing us to run, fight, or else. But here, as elsewhere, the critical point is not whether the danger is real or even if it was just a fantasy or having mistakenly taken passing shadow for a threat. It is the perception of a danger that makes it real. The behavioural responses of the organism are always the emergent property of this complex inner symphony, of which just a minor part and some of the composing instruments were here briefly explained. It depends on how the incoming perception is internally processed, triggering internal autopoietic processes to re-establish inner balances according to each one’s ontogenetic and phylogenetic past experiences and learnings. Here, both species and individuals may differ, leading to different behavioural responses to similar incoming stimuli. In the example about the smell, there are many other olfactory receptors and genes related to it—more than 1000 genes in the mammalian genome, approximately 3% of the total. It is the highest proportion for any sense. However, not all of these potential olfactory receptor genes are expressed and functional. According to an analysis of data derived from the human genome project, humans have just short of 400 active genes coding for olfactory receptors and the remaining approximately 600 candidates are pseudogenes. Mice, in contrast, have a total of 1035 protein-coding olfactory receptor genes. A large number of different olfactory receptors provide ways to discriminate between as many odours as possible. Each olfactory receptor is broadly tuned to activate similar scent structures. Thereby, any specific odour molecule will activate different olfactory

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receptors, depending on its physicochemical properties (to which each particular odorant receptor is sensitive). From the combination of the different activated ones, like when playing several notes on a piano keyboard, the final particular ‘smell-tune’ experienced by the animal emerges. Some will be perceived as pleasant, others as not. Once the odorant has bound to the olfactory receptor, the receptor undergoes structural changes. The process is translated into a neuronal signal that carries the information to the brain through a series of inner physicochemical processes. And here, differently wired brains may lead to different emerging behavioural responses. It becomes even more complex in the social domain. As Maturana and Varela (1987, pp. 180–181 and p. 193) argued, ‘as in the case of cellular interactions in metacellulars, it is evident that from the standpoint of the internal dynamics of one organism, the other represents a source of perturbations indistinguishable from those that come from the “nonbiotic” environment. It is possible, however, for these interactions between organisms to acquire in the course of their ontogeny a recurrent nature. This will necessarily result in their consequent structural drifts: co-ontogenies with mutual involvement through their reciprocal structural coupling, each one conserving its adaptation and organization. When this happens, the co-drifting organisms give rise to a new phenonomenological domain, which may become particularly complex when there is a nervous system. (. . .) We call social phenomena those phenomena that arise in the spontaneous constitution of third-order couplings, and social systems the third-order unities that are thus constituted. The form embodied by unities of this class varies considerably from insect to ungulates to primates. What is common to them all is that whenever they arise—if only to last for a short time—they generate a particular internal phenomenology, namely one in which the individual ontogenies of all the participating organisms occur fundamentally as part of the network of co-ontogenies that they bring about in constituting third-order unities’. Each individual is a constituent in this social domain, (co)reproducing part of the larger social whole and its product simultaneously. These social structures may be based on innate instinctive behaviours, as in the social insects, or primarily on learned behaviour like for humans. But in both cases, the individual identities and even survival is a function of the larger whole which is co(re)produced by the individuals and, at the same time, the precondition for the individual’s existence. As Maturana and Varela (1987, p. 201) defined it, ‘those behavioral patterns which have been acquired ontogenically in the communicative dynamics of a social environment and which have been stable through generations, we shall call cultural behaviors. This name should not be surprising, for it refers to the whole body of ontogenetically acquired communicative interactions that give a certain continuity to the history of a group, beyond the particular history of the participating individuals. Imitation and ongoing intragroup behavioral selection play a key role here, resulting in the coupling of the young and the adults’. We may find a similar definition in Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 89) when he argues that ‘the culture concept to which I adhere has neither multiple referents nor, so far as I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it denotes a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in

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symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life’. Although Geertz refers to human culture (mediated, as we will see, by language and symbols), it also appears as an emergent social phenomenon in other species. In all of them, individuals’ behaviour and evolution happen at the collective species level due to the mutual recurrent interactions among different individuals. Within this larger sociocultural domain, individuals behave and need to maintain their inner identities and develop their ‘art of living and living well’ collectively. Thus, once this larger whole exists, it becomes the very precondition for the individual’s existence. It is what makes us humans and, for the ants, allows them to survive as part of a larger ant colony. As for the individually learned behaviour, culture-based symbols offer a higher degree of plasticity than the genetically encoded pattern. Unlike our instincts and unconscious behaviour and responses, cultural values and beliefs are open to learning and unlearning. They can be changed and transformed according to the collective dynamics and relations of the larger group. While, on the one hand, culture allows for a learned behaviour to be passed on to the larger group and across generations, this same behaviour, once applied to different realities, both in time (among generations) and in space (to other groups), may result in unadapted behaviour and thus imbalances. Therefore, further adaptive learning processes are required or, said otherwise, cultural change, fine-tuning the structural coupling among individuals and each one to its changing environmental conditions. Notwithstanding, while instinct-based social insects collectively behave according to patterns within a relatively limited range of variability—thus, having difficulties adapting to changing environmental conditions—human cultures may adopt a large spectrum of possibilities in their behaviours. But in both cases, those individuals, social groups, or species that stick to collective social behaviour that does not give the appropriate answers to their environment’s changing and specific demands may not sustain their structural coupling to this environment. As will those cultures whose behaviours disrupt or destroy the social and broader environment on which the individuals and societies depend.

References Callaway, E. (2007). Fear no smell—Researchers make mice unafraid of the scent of danger. Nature. Published online 7 November 2007. https://doi.org/10.1038/news.2007.224. http:// www.nature.com/news/2007/071107/full/news.2007.224.html. Chen, J., Blume, H.-P., & Beyer, L. (1999, October). Weathering of rocks induced by lichen colonization—A review. Catena—An Interdisciplinary Journal of Soil Science, 39(2000), 121–146. Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens—Body, emotion and the making of consciousness. Vintage. Gadd, G. M. (2010, March). Metals, minerals and microbes: Geomicrobiology and bioremediation. Microbiology, 156(Pt 3), 609–643.

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Gault, R. (1995, May). In and out of time. Environmental Values, 4, 2149–2166. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures—Selected essays. Basic Books. Gilbert, S. F., Sapp, J., & Tauber, A. I. (2012, December). A symbiotic view of life: We have never been individuals. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 87(4), 325–341. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Harper and Row. Hill, J. B. (2000). The legacy of Luna. Harper Collins. Jones, C. G., & Shachak, M. (1990, August 30). Fertilization of the desert soil by rock-eating snails. Nature, 346, 839–841. Koyré, A. (1945). Discovering Plato. Columbia University Press. Leopold, A. (1968). A Sand County Almanac—and sketches here and there. Oxford University Press. Lovelock, J. (1995). The ages of Gaia—A biography of our living earth (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Shambhala. Merton, T. (Ed.). (2007). Gandhi on non-violence. New Directions. Rosenberg, M. B. (2015). Nonviolent communication: A language of life (3rd ed.). Poddle Dancer Press. Roszak, T. (1992). The voice of the earth. Touchstone. Schuergers, N., Lenn, T., Kampmann, R., Meissner, M. V., Esteves, T., Temerinac-Ott, M., Korvink, J. G., Lowe, A. R., Mullineaux, C. W., & Wilde, A. (2016). Cyanobacteria use micro-optics to sense light direction. Available on https://elifesciences.org/articles/12620. Sharnoff, S. (2014). Field guide to California lichens. Yale University Press. Speer, B. R., & Waggoner, B. (1997, May). Lichens: Life history & ecology. University of California Museum of Palaeontology. Wohlleben, P. (2017). The hidden life of trees. William Collins.

Internet Only Reference Lichen—Australian National Botanical Garden. (2014, October 10). What is a lichen? https://www. anbg.gov.au/lichen/what-is-lichen.html.

Part IV

Human’s Oikonomy

Chapter 12

Humans as Part of Nature’s Oikonomy

We, humans, are not separate but part of Nature. Nor is our oikonomy separate from Nature, but part and extension of natural processes. All living beings transform the resources found in their environment to attend to their needs, aiming to survive and ‘to live well’. Social animals, as we, do so collectively, basing their oikonomy on a social division of labour. They thrive when individuals contribute according to their capacity to the wellbeing of the whole while being sustained by others to do so. Moreover, as self-reflective beings, we may observe and describe reality, both external and our inner self, from the outside. We may create an external narrative, and, just as a writer describing his characters, we may describe both ourselves and the reality we ‘see’ out there. Thus, becoming conscious of ourselves and our existence. Thereby, we may restrain or direct our behaviour according to these abstract and externalised depictions of reality. Restrain our instinctive and emotion-driven behaviour according to our values, believes, and ideas. Notwithstanding, as part of our self-reflective human nature, we may mistake our depiction of reality, our theories and ideologies, for reality itself. Thus, we may, as it happens in the case of our modern oikonomic practice, act out of false values and perceptions, behaving in dysfunctional ways as a result. As we saw, for all living beings and ecological dynamics, selective pressure favours behaviours that promote a (co)evolutionary coupling of the parts with the whole. Socioecological dynamics in which the mutually enhancing relations among individuals and societies with their environment prevails over competition and mutually negating relations. Thus, natural, and we might say cultural selection leads to cultures’ evolution and learning processes. It leads to new ways whereby information, energy, and matter are processed and transformed in the universe and where understanding and consciousness may evolve. Here too, higher awareness of our place in society and, collectively, in the universe may enhance our survival and our ‘art of living and living well’. Conversely, dancing to the wrong tune may lead to hardship, crisis, and conflicts. Eventually, it leads to collapse. One classic example of this process is the fate of Easter Island, which, being an isolated, self-contained ecosystem, may serve as a fitting parable for our present-day © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_12

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regenerability issues at a global level.1 As for the Earth on the outer rim of the Milky Way, Easter Island is an isolated spot whose human inhabitants relied entirely on their environmental dynamics for their survival while having no eventual escape route once their vital ecological support systems deteriorated. All the same, they managed to establish one of the most complex and sophisticated Polynesian traditional societies, albeit for a relatively short period. As for our present interrelated, institutional, oikonomic, political, social, and ecological crisis, Easter Island became one of the clearest examples of self-inflicted collapse. A clear example of birth, growth, and decay of a socioecological organism. When the Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen, first discovered, from a white man’s perspective, the Island on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722, he first believed it to be deserted. However, once landed, he realised, as quoted by Diamond (2005, p. 81), that they ‘counted as sand the withered grass, hay or scorched and burnt vegetation, because its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular poverty and barrenness’. Moreover, although precariously, the island was inhabited by a small population mainly living in caves and resorting to cannibalism to complement their relatively poor diet. Having navigated for 17 days from the coast of Chile in three large vessels and having seen the native’s small canoes, ‘bad and frail as regards use, for their canoes are put together with manifold planks and light inner timbers’ (Diamond, 2005, p. 81), he wondered how the island could be inhabited at all by those humans living in a harsh environment and possessing such limited technical resources. Even greater was their astonishment when they discovered, scattered and thrown to the ground all over the island, hundreds of giant statues depicting stylised male torsos. Weighing several tonnes each, they pointed to sophisticated technical and cultural ceremonial skills. Quoting his journal again: ‘The stone images at first caused us to be struck with astonishment, because we could not comprehend how it was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images, which were fully 30 feet high and thick in proportion’ (Diamond, 2005, p. 81). But they did. In what became known as the ‘mystery of Easter Island’, all kinds of imaginative explanations were offered to account for the signs of an advanced civilisation on that distant and isolated island. A past culture in such harsh contrast to the ecological and social bareness rediscovered by the European navigators. Thor

We use here the term ‘regenerability’ instead of the more common ‘sustainability’ for a matter of coherence and clarity. Organisms and life processes do not ‘sustain’ themselves and are not ‘sustained’ in a fixed balance, but are in a constant process of regeneration: cells, tissues, organisms, ecosystems, species, and life at large are continuously (re)producing their structures and identities. Moreover, as we argued elsewhere, ‘sustainability’ has become what Uwe Poerksen defined a plastic word. Having lost its denotative power, referring to a too wide range of different (and sometimes mutually exclusive) perspectives and uses, while retaining a strong positive connotation, as an aim worthy to be pursued, the word ‘sustainability’ brings little clarity to our discourse and our understanding. It rather introduces noise and misunderstandings behind an apparently shared common-view. See Poerksen (1995) and Cendra-Garreta and Stahel (2011). 1

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Heyerdahl, a Norwegian explorer and ethnographer, became famous when, in 1947, he navigated more than 8000 km across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands, aiming to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between societies. Later, after an archaeological expedition to the Eastern Island, he claimed that it had been initially colonised by colonisers from Peru who built the statues but were subsequently decimated by invading Polynesians. Erich von Däniken, a Swiss author, directly took it as evidence that ancient mysteries must have resulted from extraterrestrial techniques and colonisation. Notwithstanding, newer comparative anthropological and archaeological research, increasingly sophisticated radiocarbon dating and particularly techniques like the analysis, classification, and dating of buried pollen (palynology), allows us to have a block of much more concrete, although surprising, picture of the rise and fall of the Eastern Island’s civilisation. This new historiography allowed us to get a reasonably clear view of the co-evolutionary history of Eastern islanders and their environment. In this history, no alien travellers but the environment and the transformation of this environment by the first colonisers played a crucial role. It is a story that may bear some vital lessons for the present, showing how indissolubly related are the social dynamics from the environmental ones; and how we need a larger picture to understand our oikonomic development dynamics. As is nowadays established, Easter Island’s settlement by humans is the fruit of Polynesian expansion and colonisation of the Pacific Islands. The first expansion of the Lapita potters eastwards into the Pacific, reaching Fiji, Tonga and Samoa (within a few days sail, one from the other) happened about the twelfth and the tenth century BCE. The more significant gap separating these western islands from the settlement of the eastern pacific islands, including Easter Island, happened only more than one millennia later. Having reached the Marquesas Islands about 300 CE, humans moved in two main directions: northwards to Hawaii and south-eastwards to Easter Island, from the fourth and fifth centuries onwards. With the occupation of New Zealand, around 1200 CE, across a considerable ocean journey of over 3200 km, the settlement of the Pacific habitable islands can be said to have been accomplished by the Polynesian pioneers, having brought human colonisers to all major and habitable Pacific islands. As Clive Ponting (1993, p. 3), an environmental historian, described it, ‘their long voyages were made in double canoes, joined together by a broad central platform to transport and shelter people, plants, animals and food. These were deliberate colonization missions and they represented considerable feats of navigation and seamanship’. Once virgin lands were reached, their living micro-ecosystem brought on their canoes like domesticated animals, crop-seeds, complete human families constituting a small clan, and unwitting passengers such as stowaways rats, microorganisms and wild seeds, they all started to colonise the new environment biologically. Making up what Alfred Crosby (1996), another environmental historian, defined as their portmanteau biota (comprised of microorganisms, diseases, larger animals and plants, all wittingly or unwittingly accompanying the human colonisers), the arrival of these

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new colonisers to the island represented a whole set of new organisms and elements disturbing and transforming the existing co-evolutionary processes and dynamics. In the case of the Easter Islands, on a date still open to dispute but estimated to be somewhere between the fourth and the ninth century, no pigs or dogs (two more of the main Polynesian domesticated animals) arrived. Just chickens and Polynesian rats, who initially, not having other enemies but humans, became a plague and multiplied rapidly, playing an essential role in the ecosystem dynamics. They ended up over-predating land and seabirds’ eggs and tree and palm nut seeds, thus accelerating the environmental breakdown of the island. At a later period, in the absence of sufficient alternative meat sources, they ended up being a vital part of the surviving islander’s diet. Being a relatively cold island due to its latitude (for Polynesian tropical and equatorial standards at least) and dry and windy, most traditional Polynesian crops did not thrive, e.g. coconuts, breadfruit, which would not grow, and taro and yam, which were marginal. Sweet potatoes, which did well, ended up becoming a major staple. Moreover, the absence of permanent rivers carrying nutrients to the sea and the fact that waters were too cold for coral reefs to form made the surrounding waters poor in fish and shellfish, thus not being relevant to the islanders’ diet. As a result, chicken and sweet potatoes became their primary food source instead. Being relatively little labour-intensive, it had the advantage of leaving plenty of time for other activities and allowing islanders to divert their oikonomic efforts towards meeting different needs besides subsistence. Among these needs were the need for identity, participation and, increasingly so at the end of their civilisation, security. The new human settlers brought with them their cultural values, practices and social structures. As with other Polynesian societies, once their population grew and their historical development unfolded, they organised themselves into clans, fragmenting Easter Island into 11 or 12 autonomous territories, comprising a shoreline and, stretching inland, cutting the island into pizza-like pieces. Society was formed of a small elite, usually living in bigger houses, close to their ceremonial sites, near the coast and controlling large plantations. In contrast, commoners worked both for the elites and themselves. Their main ceremonial and gathering places were big stone platforms which played a central role in their social dynamics and identity. Easter Island was unique not only because of the sheer scale of their ceremonial sites, called Ahu but for their famous giant statues, Moai, which were found at many of these Ahus. Although similar figures could be found on other Polynesian Islands, none had the scale nor were produced in such quantities as Easter Island. While the average Moai in Easter Island weighed about 10 tonnes, the tallest ever erected successfully, known as Paro, was nearly 10 m high and weighed 75 tonnes—a slightly shorter but bulkier statue in Ahu Tongariki, weighed 87 tonnes. Each territory had dozens of these Ahus, although most being small and not having any Moai. But many were large, 113 bearing Moais and 25 being particularly large and elaborated. They were made up of a minimum of 300 tonnes of stone up to 9000 tonnes for Ahu Tongariki, the largest of them all. Each territory possessed one to five of these large Ahus, which were used as crematoria, containing thousands of remains on their back-side. This practice was unique to Easter Island among Polynesian

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societies and pointed to the one-time abundance of firewood. But it was as well a practice that contributed to the island’s eventual deforestation. As for the Moai, all were cut from the Rano Raraku quarry, one of the island’s three volcanoes. Moais and Ahus were seen as a sign of prestige and legitimacy for the ruling elites. They constituted as well an element of peaceful competition between the clans. Thus, just as mediaeval European cities would compete for having the biggest and most splendorous cathedral or church, Eastern Islanders dedicated much energy to building even more prominent and magnificent Ahus and Moais. Being so isolated, Eastern islanders did not engage in commerce or social intercourse with other islands, an essential social activity (and often source of prestige) in other Polynesian societies. Thus, their competition mainly was internal and among the clans. The basalt stones found in the Rano Raraku’s crater quarry were perfectly fitted for sculpting, much more so than those found on other Islands. Moreover, all different clans and regions had access to this quarry and used these particular basalts, pointing to a certain degree of unity and collaboration on the island. Thus, both fragmentation and unity, competition and cooperation existed: the clans shared cultural identity, the same rituals and ceremonies, and actively engaged in trade and sharing resources. But they also lived in autonomous and separated social groups, competing with each other for prestige, ascendency and, finally, for the resources, such as wood, which eventually became scarce. As Diamond (2005, pp. 94–95) in his accounts argued, resources on the island were unevenly distributed: ‘Tongariki territory (called Hotu Iti) contained Rano Raraku crater, the island’s source of the best stone for carving statues, and also a source of moss for caulking canoes. (. . .) Vinapu and Hanga Poukura territories controlled the three major quarries of obsidian, the fine-grained volcanic stone used for making sharp tools, while Vinapu and Tongariki had the best basalt for hare paenga (elite housing) slabs. Anakena on the north coast had the two best beaches for launching canoes, while Keki’I, its neighbour, on the same coast, had the third best beach. As a result, artefacts associated with fishing have been found mainly on that coast. But these same north-coast territories have the poorest land for agriculture, the best land being along the south and west coast. Only five of the dozen territories had extensive areas or interior uplands used for rock-garden plantations. Nesting seabirds eventually became virtually confined to a few offshore islets along the south coast, especially in Vinapu territory. Other resources such as timber, coral for making files, red ochre, and paper mulberry trees (the source of bark pounded into tapa cloth) were also unevenly distributed’. These resources were traded and carried throughout all territories, using a network of roads and paths, still visible today, crossing the island linking different regions. These, at their turn, implied that the local clans gave special permits for crossing. Thereby, contrary to other Polynesian Islands where rival clans lived in a permanent state of conflict, the rivalry was translated into a symbolic, ceremonial level on Easter Island. In contrast, at the cultural, oikonomic and even political level, an essential degree of collaboration and integration existed. Moreover, Easter Island’s gentle topography allowed for accessible communication throughout the island.

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Another unique feature was the Pukao, large cylinders made of red scoria, weighing up to 12 tonnes and which, starting at a later date, began to be placed on top of the Moai’s flatheads. They all came from another single site, Puna Pau, in Hanga Pokura territory but were used on the Moais all over the island. Notwithstanding, and this is an essential reminder of how rapid, and unexpected social and ecological collapses may be, half of a total of 887 Moais inventoried never left their production site at the volcano crater of Rano Raraku. Most were not even finished, while others were left scattered along the routes towards their final destination. Thus, they were being produced until the end, when Easter Island’s socioecological collapse made it impossible for them to be carried to their destinations. What is even more striking is that instead of becoming smaller due to increasing difficulties in producing and transporting them, they became more giant and cumbersome. Indeed, one unfinished statue is over 21 m tall, more than three times the average, estimated to weigh 270 tonnes. This all suggests the sudden and complete collapse due to self-reinforcing socio-political and ecological negative dynamics. The harsher the condition and social conflict once resources became scarce, the greater the depletion of the remaining resources for legitimisation and ceremonial purposes seemed to have been. Conversely, the fact that most Ahus were found damaged, many of their stones used to create protective walls and, particularly, large stone houses for their chickens called hare mod of which 1233 remaining are much more conspicuous than their human counterparts, all show how far social warfare and the keeping of food became crucial in the later stages of Easter Island’s development. They also point to open conflict and a civil war that ravaged the island’s society once its social, institutional, and ecological structures broke down. The Moai which were found scattered on the ground, most still unfinished, others having been toppled and damaged, along with evidence of cannibalism, cracked human bones to extract the marrow in late garbage heaps, indicating that it was cannibalism with dietary more than symbolic or ritual foundations, they all tell to the harshness of the downfall. According to oral tradition and later European records, statues began to be toppled once military leaders, called matatoa, had supplanted clan leaders and priests. The previous elite members were probably thrown down by local revolts and rival clans engaged in civil warfare during the collapse of Easter Island’s civilisation. At this time, warriors became the leading class. The destruction looks quite deliberate as many of the statues were toppled forwards onto slabs to ensure they were shattered in the fall. Whatever the case, as late as 1838, there was still mention of erected statues, but by 1868 there were none, pointing to the fact that a long-term, low-intensity conflict was still active, finally brought to an end by the new colonisers. We can observe from this account that Eastern Island initially peaceful and collaborative social relations that allowed to build a thriving society and civilisation mutated into open warfare and hostility once the social, cultural, and ecological ground on which their development relied began to decline and finally collapsed. Moreover, as in many other cases, these conflictive relations accelerated the collapse instead of mitigating or reversing it. The same forces initially establishing the most

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sophisticated and complex Polynesian society and culture—the peaceful competition among clans building their ceremonial Ahu sites—ended up promoting and accelerating their collapse whence this competition accelerated and gave the final blow to the Island’s ecological and social balances. Insisting in these self-reinforcing negative dynamics is even more striking if we consider that it should be self-evident to the islanders that they were heading to a cul-de-sac. As said, Ahus and particularly Moai, progressively got bigger until the socioecological collapse of Eastern Island. Given the increasing human, technological, and particularly ecological limitations, these statues could hardly have been transported and erected by the Easter Islanders in a time of warfare and hardship. Probably, not even at the heights of their civilisation and population. But, on all evidence, the elites, unable to find another source for legitimacy and maybe to hope for supernatural support by erecting those mammoth statues, kept on trying, even if against ever greater odds. Nevertheless, by diverting the remaining scarce human and natural resources to propping up the social power structures, they just accelerated their collapse. The building, transport, and erecting of these Ahus and Moais represented not just an extraordinary human feat, given the lack of any kind of pack animal, cranes, or other kinds of machines, but also an incredible environmental strain. Firstly, the island’s small population, which may have ranged from a low of 6000 up to a maximum of 30,000 people at its peak in the sixteenth century.2 Moreover, considering that they were divided into many territories, each territory would be dedicating a considerable proportion of its human forces to the carving, transporting heavy stones, and building their ceremonial sites. This means that large food surpluses had to be obtained by the peasants to sustain these efforts. Here, their low-labourintensity diet may have helped. But it was undoubtedly no free lunch in environmental terms. Although different methods were suggested to transport and erect that large Moais, some of them with heavy Pukaos on top, and the hundreds of tonnes of stones for the larger Ahus, all tried methods require wooden structures to be realised. Possibly wooden rails or movable rollers and long thick ropes to allow a larger human contingent to pull simultaneously to drag the heavy weights.3 Indeed, this process required not just human labour but also crucial natural resources, notably wood, large trunks, and strong natural ropes.

2

While Diamond bets on the larger range of at least 15,000, based on more recent estimates, Ponting still talked of a maximum of 7000. In any case, the largest of all current main estimations is lower than 30,000 inhabitants at its peak. 3 There have been some empirically successful attempts to drag and erect large statues using either movable rollers or wooden rails joined by fixed wooden crosspieces over which the log is rolled and which was widespread in other Pacific islands to move canoe ladders weighing up to more than average East Island moai. Jo Anne Van Tilburg, for instances, managed to drag, using between 50 and 70 people, a 12-tonne statue 9 miles in about a 5 h/day working week. To erect the statues, stone slopes were built and statues, being levered with logs, would have stones thrown bellow them and thus, little by little, they would assume their upright position.

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These were resources available in the first centuries of their development, at least up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when evidence for deforestation and environmental degradation can be found. According to the reconstruction of the environmental history of the island, when the first settlers arrived, they reached a virgin world devoid of large predators and whose plenty of seabirds, land birds, and porpoises were readily available food sources for the first settlers. This abundant source of subsistence declined or disappeared later due to a combination of factors, including the impact of rats and over-predation by settlers who enjoyed an easy-tocatch food supply feeding on the birds’ eggs. The remoteness and the lack of predators made the island one of the most important nesting sites on the pacific. Notwithstanding, having evolved counting on this secure spot, these seabirds were primarily defenceless once the predators arrived. Even more crucial, in ecological terms, was the deforestation brought by the human colonisers. Although botanic surveys in the twentieth century identified just 48 native species, primarily low fern, grasses, sedges, and shrubs, the tallest of them just over 2 m high, the island was once covered by a subtropical forest of tall trees and woody bushes. There has been, among others, abundant pollen of a now extinct palm tree whose ‘nuts turned out to be very similar to, but slightly larger than those of the world’s largest existing palm tree, the Chilean wine palm, which grows up to 65 feet tall and 3 feet in diameter’. (Diamond, 2005, p. 103). Further evidence was found cast under lava that the ‘Easter Island palm trunks reached a diameter exceeding seven feet. It thus dwarfed even the Chilean palm and was (while it existed) the biggest palm in the world. Chileans prize their palm today for several reasons, and Easter Islanders would have done so as well. As the name implies, the trunk yields a sweet sap that can be fermented to make wine or boiled down to make honey or sugar. The nuts’ oily kernels are rated a delicacy. The fronds are ideal for thatching, baskets, mats, and boat sails. And, of course, the stout trunks would have served to transport and erect Moai, and perhaps to make rafts. (. . .) Many of those 21 vanished species, besides the palm, would have been valuable for the islanders. Two of the tallest trees, Alphitonia cf. zizyphoides and Elaeocarpus cf. rarotongensis (up to 100 and 50 feet tall respectively), are used elsewhere in Polynesia for making canoes and would have been much better suited to that purpose than was the palm. Polynesian everywhere make rope from the bark of the hauhau, Triumfetta semitriloba, and that was presumably how Easter Islanders dragged their statues. Bark of the paper mulberry Broussinetia papyrifera is beaten into tapa cloth; Psydrax odorata has a flexible straight trunk suited for making harpoons and outriggers; the Malay apple Syzygium malaccense bears an edible fruit; the oceanic rosewood Thespesia populanea and at least eight other species have hardwood suitable for carving and construction; toromiro yields an excellent wood for fires, like acacia and mesquite’. (Diamond, 2005, p. 104). In the early stages, the island harboured as well a relatively rich fauna. David Steadman (1995, p. 1124), for instance, could identify six now-extinct land birds’ bones at the Ahu Naunau archaeological site. As stated by this author, ‘the entire prehistoric seabird fauna of Easter Island probably exceeded 30 breeding species,

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more than are known from any other single Polynesian island. Of these, only Phaethon rubricauda still nests on Easter Island itself. (. . .) 8 to 10 no longer breed on Easter Island and 13 to 16 others no longer breed even on any of its offshore islets’. Thus, the incoming human species found plenty of self-reproduced natural wealth to tap into and build their civilisation. Particularly in the early stages of development, when abundant wild birds and sea life were hunted, the islanders had plenty of time left, added to the relatively low labour-intensive requirements of sweet potatoes and chickens. Given that, as we saw, their social identity, values, and institutional clan structures were based on the (re)production of symbolic satisfiers, like the immense Moais and plenty of ceremonies, that is precisely what they did. Large palms and other trees facilitating transport and erection of their statues and ceremonial sites, combined with the relatively easily carved stone of Rano Raraku, further boosted their unique display of craftsmanship and construction capability, outstripping any other Polynesian traditional society. Notwithstanding the above, by over-consuming and depleting their natural resources (fundamentally their forests), those mutually reinforcing cultural, political, oikonomic and environmental factors that engendered their flourishing also precipitated their fall. The shortage of food brought the competition between different clans from the symbolic arena to the fight over the ever scarcer natural resources, as shown by the increasing efforts to protect their chickens from escaping or being taken by others. Moreover, as a grim reminder of the importance of Nature to our wellbeing, this has been poignantly shown by the appearance of cannibalism on the island. Simultaneously, the resulting instability and hardship led to internal legitimisation crises. As much as clan elites fought among themselves, they faced internal resistance from their commoners, whose diminishing subsistence had to be shared with the elites and the growing in importance warriors. As Ponting (1993, p. 6) summarised, ‘the deforestation of the island was not only the death knell for the elaborate social ceremonial life, it also had other drastic effects on everyday life for the population generally. From 1500 the shortage of trees was forcing many people to abandon building houses from timber and live in caves, and when the wood eventually ran out altogether, about a century later everyone had to use only materials left. They resorted to stone shelters dug into the hillside or flimsy reed huts cut from vegetation that grew round the edges of the crater lakes. Canoes could no longer be build and only reed boats incapable of long voyages could be made. Fishing was also more difficult because nets had previously been made from the paper mulberry tree (which could also be made into cloth) and that was no longer available. Removal of the tree cover also badly affected the soil of the island, which would have already suffered from a lack of suitable animal manure to replace nutrients taken up by the crops. Increased exposure caused soil erosion and the leaching out of essential nutrients. As a result crop yields declined. (. . .) After 1600 Easter Island society went into decline and regressed to ever more primitive conditions. Without trees, and so without canoes, the islanders were trapped on their remote home, unable to escape their self-inflicted environmental collapse. The social and cultural impact of deforestation was equally important. The

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inability to erect any more statues must have had a devastating effect on the belief system and social organization and called into question the foundation on which that complex society had been built’. The collapse was not complete, and, eventually, a new balance was achieved, although at a lower level of complexity. As Diamond (2005, p. 111) pointed out, ‘the survivors adapted as best they could, both in their subsistence and in their religion. Not only cannibalism but also chicken houses underwent explosive growth after 1650 (. . .). The matatoa justified their military coup by adopting a religious cult based on the creator god Makemake, who had previously been just one of Easter’s pantheon of gods. (. . .) The new religion developed its own new art styles, expressed especially in petroglyphs (rock carvings) of women genitals, birdmen, and birds (in order of decreasing frequency), carved not only on Orongo monuments but also on toppled Moai and Pukao elsewhere. Each year the Orongo cult organised a competition between men to swim across the cold, shark-infested, one-mile wide strait separating the islets from Eastern itself, to collect the first egg laid that season by Sooty terns, to swim back with the unbroken egg, and to be “Birdman of the year”. The last Orongo ceremony took place in 1867 and was witnessed by Catholic missionaries’, who took up residence in 1864. Just at a time when the residue of Easter Island society, not already destroyed by the islanders themselves, was being destroyed by the outside world. Indeed, having been further decimated by viruses brought by navigators like Captain Cook in 1774, kidnapped for forced labour (particularly 1862–63 when a dozen Peruvian ships abducted about 1500 people), in 1872, there were just 111 native islanders left. By 1870 sheep were brought and, after the Chilean annexation in 1888, it effectively became a sheep range managed by a Chile-based Scottish company (Diamond, 2005, pp. 112–113). Nowadays, as is known, it lives mainly from tourism visiting the ruins of its ancient short but spectacular blooming. The resemblance and analogies to our present crisis are all too evident. A reminder that we ignore the complex institutional, cultural, ecological, technical, and oikonomic dynamics and interdependencies underlying human development dynamics at our peril—as had the Easter Islanders, unable to halt the coming collapse, not just of their oikonomic model but also their environment and civilisation. This may look striking seen from the outside, once, as Ponting (1993, p. 7) argued, ‘the Easter Islanders, aware that they were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, must surely have realized that their very existence depended on the limited resources of a small island. After all it was small enough for them to walk round the entire island in a day or so and see for themselves what was happening to the forests. Yet they were unable to devise a system that allowed them to find the right balance with their environment’. Is our present situation any different? Although it cannot be walked in a day, satellite images and the internet allow us to see the entire world. We have all wondered in awe at the pictures of the Earth seen from space, in its beauty, fragility, and loneliness in front of the deep, dark space. Indeed, there has never been as much information about the ecological and social dynamics on which our wellbeing depends. Nor information on the limits and risks of our current development patterns

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and, globally, about the limited material grounds on which we base our existence and civilisations. Nor do we ignore the dangers of climate change, whose effects are already felt worldwide, while we still collectively are pumping increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or keep on holding our dietary and consumption habits locally, although aware of their contribution to it. Although the complexities and uncertainties of the different processes and the short-term interests and power-relations involved do not allow for simple answers or consensus, there is growing scientific consensus about the risks and consequences of climate change, the considerable impact of the human species on our planet’s biodiversity and the enormous costs of the increasing social and ecological crisis. But we still compete for chrematistic and industrial growth, consuming the remaining natural resources and ecosystems at still growing rates. Chrematistic growth and its vanishing resource consumption are the foundation on which our hegemonic institutions and our growing population are grounded. It is so both on a symbolic and a material level—as ways of legitimising our hegemonic elites, institutions, and individual identities around the consumption and possession of material goods. Individuals earn their living, governments their taxes, and companies survive and increase their power according to how they excel in the chrematistic ‘art of getting rich’. Governments and politicians are evaluated by their capacity to foster chrematistic growth and ‘job creation’ or their ability to realise successful redistribution policies. According to chrematistic indicators, ‘Efficiency’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is thus assessed, mostly ignoring its qualitative ecological and social impacts. At the same time, governments, professional politicians, and parties exist using their relations to the private sector, while public administration’s incomes are derived from taxes on chrematistic activities or public debt. We live in The Society of the Spectacle in Guy Debord’s premonitory definition for our digitally commodified reality. A reality in which the creation of fictional narratives increasingly permeates the world in what increasingly is perceived as ‘post-truth’ politics. At the same time, economists worldwide are trained not to understand the realworld dynamics and how to best generate and distribute wealth in use-value terms, regenerating and reinforcing socioecological balances and dynamics. Instead, they focus on an ideological construct that emerged as a way to legitimise our current unsustainable chrematistic-centred development practices. Thus, in the same way as for the Easter Island’s elites ignoring the ecological (and social) imbalances whereas asserting the need for more and more prominent statues to get the favour of the Gods or their ancestors hopefully, our present-day political system looks for ways of convincing people of the need for more of the same to get us out of the deepening crisis, boosting ‘economic growth’. Thereby, despite rapidly succeeding crises, from those who become the dominant theme of their times like the financial crisis (2008), migration crisis (2015), climate crisis (2019), and now the coronavirus (2020–22), up to those recurring and increasing natural disasters like wildfires, hurricane season, droughts and inundations around the globe; no significant change in course can be observed. Yes, voices asking for change are getting louder, but we continue to base our oikonomic development strategies on the same mantra: ongoing material and chrematistic

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growth. We still aim to return to ‘business as usual’ despite the mounting evidence about the fragility and the growing imbalances of the current prevalent development models. Despite warnings about peak-oil scenarios and the growing climate change due to the combustion of the remaining reserves, like the East Islander’s depleting their palms and trees, we continue to increase our oil production and consumption. Chrematistic growth continues to be the primary goal of all political parties, be they left-leaning, right-wing or even mainstream green parties, despite the growing income inequality and the burden this ongoing growth is placing on our planet and our lives. That strong is the radical monopoly our modern conception of the economy and wealth as related to accumulating exchange-values and growing GDP has on our collective mind, that we simply cannot perceive that the way out needed to restore social and ecological balances, to regenerate our oikonomy and produce more wealth in use-value terms, is to stop growing and inclusive to de-growth in chrematistic terms.4 We cannot perceive ways to reduce our material possessions and accelerated depletion of resources while increasing our wealth in qualitative terms, improving our relational balances and exchanges, both social and ecological. We cannot perceive that in the same way that Easter Islander’s competition for bigger and bigger statues accelerated the environmental breakdown of the Island, our competition for bigger GDPs and material possessions is accelerating the breakdown of our planet. Thus, we fail to regenerate ecosystems and our biosphere as a whole, allowing ecological processes to reproduce natural wealth on which our lives and wellbeing ultimately depend. At the social level, we do not concentrate our efforts on enhancing other forms of producing use-value beyond the markets, as discussed in Chap. 2. Confounding, like king Midas did, wealth with exchangevalues, mistake the ends for the means. We continue to pursue strategies that lead us to disaster, fighting and competing among us as always, while becoming all poorer as a result by destroying the very ground on which our wealth is based.

References Cendra-Garreta, J., & Stahel, A. W. (2011). Desarrollo Sostenible: ¿Sabemos de qué estamos hablando?—Algunos critérios para un uso consistente del término sostenibilidad aplicado al desarrollo a partir de una perspectiva sistémica. In Sostenibilidad, Tecnología y Humanismo (no. 7, pp. 37–57). Cátedra Unesco de Sostenibilidad—UPC. Crosby, A. W. (1996). Ecological imperialism—The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge University Press.

4

Faced with the growing signs of the limits to industrial growth and the illusions about a supposed ‘dematerialization’ of the oikonomy by the spread of the so-called post-industrial age, recently ecological economists are waking up to the need not just to stop growing, but to shrink our economy once many ecological limits have already been surpassed, as acknowledged by the degrowth movement.

References

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Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse—How societies choose to fail or succeed. Viking. Poerksen, U. (1995). Plastic words—The tyranny of modular language. The Pennsylvania State University Press. Ponting, C. (1993). A green history of the world—The environment and the collapse of great civilizations. Penguin. Steadman, D. W. (1995, February 24). Prehistoric extinction of pacific island birds: Biodiversity meets zooarhaeology. Science, New Series, 267(5201), 1123–1131.

Chapter 13

Are We in Need of Our Needs?

There is undoubtedly a space for markets, free exchange between individuals, and the social division of labour. The capacity to freely decide and to agree with someone else about the terms of a sale is a distinctive human feature. Social insect’s division of labour and sharing of wealth is based on inherited instinctive patterns, not allowing for individual choice and behavioural plasticity. In other mammals and even primates, instinctive and emotion-driven behaviour still is limited in scope, although allowing for a separate learning process and adaptation to different social and ecological circumstances. Thus, social animals like wolves, elephants, whales, monkeys, and other mammals have group behaviour and patterns passed from one generation to another and differentiate groups. Many species gift and share, but only humans have been seen to engage in trade—a voluntary, conscious agreement whereby one individual gives something in exchange for something else. Notwithstanding, as we saw in our introduction, commerce or chrematistics is a means-to-an-end, a way to sustain our lives and our wellbeing, as was the building of ceremonial sites by the Eastern Islanders. Once the construction of even more giant statues and signs of prestige became their objective despite its social and ecological burden, their behaviour ceased to be rational and coherent with their aim of ‘living and living well’. Is it any different from the behaviour of the so-called ‘rational economic agents’ of today? We still define wealth in purely monetary terms and believe that more chrematistic growth and development will alleviate poverty when it is precisely the other way around: our chrematistic-centred oikonomic development has been responsible for the spread of modern poverty. To better understand this, it may be worth having a deeper look at what constitutes wealth again. As a would-be economist, one of the first things we are taught is the definition of the economy being ‘the satisfaction of our infinite human needs through the use of the available scarce resources’. Thus, a polarity between our limited world and our unlimited wants is established right from the start. Our needs being seen as infinite, it was only through producing more and more, through ‘economic growth’ that this insatiable being, homo oeconomicus, was to be appeased. Our task as economists was to learn how best to achieve this goal, promoting ‘economic efficiency’ and an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_13

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‘economical use of resources’. How to ‘maximize the results while minimizing the costs’. Notwithstanding, although this is the standard definition of economics, thus defining our profession, no further thoughts are given to dwell a little deeper in it. It is simply assumed as a self-evident truth without asking ourselves whether it is so. In particular, economists do not give further thoughts to inquire into the nature of ‘needs’ and whether they are infinite or not. Nor do economists look, as we saw in the last part, at how the limited available resources are continuously being created and regenerated in physical and ecological terms, and whether these limits are rigid or not. Thereby, economists simply assume that we have to grow forever to keep closing the gap between our boundless needs and our limited capacity to satisfy them—thereby supporting our modern obsession with ongoing chrematistic growth. After finishing my studies and starting to teach, I stumbled over a study about Human Scale Development (Max-Neef et al., 1989). I was immediately drawn to it, and it was there that, for the first time, I found economists thinking about what needs are in the first place. By making a crucial distinction between needs and the way these needs are satisfied, that is, satisfiers, the authors of the report just pointed to something which should be self-evident: something is what we need to live and thrive, something completely different is how we try to satisfy this need. At the most basic level, all living beings need subsistence and security. Animals attain it by feeding, hiding, fighting, trying to escape, or fending off potential predators. Plants learned the trick of converting atmospheric gases, water, and nutrients absorbed by their roots from the soil into organic matter: photosynthesis. Some animals feed on plants, others on other animals. But no fox needs to chase rabbits to feed on them. Some have learned to do so, thus satisfying their subsistence need in this way. Still, others, confronted with other circumstances, have chosen to chase other animals or the risky business of stealing some chickens from humans. Being a tool-using, self-reflective social species, humans develop tools, institutions, rituals and, encompassing it all, different cultures and social organisations aiming to satisfy our fundamental human needs. No one needs a bratwurst to survive, but some eventually may select one as a means to satiate their hunger— others, by instead eating a hunted seal. Still, others may prefer a vegetarian curry. In the same vein, nobody needs a smartphone or a new car. They may be helpful satisfiers reaffirming the identity of some, or be a satisfier communicating and commuting to work attempting to satisfy our subsistence need. But they are not a need as such. Indeed, for some, they may be even useless or burdensome instead of being a help. As it becomes immediately apparent once we distinguish between needs and satisfiers, they are entirely different. Satisfiers, as can be seen by the myriad ways living beings satisfy their subsistence needs or by just looking at the countless ways humans in different cultures and societies do, are potentially infinite. Something completely different happens once we start looking at our needs. No living being, humans included, has unlimited needs. Living beings are finite and so are their needs. Health and wellbeing are associated not with ongoing desires, consumption, and accumulation, but balances within narrow frames. We eat healthily up to the

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point of satiation. Too small an intake of nutrients or imbalanced food is associated with hunger and eventual starvation. Conversely, too much brings indigestion and obesity. The same goes for all other fundamental human needs. Too little security may put at risk our lives, while too much hampers our freedom and behaviour, becoming a risk on its own. Fundamental human needs are related to our human nature. Thus, they are common to all humans, just as other species share their needs. However, according to different and changing cultural contexts and environments, different satisfiers may be chosen to satisfy them. While many animal species diverge in their chosen satisfiers within a limited range, we humans, living all over the world and, more importantly, having developed the most different cultures, tools, and artefacts, satisfy our everyday needs in the most diverse and often uncommon ways. As humans, we share the same needs according to our shared biological and cognitive nature. They are thus universal and invariable, or they change only very slowly according to our evolution as a species. As a species, we are social, self-reflective animals, able to speak and abstract thinking. Thus, as we saw in Magritte’s painting, we always relate to reality according to our inner depiction and narratives. Thereby, besides subsistence and security, understanding and sense-making is a fundamental human need. But here too, there are potentially infinite ways we may try to attend to it: scientific inquiry, practical experience, myth-making, art, language, meditation, yoga, or Tai-Chi, are just some of the satisfiers some humans choose to try to attend these needs. We share other needs, like participation and affection, with different species, but none does it in such culturally and historically varying ways. In contrast, some needs like self-reflective understanding and transcendence may be specific to humans. However, we do not know how and if they may be familiar to other species like whales, dolphins, or our cousins, the Bonobos, Chimpanzees, and Gorillas. We do know that they too have a sense of ‘I’ and the ability of language and, as known from Elephants, mourning their deaths. But we do not understand how their consciousness works and thus what their fundamental needs may be. In any case, they are not needs shared with most other species whose behaviour is based on instincts and not individual learning and even less self-reflective consciousness. The critical point to retain here is that we humans only become fully human in the context of our social relations and having our instinctive, emotional, and selfreflective needs attended. We do so in a myriad of ways, using different culturespecific satisfiers to ‘live and hopefully live well’. As we saw, all living beings need to adapt to their environment, give the correct answer to the challenges they encounter and behave in ways that allow them to survive and thrive by managing to satisfy their needs. Thus, they all need to ‘understand’ the world they live in, giving the correct answers. To ensure that which Maturana and Varela called their ‘structural coupling’ to their environment. For some species, this knowing and their behavioural response follow predetermined instinctive paths. Bacteria ‘knows’ where their food source is and how to feed on it, just as does a frog. Going one step further, we humans, being self-reflective, adapt not just by following our instincts but by self-reflectively trying to make sense both of our environment and ourselves. Thus, we need to know and understand it self-reflectively, as seen from

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without, in ways to adapt and respond. We could no longer survive on instinct alone, nor without knowing how to use our tools and our communicative skills to survive. Being self-reflective or reasonable is just a satisfier we humans developed to satisfy our need for understanding, just as phototropism allows plants to ‘know’ where the radiated energy source is, thus growing into this direction. Within the human scale paradigm, nine different fundamental human needs are proposed, namely: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity, and freedom. The need for transcendence is sometimes also included, although the authors doubt whether this particular need is familiar to all humans. However, it is undoubtedly an essential need for some individuals and communities, orientating their behaviour and sometimes even placing it in the centre of their lives, like religious and monastic practices. Other authors may have slightly different lists and names. Although, as long as a clear distinction between needs and satisfiers is made, they always are few and limited. As for other living beings, needs constitute the driving force of human behaviour, particularly human oikonomic behaviour and development. Unmet needs are perceived as a lack, thus driving our behaviour to fill this lack. But once the adequate satisfier is produced, acquired, and consumed, fulfilling this lack, we are satisfied and no longer in need, thus stopping pursuing this particular need. Needs, therefore, continuously manifest themselves as lack, driving our behaviour aiming to fulfil them, and satiation, leading to a halt. As we saw, needs are the source of our feelings. We always feel something as the result of our unmet needs and our thoughts or perceptions about it. We may feel hungry having not eaten for a long time or by nurturing ideas about the food we particularly like, just as we may feel angry by having an unmet need and blaming someone else or an external circumstance for it. Indeed, for any need, according to our perceptions of reality and how this need may eventually be satisfied, we may feel anxious, happy, sad, angry, confident, or just relaxed once we are optimistic that a given need will be met. All these feelings, as we saw, fuel our motivational energy and nurture different behaviour strategies to satisfy this need. As these authors argued, going one step further, needs are always met by combined ways of being, having, doing, and interacting. Thus, to stay at our example, feeling hungry will lead us towards looking for food. According to our particular ways of being (values, beliefs, culture, and biology), having (money to buy food or a garden in which to collect self-produced vegetables, having the needed ingredients and food at our disposal to be consumed, etc.), doing (cooking, going to a restaurant or picking some fruits directly from the tree for instances) and interacting (for example, living in community and thus having a community lunch or providing self-sufficiently for ourselves), different satisfiers will be (re)produced and supplied according to chosen oikonomic modalities like self-sufficiency, reciprocity, redistribution, commerce or even plunder, to come back to the primary oikonomic modalities we have been considering in this book. Different satisfiers will thus allow this particular need and others to be satisfied or not. But, once we have had enough food, there is no stimulus to look for more. Like other living beings, once enough food for our subsistence has been provided and

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ingested, we may look for resting or providing for different needs. Like lions which once satiated, rather relax in the shadows than chase more prey, even if they are readily available. Adequate scale and balances are key to ‘living and living well’: below a certain threshold, we are in need and may have unpleasant feelings of hunger, anguish, or deprivation. Above a certain point, we may feel over-satiated and may experience unpleasant feelings of sickness or even nausea for having overeaten. In the same way, lack of security may manifest as insecurity and fear. Overprotection may lead again to the feeling of insecurity, tightness, or impotence. It is only in between, nor too little, nor too much, that pleasant feeling of satiation and wellbeing may calm us, providing peace and no further need to act. Thus, as sentient and self-reflective beings, needs are familiar to us all according to our shared biological and cognitive nature. According to our evolution as a species, they are universal and invariable, changing very slowly or not at all. Within the human-scale development approach, they are classified at the axiological level (i.e. referring to those things we value) as comprising nine fundamental needs and, on the ontological level, according to forms of being, having, doing, and interacting (Table 13.1). By classifying needs in this way, a matrix of needs and satisfiers may be elaborated. Each square being fulfilled according to the particular satisfier a person or a community may favour satisfying a specific need. Table 13.1 gives us just a generic example of such a matrix, listing some generic satisfiers. Thus, having food and shelter may be a satisfier for someone’s subsistence, just as being resourceful and healthy, feeding, interacting and living in a healthy environment. Others may attend to these needs differently. Needs are always felt and satisfied in systemic, global, and interrelated ways. Indeed, satisfiers always require complementary satisfiers at the different ontological dimensions of being, having, doing, and interacting to meet a given need. For instance, living and interacting in a rural environment in which plentiful food is being grown requires you to have access to this grown food in the first place to satisfy your subsistence needs. You may have access to being a producer who produces self-sufficiently or being a consumer who, having enough money to spend, goes to the local market. Or, being part of a larger community based on reciprocity, we may rely on food given freely by others as was and still is the praxis in some religious communities who are dependent on donated food. Or according to one’s position in a larger redistribution scheme to which the individual may have rights to apply. Moreover, having food will not be enough to appease your hunger if you do not eat and do not digest the consumed food adequately due to being healthy and able to digest this particular food. Wheat bread may not be an adequate satisfier for those who have celiac disease, in the same way as a vegan may reject meat as a satisfier for their hunger when eating once it may negatively affect their identity need. Thus, different satisfiers at different ontological levels may complement, contradict, reinforce or dampen each other.

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Table 13.1 Needs matrix according to the human scale development approach Fundamental human needs Subsistence

Being (Qualities) Physical and mental health, adaptability

Having (Things) Food, shelter, income

Doing (Actions) Feed, procreate, rest, work

Protection

Care, adaptability, autonomy, equilibrium solidarity

Social security, health systems, civil rights

Affection

Self-esteem, solidarity, tolerance, generosity, sense of humour, receptiveness

Friendships, partners, family, partnerships, relations with nature

Understanding

Critical capacity curiosity, astonishment, intuition, rationality

Literature, teachers, method, relevant information

Participation

Solidarity, willingness, determination, dedication, respect, passion, sense of humour

Rights, responsibilities, duties, privileges, work, groups and communities

Idleness/ Leisure

Curiosity, receptiveness, imagination, recklessness, sense of humour, tranquillity, sensuality Passion, determination, intuition, imagination, inventiveness, curiosity

Games, spectacles, clubs, parties, peace of mind, free time

Cooperate, prevent, take care of, cure, be helped. Love, make love, share, express emotions, care, cultivate, appreciate Investigate, study, educate, experiment, interpret, meditate Cooperate, share, become affiliated, interact, agree on and express opinions Create, enjoy, appreciate, play, imagine, daydream

Abilities, skills, method, work, materials.

Work, invent, build, design, compose, interpret

Identity

Sense of belonging, consistency, differentiation, selfesteem, assertiveness

Commit, integrate, recognise oneself, get to know oneself

Freedom

Autonomy, selfesteem, determination, passion, assertiveness, open mindedness, rebelliousness

Symbols, language, religions, habits, citizenship, customs, reference groups, sexuality, values, work, career Equal rights, liberty

Creation

Dissent, be different, risk, develop awareness, develop consciousness

Interacting (Settings) Nurturing living and sociocultural environment Living space, community, dwelling Privacy, intimacy, spaces of togetherness, home

Settings of formative interactions, family, community Settings of participative interactions, parties, associations, gatherings, family Privacy, landscapes, surroundings, settings for free activities, temporal freedom Workshops, audiences, spaces for expression, cultural groups Social and individual rhythms, settings which one belongs to, maturation stages Individual, selfchosen spaces and times

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Conversely, satisfiers do not just affect a single need linearly but affect simultaneously different needs at different levels and in different ways. Going to the cinema may be a way of attending to a lack of idleness. Still, it may relate and affect as well our identity (depending on the kind of movie you are choosing), affection (depending on whether you go alone or with someone else), understanding (as long as the film helps you to deepen in the knowledge of given realities or human relations and feelings) and participation, insofar as having seen certain movies is part of your ways of socialising with like-minded. Being a movie actor may be the way you earn your living and subsistence. Still, it may also be a way of attending to your identity, creativity, and participation needs, among others. At the same time, different ways of being given our biological constitution, character and values may lead us to experience the same satisfiers differently from others. Understanding this point takes us to another fundamental element of the human scale development, namely the way satisfiers may be classified according to how they satisfy particular needs or not. Satisfiers are potentially infinite but qualitatively different, affecting our wellbeing in global and holistic ways. Within the humanscale development approach, they are broadly classified into five different categories according to their various attributes: synergic, singular, pseudo, inhibiting, violators, or destroyers. Synergic satisfiers are those that simultaneously attend to different fundamental human needs while satisfying a specific one. Breast-feeding, for instance, usually meets the baby’s need for subsistence, protection, affection, and even understanding and identity. Self-building your home may be directed to attend to a need for shelter and security, but it may also respond to fundamental needs like creation, freedom, and understanding. Moreover, done in a context of reciprocity by a community work freely given by others, it may satisfy the necessity of participation, affection ad a shared identity. Thus, by their very nature, these kinds of synergic satisfiers ‘share the attribute of being anti-authoritarian in the sense that they constitute a reversal of predominant values such as competition and coerciveness’, (Max-Neef et al., 1989, p. 36) enhancing the satisfaction of these other needs as well. At the second level of importance as ways of satisfying fundamental human needs, we find singular satisfiers. These are satisfiers with a predominantly singular relation to a specific need, being neutral respecting others. Feeding babies using nursing bottles will satisfy their hunger but not their need for affection or any other as breastfeeding does. In the same way as buying a ready-made home, fully equipped and furnished, it may not satisfy your creativity need. Once they usually result from an instrumental approach to reality (looking for the means-to-an-end, linearly defined), ‘they are characteristic of plans and programmes of assistance, cooperation and development. These satisfiers share the characteristic of being institutionalized; that is, their origins are in institutions of the State, of the private sector, or of the voluntary or non-governmental sector’ (Max-Neef et al., 1989, p. 36). Moving a step further down in terms of their ability to enhance ‘the art of living and living well’, we find pseudo-satisfiers. These kinds of satisfiers, while attending to and satisfying a fundamental need in the short run, do not benefit them in the medium and long term. They may even end up annulling the possibility of meeting

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the need they were initially aimed at fulfilling. Taking a pill for your headaches may give you a passing relief and feeling of being safe and healthy. But, by not having solved the underlying cause of the headache, it may require further treatment in the medium and long term. Most drugs fall into this category. They all produce a specific effect, thus satisfying a felt need. But once the effect fades, the felt deprivation may return even stronger and require further (and often increasing) doses of the drug. That is why drugs are addictive: they do not satisfy a given need for long, leading to repetitive consumption patterns once the need emerges again and again. Of course, a repetitive consumption pattern is what modern industry and those engaged in the ‘art of getting rich’ by selling their produce at the highest price are looking for. Thus, it is no surprise that drugs and most commercial branded goods usually fall into this category. Although promising to attend to a given need, they all only do so for a short period. Thus, due to active publicity and marketing strategies, presenting themselves as ways of attending to fundamental identity needs—among others—once replaced by new ones and becoming obsolete, they require further consumption in a never-ending race. Thus, having the latest smartphone model may provide a momentary social status and identity, but this identity will rapidly erode as soon as newer models are presented and sold. They may satisfy our need for participation as means of communication. Still, once the information requirements to be communicated (including photos, videos, social apps, etc.) increase, they become technically obsolete and need to be replaced. Thereby, just as for drug addicts, we will find compulsive consumers once their needs are never effectively attended by the products they consume. Indeed, our modern materialistic and consumption-oriented society is centred on what Illich termed forced obsolescence. Design and branding and an identity based on this continuous adherence and possession of the newest are how the inherently unlimited chrematistic growth process at production is sustained at the consumption level. As Illich (1975, pp. 89 and 90) put it, ‘the most effective way to open a market is to identify the use of what is new as an important privilege. If this identification succeeds, the old model is devalued and the self-interest of the consumer is wedded to the ideology of never-ending and progressive consumption. Individuals are socially graded according to the number of years their bill of goods is out of date. Some people can afford to keep up with the Joneses who buy the latest model, while others still use cars, stoves, and radios that are five to ten years old and probably spend their vacations in places that are just as many years out of style. They know where they fit on the social ladder. The social grading of individuals by the age of the things they use is not just a capitalist practice. Wherever the economy is built around the large-scale production of elaborate and obsolescent packages of staples, it is only the privileged who have access to the newest model of services and goods. (. . .) Periodic innovations in goods or tools foster the belief that anything new will be proven better. This belief has become an integral part of the modern world view. It is forgotten that whenever a society lives by this delusion, each marketed unit generates more wants than it satisfies. If new things are made because they are better, then the things most people use are not quite good. New models constantly renovate

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poverty. The consumer feels the lag between what he has and what he ought to get. He believes that products can be made measurably more valuable and allows himself to be constantly re-educated for their consumption. The “better” replaces the “good” as the fundamental normative concept’. This idea can be rendered more visible if we take a useful distinction done by André Gorz (1978) between poverty and misery. While he defines misery in absolute and pathological terms, levels that objectively may impair the health and life of an organism, poverty is determined by the distance between wants and fulfilment. There are levels below or above certain thresholds at all different fundamental needs in which ‘the art of living and living well’ may be seriously impaired, and thus people may have miserable lives. Below a given intake of calories and nutrients, malnutrition may lead to inadequate organism growth or starvation. Above certain levels, it may lead to indigestion and even death. The same may apply to security: where at certain levels of exposure to dangers, an organism may die; over-protection may lead to dependencies, lack of autonomy and freedom, equally endangering the prospects and wellbeing of the individual. Everywhere, the adequate development of organisms requires that their fundamental needs be attended to within specific ranges and balances. Bellow or above them, misery and pathological outcomes may follow. Notwithstanding, poverty is observed at the cognitive level, at the point in which the individual cannot access the desired satisfiers, although others may be available to satisfy some unmet needs. Commercial publicity and marketing strategies focus precisely on creating, at the personal level, a distance between the desired and the actual reality of the individual or the group. As Gorz (1978, p. 65) put it for the early 1970s, “someone is poor in Peru if he walks barefoot. In China, by not having a bicycle and in France, by not having a car. In the 1930s someone was poor by not being able to buy a radio; in the 60s, by not having a television and in the 70s, you become poor by not possessing a colour TV”. Nowadays, we have become poor by not having the latest smartphone or access to all these glittering gadgets displayed on the vitrines or our digital screens. Thus, while misery has a strongly objective dimension, poverty is subjectively and culturally defined and felt. Once seen from this perspective and by understanding the crucial role forced obsolescence plays in our market-centred oikonomic development strategies, it becomes clear that contrary to mainstream belief, conventional development is not alleviating poverty but reinforcing and creating new poverties by widening the gap between wants and their fulfilment. In the face of our modern misrepresentation of satisfiers as needs, we are all blinded by the apparent lack of acquiring a new smartphone, having thousands of followers in our social networks and likes in our latest post on social media, having a new car or going to Disneyworld. People feel poor by not wearing Nike or Adidas and, whence, being an upper-class member, not using a Gucci bag or driving a Mercedes. But being pseudo-satisfiers, once acquiring the latest iPhone, we rapidly feel the need to complement it with something else. Thus, the perception that our needs are infinite and we need both individually and collectively to keep growing, producing, and consuming more. Just to feel no longer on top once a new iPhone has been launched. Thus, like Sisyphus, condemned to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, we

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are doomed to ‘fight against poverty’ by ongoing chrematistic growth, just to find poverty growing each time we thought the goal was at reach. As drug addicts, we start craving stronger doses and drugs just to experience the same effect. In the 1930s, Alfred Sloan, at the top of General Motors, revolutionised the car industry, not by fundamentally changing the production line as his competitor Ford had done, but by radically changing the way cars were to be consumed as signs of social identity and status. Ford created the assembly line to mass-produce standardised vehicles at the lowest possible cost. As he is famously quoted, ‘people can have the Model-T at any colour they like, as long as it is black’. Notwithstanding, Sloan took a different approach and invested in differentiated designs, yearly models and even other brands, sometimes assembled by the same factories. Thereby, General Motors delivered cars in various models, colours, shapes and even brands. More than the product itself, he decided to invest in creating and enhancing its sign value. A practice that spread to all other industries and became a central feature of the twentieth century mass consumer society. It is still the ground on which, now, more than ever, with improved and flexible production techniques, 3D printers and robots, design and branding is nurturing our wants and spreading pseudo-satisfiers. Thus, from sportswear to cars, from cooking gadgets to luxury goods and new magical devices we see in between youtube videos, the gap between what we possess and what we believe is required to meet our needs keeps growing. This is precisely how Apple, under Steve Jobs careful design and marketing strategies, became an icon of the new century with its iPods, iPhones, iPads, and iMacs. It is as well how other companies follow in their attempt to keep on growing and making profits. This same misconception leads the United Nations and governments worldwide to alleviate poverty while increasing it once people and societies enter into this never-ending production and consumption spiral of modern pseudosatisfiers. We do not perceive that by promoting conventional development practices without questioning our needs and how we satisfy them, we are inoculating our modern cultural misconceptions in traditional societies, confounding needs with satisfiers. Realising this simple truth and seeing how economists simply ignore it was crucial in my perception of economics’ ideological role in our modern world. By merely assuming needs as unlimited without giving them any other thought, we keep on pursuing our Sisyphean development strategies. Following the economists’ advice, we believe that by producing and consuming more commodities, more satisfiers will reduce poverty, when it is precisely the other way around. At least for the affluent societies where misery has been eliminated and replaced by modern poverty. As Jean Baudrillard, (1998, p. 66) already in the 1970s, noted, ‘we must abandon the received idea we have of an affluent society as a society in which all material (and cultural) needs are easily met, for that leaves all social logic out of account. We should rather espouse the notion recently propounded by Marshall Sahlins in his article on the first affluent society, that it is our industrial and productivist societies which, unlike certain primitive societies, are dominated by scarcity, by the obsession with scarcity characteristic of the market economy. The more one produces, the more

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clearly does one show up, amidst plenty, how irremediably far off is that final point which affluence would represent, defined as an equilibrium between human production and human goals. Since what is satisfied in a growth society, and increasingly satisfied as productivity grows, are the very needs of the order of production, not the “needs” of man (the whole system depends indeed on these being misrecognized), it is clear that affluence recedes indefinitely: more precisely, it is irrevocably rejected and the organized reign of scarcity (structural penury) preferred’. As Giles Lipovetsky (1994), a French philosopher, in his historical analysis pointed out, humans have always asserted their status, identity, and ascendency over others by consuming and displaying signs of identity. Notwithstanding, it was only in the modern world, coupled with the rise of the industrial free-market based oikonomy and the future-oriented development process, that the conspicuous consumption of signs of social status and identity assumed an entirely new role, mutating into fashion. As he argued (1994, pp. 4, 5 and 6), ‘once we resituate fashion within the vast life span of societies, we cannot see it as the simple manifestation of a passionate desire to be admired and to set oneself apart; it becomes an exceptional, highly problematic institution, a sociohistorical reality characteristic of the West and of modernity itself. From this standpoint, fashion is less a sign of class ambition than a way out of the world of tradition. It is one of the mirrors that allows us to see what constitutes our most remarkable historical destiny: the negation of the age-old power of the traditional past, the frenzied modern passion for novelty (. . .). For the dominant feature of our societies (. . .) is precisely the extraordinary generalization of fashion: the extension of the ‘fashion’ form to spheres that once lay beyond its purview, the advent of a society restructured from top to bottom by the attractive and the ephemeral—by the very logic of fashion. (. . .) Fashion is no longer an aesthetic embellishment, a decorative accessory to collective life; it is the key to the entire edifice. In structural terms, fashion has completed its historical trajectory; it has reached the peak of its power, for it has succeeded in reshaping society as a whole in its own image. Once a peripheral phenomenon, it is now hegemonic. (. . .) In less than half a century, attractiveness and evanescence have become the organizing principles of modern collective life’. He wrote it when our current information age had not yet created the frenzy around celebrities and the reign of what Guy Debors, another French philosopher, called the Spectacle Society. A world in which all has to show its bright side to sell and to be bought. A world in which, as is becoming more apparent in politics as well, discourse and appearance dominate over essence and truth. Our contemporary world came into being by spreading and generalising this Western concept of needs—equating them to acquiring and consuming certain satisfiers instead. Generalising this particular culture and set of ways to aim to satisfy our human needs has become central to our way of perceiving the aims of our lives and the objectives of oikonomic development. Ironically, if not tragically so, increasing poverty while aiming to reduce it once every new product replacing previous ones, every commercial good advertised as fundamental to our wellbeing and lives, generates more unsatisfied desires than it manages to appease. Taking satisfiers for needs is a misconception and misrepresentation repeated each time an

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aspiring economist is told that ‘human needs are unlimited’ and that our task, as economists, is ‘to find ways to foster economic growth to attend to them’. Each time we are told we ‘need’ the newest smartphone, the most luxurious cars or holidays in paradisiac-looking exotic places to be happy and fulfilled. What I have been told, now I know, is that we have to ignore all other forms of satisfying our fundamental human needs besides chrematistics and the marked-centred activities we call ‘the economy’. As economists, we unwittingly reproduce the modern development mantra, best exemplified by the ‘American Way of Life’, which, as for the Eastern Islanders, is taking us beyond the limits and the carrying capacity of our world, of our oikos. As Alphandéry et al. (1992) argued, ‘the destruction of traditional cultures, concomitant with the process of Westernization of the world, had not developed exclusively through force, but, perhaps more perniciously and effectively, by inoculating our modern needs in others’. Marketing, advertising, and publicity have played a crucial role in this process. As Max-Neef et al. (1989, p. 34) had warned, for pseudo-satisfiers, one of ‘their main attribute is that they are generally induced through propaganda, advertising or other means of persuasion’. Notwithstanding, despite our growing understanding of the limits to growth, this is an ongoing and accelerating process. It is done by our hegemonic institutions exerting their radical monopoly on our minds, and in the economics’ textbooks teaching us to believe in the need for infinite chrematistic growth. Nowadays, it is done even more perniciously with the new advertising-based ‘free’ internet economy. Our on and offline behaviour has become the product sold by these new internet giants to advertising companies. Thus, we are continuously persuaded and led to favour pseudo-satisfiers by these powerful algorithms inducing us to become addicts to our virtual social networks and avid internet shoppers. I sometimes wonder how a potential intergalactic anthropologist would look at our present world. He would probably be even more puzzled about our behaviour’s incongruence than us looking at the Eastern Islanders. On one side, he would see scientists spending their lives to understand better our current reality, conferences, global agreements and thousands of activists and individuals pointing to the limits to growth. He would identify a growing awareness about the ongoing social and ecological imbalances and how people claim the imperative to stop and reverse them by reducing our consumption patterns, changing our habits and practice. But on the other hand, they would see that some of the most clever, imaginative, and gifted minds in the world are devoted to devising even more sophisticated means of persuasion to promote these habits and behaviour patterns, which the former aim to revert. The same governments who claim to stop climate change look for more fossil fuels in their territories and elsewhere to fuel their economy. Once, like at the moment I am writing, oil prices soar, governments worldwide look to reduce them instead of seeing it as a way to reduce its consumption eventually. But not just governments. As individuals, we are becoming increasingly aware of climate change and the ecological limits to growth. Notwithstanding, we cannot manage to overcome our addiction by consuming more and more. All subscribe to the need for ‘sustainable development’, but none

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speaks about the pernicious effects advertising, marketing, and merchandising strategies have in inciting more consumption and addiction. We talk about alleviating poverty and attending to human needs but do not ask ourselves what poverty and needs mean in the first place. We simply equate poverty to a given daily or monthly monetary income, but we forget that money cannot be eaten. Indeed, by looking at reality solely in monetary terms, we are reinforcing our current cultural myopic views, which are at the root of the problems we face in the first place. One of the main aspects which define a given culture is the set of satisfiers it privileges over others. Thus, spreading the Western development model to the world meant replacing some groups of satisfiers with others. As Illich showed in his analysis of the radical monopoly, it meant to monopolise our beliefs and narrow our understanding to one particular perspective at the expense of others. And nowhere, perhaps, is this cultural change and materialistic reductionism clearer than within modern economic theory. It is there that by confounding needs with satisfiers, confounding chrematistic with the larger oikonomy, by taking the means for the ends and focusing on exchange-value accumulation instead of use-values, prices instead of value, we fail to see that more of the same instead of increasing our wellbeing and supporting life, is doing the opposite. But besides pseudo-satisfiers, which are the main satisfiers our modern culture came to choose, there are even more pernicious kinds of satisfiers. Inhibiting satisfiers are those which, while satisfying a given need (generally over-satisfying it), seriously impair the possibility of meeting other requirements. Paternalistic ways of being and many redistribution schemes while attending, for instance, the need for subsistence or security of those who receive them, may create dependencies and lack of initiative. Thereby, it inhibits individual freedom and creativity. Compulsive or fanatical adherence to ideologies, religious communities, or rituals may enter into this category: while providing a sense of identity or security, it prevents individuals from attending to other needs like freedom, creation, or idleness. Finally, there are the violators or destroyers. These are satisfiers who, while chosen or presented as a way of satisfying a particular need, do not manage to fulfil this need and impair the satisfaction of others too. Many strategies aimed at providing individual and collective security often fall into this category. Thus, George W. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’, beginning with a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, not only did not manage to enhance global security but impaired many other fundamental needs like freedom (once restrictions to mobility, security controls, etc. were imposed), understanding (insofar as information was restricted ‘for security reasons’), among others. It has increased social and cultural polarisation by promoting wars and discourses about ‘civilization wars’ which go on until nowadays, thus not making the world a safer place, while generating all kinds of measures and restrictions impairing the satisfaction of other needs. Along the same lines, in response to the massive number of refugees aiming to enter Europe, the answers given by the European Union states like tightening the borders, creating refugee camps in Greece or Turkey, are not only not solving the problem, but may make it even more challenging to handle them in the future.

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Simultaneously, they impair the satisfaction of many other fundamental needs. As would Donald Trump’s proposed wall between the USA and Mexico, not providing higher security and wellbeing for those who voted for him while impairing the satisfaction of other needs like freedom and understanding. Moreover, channelling resources that could have been used elsewhere leaves different pressing needs behind. These are all examples of destructive satisfiers which start self-reinforcing (or we may say self-defeating) dynamics, increasing instead of reducing the unmet needs they were supposed to satisfy. Usually based on fear, ‘the special attribute of these violators is that they are invariably imposed on people’ (Max-Neef et al., 1989, p. 34). While destructive violators are generally imposed on people (thus, they may be prevalent in authoritarian regimes or at times of war and states of emergency when the executive powers assume unhinged prerogatives), inhibiting satisfiers are usually adhered to by the individual. But both have the characteristic of being associated with fear and the need for expediency and urgent decisions. In the face of reality’s complexity, behaviour is always dichotomist: to do or not to do. Run or stay. Thus, we need to reduce all to a black or white decision. Of course, behaviour can be adaptive and attentive, like dancing, moving our feeds and our body while listening and adapting to our partner’s movements. But once we focus all our attention on a supposed external threat, we quickly lose this focus and look for security. Be it in ideology and past theories, narratives and ways of doing, be it accepting the guidance of a leader or higher authority whom we believe to know what he is doing or which we are too afraid to confront. Thus, giving up our freedom and autonomy, as well as our responsibility. Therefore, it is no coincidence that authoritarian regimes and dictators base their ascent to power and their grip on power, spreading fear and urgency while imposing inhibiting and destructive satisfiers. These satisfiers, usually, instead of solving, tend to worsen the problem, thus increasing fear and the need for urgency. But the same may happen in the so-called free societies when crises, like the immigration crisis or the current COVID-19 pandemic, are wrapped in discourses of fear and emergency, leading to radical ‘emergency measures’ curbing individual rights, freedom and understanding, among others. At their different axiological and ontological levels, the set of chosen satisfiers differentiates oikonomic development models and cultures from each other. It sets the structural and conceptual framework for human wellbeing. Therefore, to enhance self-awareness and understanding of the nature and characteristics of chosen development models, the Human Scale Development approach proposes individual and sometimes collective exercises of filling the different boxes of the Needs Matrix with the particular satisfiers we as individuals or as groups may have chosen. By differentiating the underlying needs from how they are aimed to be satisfied, the satisfiers, we may better understand the crucial importance of our individual and collective choices at the different ontological and axiological levels while pursuing

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our oikonomic development strategies. It helps as a self-reflective exercise on who we are and how we aim to ‘live and hopefully live well’.1 Through this exercise, we become aware that there are potentially infinite and creative ways to satisfy our fundamental needs, which are few and limited. Moreover, we realise that not all sustain our lives and wellbeing in the same way and that oikonomic development is always about choice. Thus, as a bonus, the very exercise of doing it is already a synergic way to satisfy fundamental needs like participation, understanding, and freedom. A potential way to become more self-aware of the systemic and interrelated ways we pursue our oikonomic development aims. Another significant insight can be gained by distinguishing between the endogenous and the exogenous nature of satisfiers. Satisfiers provided by the state or commercial products offered at the marketplace usually are satisfiers that ‘are exogenous to civil society as they are usually imposed, induced, ritualized or institutionalized. In this sense, they are satisfiers that have been traditionally generated at the top and advocated for all. On the other hand, endogenous satisfiers derive from liberating processes which are the outcome of acts of volition generated by the community at the grassroots level. It is this that makes them antiauthoritarian, even though in some cases they may originate in processes promoted by the state’ (Max-Neef et al., 1989, p. 36). The critical point is that exogenous satisfiers, resulting from alien perspectives and interests, tend to be singular, inhibiting, pseudo or even violating nature. Conversely, autonomous satisfiers are not provided by an external actor but derive from a conscious act by the individual. Thus, being endogenously created, individuals acting in freedom may take full responsibility for them and not just act as passive consumers, clients, or citizens. By contrast, once generated by the individual or the community itself, endogenously created satisfiers tend to be more holistic and synergic. Thus, individuals and society knowing their multiple needs and freely aiming to satisfy them, will look for satisfiers that simultaneously meet different needs. Therefore, taking care of our vegetable garden may attend to our need for subsistence and simultaneously appease our need for understanding, autonomy and even idleness if done out of a hobby. If done in a community project, it may satisfy our need for participation, affection, and identity. Autonomous and heteronomous satisfiers tend to be associated as well with different oikonomic behaviours. Self-sufficiency and reciprocity, as we saw, are based on the choices of the individual. Thus, it tends to promote synergic satisfiers. When we produce for ourselves or gift something to a neighbour, we balance needs like subsistence, participation, affection, identity, and understanding. Of course, they may as well follow strong and closed ideological or cultural norms, thus not leaving much choice to the individual who fanatically adheres to an ideology or fearfully submits to traditional social standards and the prevalent satisfiers, which may be

1

Elsewhere, together with Cruz et al. (2009), we propose a more synthetic and visual way to present these results, facilitating the understanding of the lacks and potentialities of given development models and strategies.

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inhibiting or even destroying his autonomy, understanding, and even subsistence and security. The same may be said from free-market relations: while open to individual choice, employing unequal power relations and information, the stronger part may be imposing its own needs over the weaker. That is when predatory behaviour and scale imbalances may lead to abuse and non-synergic and non-symbiotic relations. And here, the greater the scale-imbalances, that is, the difference and distance between the power of the exogenous provider and the internal receiver, the greater the potential abuses and, as we saw, the imbalances in ‘the art of living and living well’. Thus, maybe not surprisingly, within redistributive frameworks, inhibiting or even destructive satisfiers are most prevalent. Authoritarian regimes, or even within capitalist enterprises where the board decides the internal distribution of revenues, are where the intrinsic need for a vertical power structure centralising and redistributing wealth may lead to abuses and growing imbalances between the parts. There where an external counter-balancing force does not place limits to potential abuse, it will eventually happen. Just as has been observed in soviet-style state-capitalism, corrupt regimes or big financial corporations. A vivid example of all these processes and how oikonomic development has to do with the way needs are satisfied by different kinds of satisfiers has been provided by Helena Norberg-Hodge’s account of the changes undergone by Ladakh in the last 50 or so years. As a linguist, she was one of the first westerners speaking Ladakhi to visit Ladakh in the early 1970s. Up to 1975, Ladakh was closed to tourism and shielded from foreign influence by India once, at the border with both Pakistan and China and culturally closer to the Tibetan culture than the Indian one, it was seen as a sensible region. Thus, she could witness first-hand both the traditional way of life primarily untainted by significant Western influence and the changes brought by the adoption of the market-driven and state-sponsored conventional development model, which happened later. Originally, Ladakh’s oikonomy was based primarily on self-sufficiency and the gift-oikonomy, some redistribution within monasteries and markets for very few goods. But, since the 1970s, it has been ‘modernising’ and increasingly being subjected to market forces and government redistributive policies. This change represented not just a radical change in the oikonomy motives guiding their development and relations with their social and ecological environment, but a whole new set of satisfiers replacing the traditional ones whereby their fundamental needs had been satisfied in the past. An ongoing process that has been spreading worldwide and accelerated after World War II. Indeed, European countries, the USA or Japan, have been industrialising and switching to post-industrial oikonomies for an extended time. In contrast, nowadays, some countries and whole societies have been catapulted from traditional, agriculture-based self-reliant oikonomies to free-market, peripheral oikonomies in a short period, sometimes in a few decades. Thereby, the social and ecological imbalances and contradictions are significantly increased once, as Polanyi used to remark, in any transition and particularly in such a big one as becoming a marketoikonomy, the speed of the change is as fundamental if not more so than the

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direction of it. If done too fast, society, culture, ecosystems, and institutions simply cannot adapt to the new emerging realities. Just what happened in Ladakh, transitioning from centuries of a stable and balanced development model to the present-day ecological breakdown and social polarisation and struggles it faces in just a few decades. As Norberg-Hodge (1992, pp. 84 and 85) remembered, ‘At first I couldn’t believe that the Ladakhis could be as happy as they appeared. It took me a long time to accept that the smiles I saw were real. (. . .) Hidden behind the jokes and laughter had to be the same frustration, jealousy, and inadequacy as in my own society. In fact, without knowing it, I had been assuming that there were no significant cultural differences in the human potential for happiness. It was a surprise for me to realise that I had been making such unconscious assumptions, and as a result I think I became more open to experiencing what was really there. Of course the Ladakhis have sorrow and problems, and of course they feel sad when faced with illness or death. What I have seen is not an absolute difference; it is a question of degree. Yet the difference in degree is all-significant. As I return each year to the industrialized world, the contrast becomes more and more obvious. With so much of our lives colored by a sense of insecurity or fear, we have difficulty in letting go and feeling at one with ourselves and our surroundings. The Ladakhis, on the other hand, seem to possess an extended, inclusive sense of self. They do not, as we do, retreat behind boundaries of fear and self-protection. (. . .) I have never met people who seemed so healthy emotionally, so secure, as the Ladakhis. The reasons are, of course, complex and spring from a whole way of life and world view’. It sprung from the whole of their human-scale oikonomic development practice and the culturally defined and specific ways their fundamental human needs were met on a daily basis within their traditional lifestyle. In Ladakh’s traditional oikonomy, chrematistics played a secondary role and was mainly limited to its sporadic relations with the outer world trading surplus goods, dispensable internally. As Norberg-Hodge (1992, pp. 95 and 101) described, ‘in the traditional subsistence economy, money played a minor role, used primarily for luxuries—jewellery, silver, and gold. Basic needs—food, clothing, and shelter— were provided for without money. The labor one needed was free of charge, part of an intricate web of human relationships. (. . .) They had developed skills that enabled them to grow barely at 12,000 feet and to manage yaks and other animals at even higher elevations. People knew how to build houses with their own hands and from materials of the immediate surroundings. The only thing they actually needed from outside the region was salt, for which they traded. They used money in only a limited way’. Their oikonomic behaviour was directed to the (re)production and distribution of use-values, not the markets. It was primarily based on self-sufficiency and an extended reciprocity communitarian network. Most satisfiers were synergic, attending to different ecological, social, and cultural needs at once. Although people and families did possess their private properties like houses, livestock, orchards and possessions, shared work and a culture of reciprocity made that even labouring and working had a synergic effect once done together. It satisfied their shared

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identity needs, among others, and by re-enacting traditional practices and social standings, it attends participation, understanding, and even leisure. Moreover, children and youngsters, not being kept separated in closed schools, participated and learned their traditional skills and culture from the adults and elders in the process. Thus, fundamental needs of understanding, learning by doing, participation, identity, and security living and interacting in a social and ecological milieu in which they could feel secure and confident were provided to the younger, without requiring separate, instrumental institutions. Ladakh was an example of it. ‘For centuries, people worked as equals and friends. (. . .) The house had a festive atmosphere whenever Tsering and Sonam Dolma’s friends came to work with them as part of the traditional lhangsde practice. Sonam used to cook special food for the occasion. But in the last couples of years, the practice has gradually disappeared and their farm near Leh is increasingly dependent on paid labor. (...) The festive atmosphere of friends working together has gone; these labors are strangers, sometimes Nepalis or Indians from the plains who have no common language. (. . .) Now that there is paid labor during the harvest, the person paying money wants to pay as little as possible, while the person receiving wants to have as much as possible. Relationships change. The money becomes a wedge between people, pushing them further and further apart’ (Norberg-Hodge, 1992, pp. 102, 103 and 102 again). As a result, growing perceptions of insecurity and feelings of fear, mistrust, and greediness, each one looking for their chrematistic autonomy and security, could be observed. ‘As people find themselves dependent on a very different economic system for all their needs and vulnerable to the vagaries of inflation, it is not strange that they should become preoccupied with money. For two thousand years in Ladakh, a kilo of barley has been a kilo of barley, but now you cannot be sure of its value. (. . .) “It’s terrible” Ladakhi friends would say to me, “everyone is getting so greedy. Money was never important before, but now it’s all people can think about”. (. . .) The changing economy makes it difficult to remain a farmer. Previously, with cooperative labor between people, farmers had no need for money. Now, unable to pay larger and larger wages for farm hands, some are forced to abandon the villages to earn money in the city. For those who stay, the pressure increases to grow food for profit, instead of food for themselves. Cash cropping becomes the norm as farmers are pushed by the forces of development to become dependent on the market economy. The new economy also increases the gap between rich and poor. In the traditional economy, there are differences in wealth, but its accumulation had natural limits. You could only care for so many yaks or store so many kilos of barley. Money, on the other hand, is easily stored in the bank, and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ (Norberg-Hodge, 1992, pp. 102–104). Particularly, once value is assessed in monetary terms and a kilo of barely is no longer a kilo of barely but a fluctuating exchange-value whose price may constantly change, the whole social and cultural structures start crumbling down. A process that can be observed worldwide in the last 50 years or so. Thus, in a self-reinforcing

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dynamic between chrematistic, technological and cultural processes, diverse and self-reliant oikonomic structures have been replaced by market-based development processes. Meaningful labour is replaced by alienated one, meaningful tools and culturally embedded technologies by ‘efficient’ technological systems and structures. ‘In watching Ladakh get “developed”, it has been difficult to say which is the more fundamental agent of change, money or technology. But it is obvious that they are closely interlinked and form the cornerstone of a systemic transformation of society. (. . .) One of the most striking lessons that changing Ladakh has taught me is that while the tools of the modern world in themselves save time, the new way of life as a whole has the effect of taking time away. As a result of modern development, Ladakhis in the modern sector have become part of an economic system in which people have to compete at the speed of the available technologies. This, it seems to me, is a tremendously important point. Once the society in which you operate has telephones, you are at a great disadvantage—economically as well as psychologically—if you do not have one. Delivering your messages in person is in practice not a real alternative’ (Norberg-Hodge, 1992, pp. 106–107). Nor is not having a smartphone an acceptable alternative to modern city-dwellers willing to keep up with everyday life and current labour conditions. Just as having a fast internet connection puts brokers in the City of London, Wall Street, Singapore or Shanghai at a great chrematistic and psychological advantage concerning those who do not. Encompassing all these changes is the gradual growth of the chrematistic oikonomic logic, subordinating to its instrumental, means-to-an-end exchangevalue logic, growing domains of life. Thus, increasingly synergic, autonomously (re)created autochthonous synergic satisfiers, which were proven by an extensive co-evolutionary adaptive learning process and embedded in the traditional culture, technique and oikonomic practices, are being replaced by a whole set of heteronomous satisfiers of singular and, predominantly, pseudo or even inhibiting and violating nature. And here, both the increasing reliance on the markets and the new technologies played a crucial role. Life may flourish and develop its full potential and creativity within a culture of sufficiency and the search for ethical and esthetical balances. Here, true wealth and the overcoming of poverty are to be found—not by continuous material growth and reproduction of unsatisfactory satisfiers, but by keeping ecological, social, and cultural limits and balances. As we saw following Illich, modern industrial institutions evolved to provide particular ways of satisfying human needs and thus reducing ‘poverty’. But focusing on its criteria and objectified representation of the goods and services it may provide as a need in itself, they simply start growing more and more. Ignoring that, once certain thresholds have been surpassed, counterproductive dynamics take the upper hand so that further growth instead of increasing wellbeing reduces it. After a certain point, the marginal gains obtained from further development are smaller than the losses resulting from deepening the radical monopoly modern institutions and tools place on satisfying specific needs. Schools are monopolising education. Expertise and specialisation replace traditional

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knowledge and self-sufficiency, while motorised vehicles monopolise transport and individual mobility. Not just in Ladakh, but everywhere local knowledge and cultures are being lost by confining students in closed classrooms, usually with other same-age pupils and members from the same sociocultural and oikonomic background, alienating them from their social, cultural, and ecological local world. Indeed, as can be seen from different studies worldwide, the growth of institutionalised schooling systems, the increase in hours, years and, as well, the intensification of these hours through the continuous enlargement of the curriculum supposed to be covered, is nowadays leading to lower instead of higher degrees of understanding. Analogously, the continuous growth in antibiotics is leading nowadays to higher and not lower risks of bacterial infections globally, by the selection of super-bugs in hospitals and a decline of human’s natural defences. More importantly, it leads to a growing dependency on institutionalised medicine. At the same time, individuals and communities lost their ability to take care of their health by themselves with traditional, natural, and local medicine and techniques. Similarly, instead of alleviating poverty, modern development is increasing subjective poverty by nurturing our wants and unfulfilled consumption desires and leading to growing states of misery by robbing people of their self-reliant and community-supported traditional ways of attending to their needs. Once in the so-called ‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped countries’ of the third world, traditional reciprocity networks are dismantled, the means for self-sufficiency are lost, and no adequate redistributive state policies exist, growing degrees of misery and scanty subsistence, security, understanding, participation, freedom, and identity, among others, can be observed. Thus, modern development strategies lead to individual and social pathologies, violence, and suffering instead of increasing wellbeing and social and ecological balances—precisely what Norberg-Hodge could see in Ladakh, where growing signs of distress and conflict appear. In terms of poverty, in the 1970s, Gorz still assumed that going barefoot in Peru or by foot in China instead of on a bicycle, were perceived as poverty. After decades of development, both Peruvians and Chinese aspire to possess cars and many other sign values instead. Thus, increasing the gap between their wants and desires and their capacity to satisfy them through their oikonomic behaviour. Similarly, in the so-called ‘developed nations’, we can see how just a tiny minority manages to keep on with the consumer-frenzy and possess the latest models and the most prestigious brands. Notwithstanding, even for them, we may find growing depression, stress and feelings of fear, anxiety and insecurity amid the material opulence and over-growth once their fundamental needs of participation, affection, creativity, autonomy, among others, are not adequately met. In the early 1970s, when Ladakh’s transition to a ‘modern economy’ started, its fellow and independent Himalayan state of Bhutan proposed another approach to development. It was in 1972 that the 4th King of Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, declared that ‘Gross National Happiness (GNH) is more important than Gross Domestic Product (GDP)’. From then on, Bhutan centred its development efforts on finding a holistic approach towards notions of progress and giving

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equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing. It has, since then, developed into a comprehensive and articulated proposal, included in Bhutan’s constitution. In 2011, the UN unanimously adopted a General Assembly resolution, introduced by Bhutan with support from 68 member states, calling for a ‘holistic approach to development’ to promote sustainable happiness and wellbeing. It has also proposed a GNH index and periodically assesses the changes in its population’s qualitative and subjective feelings and perceptions about their quality of life and happiness. Notwithstanding, being a state-sponsored and institutionalised project and not an autonomous, bottom-up development, it also has drawbacks and limits. Notwithstanding, it recovers a fundamental aspect of the oikonomy: focusing on life and wellbeing, human needs, and not simply reproducing more and more satisfiers promoting chrematistic growth.2 In the meantime, some of the highest suicide rates can be found in the so-called rich countries, showing that chrematistic growth and consumption does not mean that fundamental needs are being satisfied. Indeed, in some cases, our modern way of trying to reassess our identity through chrematistic consumption may lead to severe imbalances and misery, like in the case of compulsive buying disorder (CBD). ‘Found worldwide, [the disorder] has a lifetime prevalence of 5.8% in the US general population’ (Black, 2007). While continuous shopping is accepted as normal behaviour in our chrematistic-centred oikonomic practice, be it online, be it simply as social activity meeting friends in malls and Main Streets, at a pathological level, people affected by CBD may spend considerable time anticipating, preparing, and finally shopping compulsively. Like for other kinds of addictions, ‘in the first phase, the person with CBD develops thoughts, urges, or preoccupations with either having a specific item or with the act of shopping. In the second phase, the person prepares for shopping and spending. This can include decisions on when and where to go, on how to dress, and even which credit cards to use. Considerable research may have taken place about sale items, new fashions, or new shops. The third phase involves the actual shopping experience, which many individuals with CBD describe as intensely exciting, and can even lead to a sexual feeling. Finally, the act is completed with a purchase, often followed by a sense of let-down, or disappointment with oneself. In a study of the antecedents and consequences of CBD, Miltenberger et al. reported that negative emotions (e.g., depression, anxiety, boredom, self-critical thoughts, anger) were the most commonly cited antecedents to CBD, while euphoria or relief from the negative emotions were the most common consequence’ (Black, 2007, referring to the studies of Koran et al., 2006, Miltenberger et al., 2003, Schlosser et al., 1994). With the CBD, we have a pathological manifestation pointing to a state of misery that may lead to severe impairments. Notwithstanding, it has become a widespread collective phenomenon and image of modern poverty and imbalances at lower

2

Plenty of literature can be found about Buthan’s experiment. Maybe the source references can be found in the webpage http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/ of the Centre for Bhutan studies and GNP where a lot of material and books can be freely downloaded.

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grades. Thus, we can conclude with Alphandéry et al. (1992, pp. 109–110) that, if we seriously aim to alleviate poverty and foster development, what is required is ‘a complete reversal of perspective on the nature of the consumer society. Contrary to all appearances, this is not a society of abundance. By abandoning the primitive rule according to which needs, “wealth” or “poverty” are based on human relations and are manifested in the concrete and symbolic sharing of goods; and by replacing it with the modern principle of the insatiability of individual wants and the ideal of accumulation of goods, industrial societies condemned themselves to a struggle, properly infinite, against scarcity’. As Baudrillard (1998, pp. 67–68) argued, ‘the collective “improvidence” and “prodigality” characteristic of primitive societies are the sign of real affluence. We have only the signs of affluence. Beneath a gigantic apparatus of production, we anxiously eye the signs of poverty and scarcity. But poverty consists, says Sahlins, neither in a small quantity of goods, nor simply in a relation between ends and means: it is, above all, a relation between human beings. The basis for the confidence of primitive peoples and for the fact that, within hunger, they live a life of plenty, is ultimately the transparency and reciprocity of social relations. It is the fact that no monopolization whatever of nature, the soil, the instruments or products of “labour” intervenes to obstruct exchange and institute scarcity. There is among them no accumulation, which is always the source of power. In the economy of the gift and symbolic exchange, a small and always finite quantity of goods is sufficient to create general wealth since those goods pass constantly from one person to the other. Wealth has its basis not in goods, but in the concrete exchange between persons. (. . .) It is not, therefore, paradoxical to argue that in our “affluent” societies abundance is lost and that it will not be restored by an interminable increase in productivity, by unleashing new productive forces. Since the structural definition of abundance and wealth lies in social organization, only a revolution of the social organization and of social relations could bring those things about. Will we return, one day, beyond the market economy, to prodigality? Instead of prodigality, we have “consumption”, forced consumption in perpetuity, twin sister to scarcity. It was social logic which brought primitive peoples the “first” (and only) affluent society. It is our social logic which condemns us to luxurious and spectacular penury’. The critical point to retain from this quote of Baudrillard is not to nurture a nostalgic return to simple, primitive life connected with Nature and community. The point is that wealth and wellbeing are not found in objects and countable exchangevalues and money. They emerge through relations. This has been confirmed in our modern world by the ‘Harvard Study of Adult Development’3 conducted over more than 80 years. By following the life of 724 men since they were teenagers in 1938 and having expanded to include other individuals and some of their sons and daughters, the researchers concluded that the quality of our relations, more than anything else, is at the source of our health and wealth.

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https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/

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‘Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes’.4 By reducing value to prices and by reducing being, doing and interacting to having, we forget that use-values realise themselves only in the act of consumption. Thereby, the use-value of any given satisfiers has to do with the way and contexts in which it is consumed. It refers to different ways of having, being, doing, and interacting. It happens through a relation, its quality being given by the quality of this relation. The purely quantitative aspects of exchange-values place them out of time and space, one billion dollars being one billion dollars, always and everywhere. Notwithstanding, use-values manifest themselves through time, being actualized by being consumed. They are a property of the whole, the relation, changing continuously from one context to another. Time is of the essence of any relation. And it is precisely time which, through the growing acceleration and accumulation in our societies, is becoming a scarce resource. Thereby further reducing our wellbeing amid our profusion of possessions. As Wolfgang Sachs (1999, pp. 208 and 211–212) argued, ‘indeed for many, in particular the well-to-do, it is not money that is in short supply, but time. (. . .) Beyond a certain income level, the marginal utility of more available time is higher than the marginal utility of more available income. (. . .) Beyond a certain number, things can become the thieves of time. Goods must be chosen, bought, set up, used, experienced, maintained, tidied away, dusted, repaired, stored and disposed of. Even the most beautiful and valuable objects unavoidably gnaw away at the most restricted of all resources: time. (. . .) Scarcity of time has therefore become the nemesis of affluence. In fact, in a multi-option society people suffer not from a lack but from an excess of opportunities. While wellbeing is threatened by a shortage of means in the first case, it is threatened by a confusion about goals in the second. The proliferation of options make it increasingly difficult to know what one wants, to decide what one does not want, and to cherish what one has. (. . .) Viewed up close, one can say that wellbeing has two dimensions: the material and the non-material. Material satisfaction is obtained by acquiring and utilizing certain objects or materials—for example, buying food and eating a multi-course meal will satisfy the need to fill the stomach. Immaterial satisfaction stems from the way in which the object and materials are used—enjoying Italian cooking and convivial company over dinner gives another dimension of pleasure. Similarly, many objects achieve their full value only when they are put to use, enjoyed and cultivated. However, and this is the dilemma, obtaining immaterial satisfaction calls for attention, demands involvement, requires time. (. . .) The conclusion is obvious. Having too many things makes time for non-material pleasure shrink; an overabundance of

4

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-beenshowing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/

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options can easily diminish full satisfaction. So, poverty of time degrades the utility of a wealth of goods. (. . .) As it turns out, having much contradicts living well. Frugality, therefore, is a key to wellbeing’.5 Notwithstanding, we still keep multiplying the options, accelerating our social life, and are bombarded by thousands of advertising and buying options demanding our attention daily. In the same way that a retrospective look at past ecological and civilisation collapses lays bare their inability to adapt their cultural and institutional practices to the limits of their ecosystem, it should strike us that, at a time of growing ecological and social imbalances and inequalities in which the limitations and costs of further growth become more evident, we still devote enormous environmental and human resources to increase this very production and consumption dynamics. Some of the most creative minds are dedicated to marketing and publicity whose aim could be defined in short as to (re)produce poverty by reassessing and creating unmet consumption needs of certain products and brands. Successful movie directors and big productions are mobilised to produce advertising. At the same time, some contemporary sporting heroes, celebrities, and so-called ‘trend-setters’ earn millions to advertise, from biscuits and chocolate to cars and airlines. Thus, those like Michael Jordan, Roger Federer, Cristiano Ronaldo, Usain Bolt, Messi, Neymar, or Tiger Woods earn more from advertising and being the exclusive ‘ambassadors’ of particular brands as they do from their already huge earnings related to their work. Many even create their brands and product lines sold by millions worldwide, like the European big football clubs, who, more than sporting institutions, become local or global brands devoted to the chrematistic ‘art of getting rich’ through merchandising and selling to a global audience. Not just that. The effects of smells, colours, or the products’ disposition on the shelves are carefully studied and used to increase sales, while architects design sophisticated showcases and department stores to improve the ‘shopping experience’. Previously, hidden cameras were placed to get information about the consumer’s behaviour. Nowadays, and increasingly so, algorithms and artificial intelligence is developed to find better and more focused ways to advertise and build some of the most important companies in the world. For instance, Amazon became a retail giant in just a few decades by using sophisticated algorithms to produce customised online publicity for its clients. Others like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook build their chrematistic empires on selling advertisements cleverly placed through algorithms developed by some of the best trained mathematical minds, informed by the knowledge and expertise of insightful psychologists and communication specialists. Indeed, the so-called artificial intelligence (AI) finds one of its main applications in learning how to trick our minds and behaviour into consuming more. ‘Black Friday’ Christmas sales has become a worldwide phenomenon, even for non-Christians. Thus, nowadays, everywhere, marketing and publicity are at the centre of our contemporary spectacle society. It has, too, entered our

5

Quoting Hörning et al. (1990, pp. 147–168) for the distinction between material and immaterial satisfaction.

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current representative political system where political campaigns are hardly distinguishable from the careful launching and marketing of new products. Simultaneously, these same politicians sell a ‘green discourse’ and participate in global forums to curb green-gas emissions and reduce contamination. But no mention is made to the simple question of whether it is sensible to continue fostering our wants the way we do. Would not stopping from boosting our desires in such a massive way significantly reduce our consumption levels and, thus, related environmental destruction? Would not it simultaneously open the way to work and produce less? Could not we lead more meaningful and straightforward lives working and consuming less instead of being trapped by the chrematistic growth drive? Should not we be focusing on quality and relations instead of quantity and growth? Our hypothetical intergalactic anthropologist would undoubtedly have trouble understanding how, in the face of the increasingly acute and visible imbalances of the hegemonic development model, so much energy and resources are placed on deepening and promoting it. As did the Easter Islanders, we keep on building bigger and bigger statues, not losing our faith in our beliefs, while the signs of stress and limits to it keep mounting up. Through the continuous (re)production of pseudo-satisfiers (when not destructive and inhibiting ones) and of the forced obsolescence of wealth, we live in a permanent state of scarcity, making the overcoming of poverty an impossibility as long as the system is based on a continuous (re)production of unmet needs and wants. We forget what traditional knowledge always knew: moderation, the right tone, and balances are not just the essence of beauty and ethics, but the foundation of ‘living and living well’. Instead, we keep growing and assuming that we have to keep doing so to attain the ‘Millennium Development Goals’. As aimed by the United Nations, governments worldwide and many well-meaning philanthropists and NGOs, these goals are not to be attained by promoting local reliance and other endogenous oikonomic forms but by promoting more chrematistic growth. Consequently, everywhere, just as observed by Norberg-Hodge (1992, p. 121) in remote Himalaya, people ‘I have watched a whole range of different pressures—all operating at the same time—pull the Ladakhis away from their own resources. The reasons are extremely complex and have to do with the systemic transformation of a whole way of life. However, it is very clear that the pull to the center is to a great extent a direct consequence of deliberate planning. The West’s addiction to economic growth puts pressure on others to ‘develop’, and in order to create the conditions for development, governments expend vast resources to restructure society. Everywhere, the underlying infrastructure—from centralized energy production to Western, urbanizing education—is essentially the same. And so, too, are the consequent problems’. Becoming part of larger units, people lose their autonomy everywhere while chrematistics and redistribution oikonomics take the upper hand. Ladhakhis have become one among nearly 1.4 billion Indians being affected by decisions taken in New Delhi. From being self-reliant, Ladhakhis have become consumers and Indian citizens. As Norberg-Hodge (1992, pp. 123) showed, it affects their cultural practice as well: ‘the cultural centralization that occurs through the media is also contributing to a growing insecurity as well as passivity. Traditionally, there was lots of dancing,

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singing and theatre. People of all ages joined in. (. . .) Everyone knew how to sing, to act, to play music. Now that the radio has come to Ladakh, you do not need to sing your own songs or tell your own stories. You can sit and listen to the best singer, the best storyteller’. Thus, to satisfy their needs, increasingly people rely on exogenously provided satisfiers. Ladakhis, as elsewhere, depend on their relations to the markets or government decisions and support on which they have no or little power. Thus, a growing feeling of insecurity. ‘As they lose the sense of security and identity that springs from deep, long-lasting connections to other people, Ladakhis are starting to develop doubts about who they are. At the same time, tourism and the media are presenting a new image of who they should be. They are meant to lead an essentially Western life-style—eating dinner at a dining table, driving a car, using a washing machine. All sorts of consumer goods are held up as prerequisites of civilised society; modern kitchens and bathrooms become important status symbols. The images are telling them to be different, to be better than they are. Surprisingly, perhaps, modernisation is leading to a loss of individuality. As people become self-conscious and insecure, they feel pressure to conform, to live an idealised image. By contrast, in the traditional village, where everyone wears the same clothes and looks the same to the casual observer, there seems to be more freedom to relax and be who you really are. As part of a close-knit community, people feel secure enough to be themselves. As local economic and political ties are broken, the people around you become more and more anonymous. At the same time, life speeds up and mobility increases—making even familiar relationships more superficial and brief. The connections between people are reduced largely to externals. People come to be identified with what they have rather than what they are, and disappear behind the clothes and other belongings. Perhaps the most tragic of all the vicious circles I have observed in Ladakh is the way in which individual insecurity contributes to a weakening of family and community ties, which in turn further shakes individual self-esteem’ (NorbergHodge, 1992, pp. 124–125). At the same time, these are self-reinforcing dynamics: growing individualisation and insecurity nurtures consumerism and ‘a hunger for material status symbols. The need for recognition and acceptance fuels the drive to acquire possessions (. . .). Ultimately this is far more important motivating factor than a fascination for the things themselves. It is heart-breaking to see people buying things to be admired, respected, and ultimately loved, when in fact it almost inevitably has the opposite effect. (. . .) A cycle is set in motion in which people become more and more divided from themselves and from another’ (Norberg-Hodge, 1992, pp. 124–125). Just as elsewhere around the world, growing insecurity and the loss of community and family ties is leading people, paradoxically in a time of globalisation, to look for strong identity forms. Thus, there is an increasing polarisation and fragmentation: ‘I have seen people divided from another in many ways. A gap is developing between old and young, male and female, rich and poor, Buddhist and Muslim. The newly created division between modern, educated expert and illiterate, backward farmer is

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perhaps the biggest of all. Modernized inhabitants of Leh have more in common with someone from Delhi or Calcutta than with their own relatives who have remained on the land, and they tend to look down on anyone less modern. (...) Competition for jobs and political representation within the newly centralized structures is increasingly dividing Ladakhis. Ethnic and religious differences have taken on a political dimension, causing bitterness and enmity on a scale hitherto unknown. This new rivalry is one of the most painful divisions that I have seen in Ladakh. Ironically, it has grown in proportion with the decline of traditional religious devotion. (. . .) The present development model is intensely centralizing, pulling diverse peoples from rural areas into large urban centers and placing power and decision making in the hands of a few. In these centers, job opportunities are scarce, community ties are broken, and competition increases dramatically. Young men in particular, who have been educated for jobs in the modern sector, find themselves engaged in a struggle for survival. In this situation, any religious or ethnic differences quite naturally become exaggerated and distorted’ (Norberg-Hodge, 1992, pp. 125, 128 and 129). Having written three decades ago and despite her efforts to create a ‘counter development’ movement in Ladakh, Helena Norberg-Hodge is certainly deeply disillusioned by today’s reality in Ladakh of increasing social polarisation, ethnic violence, as well as near-ecological breakdown due to excess tourism. Thus, should we all be, knowing that we live in a wonderful but isolated and limited pale blue dot, as the late Carl Sagan defined it. We are still unable to reverse the increasing social polarisation and ecological imbalances resulting from our growth-centred, modern chrematistic development model. Thereby, it may be worth quoting Carl Sagan (1994, pp. 6–7) more in length to close this chapter, inspired as he was by the image of our planet taken by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990, Valentine’s day, just before departing our planetary neighbourhood for the fringes of the solar system, turning around for one last look at its home planet. At about 6.4 billion kilometres (4 billion miles) away, the Earth appears barely perceptible as a tiny pale blue dot, leading Sagan to wonder: ‘Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable

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inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known’.

References Alphandéry, P., Bitoun, P., & Dupont, Y. (1992). O Equívoco Ecológico—Riscos Políticos. Brasiliense. Baudrillard, J. (1998). The consumer society—Myths and structures. Sage. Black, D. W. (2007, February). A review of compulsive buying disorder. World Psychiatry, 6(1), 14–18. Cruz, I., Stahel, A., & Max-Neef, M. (2009, May). Towards a systemic development approach: Building on the human-scale development paradigm. Ecological Economics, 69(7), 2021–2030. Gorz, A. (1978). Ecologie et Politique. Seuil. Hörning, K. H., Gerhard, A., & Michailow, M. (1990). Zeitpioniere. Flexible Arbeitszeiten—neuer Lebensstil. Suhrkamp. Illich, I. (1975). Tools for conviviality. Fontana/Collins. Koran, L. M., Faber, R. J., Aboujaoude, E., Large, M. D., & Serpe, R. T. (2006, October). Estimated prevalence of compulsive buying in the United States. American Journal of Psychiatry, 163(10), 1806–1812. Lipovetsky, G. (1994). The empire of fashion—Dressing modern democracy. Princeton University Press. Max-Neef, M., Elizalde, A., & Hopenhayn, M. (1989). Human scale development. Development Dialogue. 1989(1). Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. Miltenberger, R. G., Redlin, J., Crosby, R., Stickney, M., Mitchell, J., Wonderlich, S., Faber, R., & Smyth, J. (2003, March). Direct and retrospective assessment of factors contributing to compulsive buying. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 34, 1–9. Norberg-Hodge, H. (1992). Ancient futures—Learning from Ladakh. Sierra Club Books. Sachs, W. (1999). Planet dialectics—Explorations in environment & development. Zed Books. Sagan, C. (1994). Pale blue dot. Ballantine Books. Schlosser, S., Black, D. W., Repertinger, S., & Free, D. (1994). Compulsive buying: Demography, phenomenology, and comorbidity in 46 subjects. General Hospital Psychiatry, 16, 205–212.

Chapter 14

Money, Cancer, and Finances: Why the Rich Get Rich, and the Poor Stay Poor?

During this last half-century, after Norberg-Hodge first visited Ladakh, not just has the whole world been included and subordinated to modern chrematistic, but a far more disruptive kind of chrematistics, namely financial capitalism, has taken the upper hand. By writing my previous book and thinking more about how our present monetary system works, I became more aware of how deeply flawed our current oikonomic practice is (Stahel, 2020a). I came to understand how growing polarization and income inequality is just not an accident but structurally embedded in our current system and methods (Stahel, 2020b). A few years before, Thomas Piketty became world famous by writing a striking bestseller about income inequality. It is an academic, well-researched, and data-based book. It is the kind of book no one would ever believe in becoming a New York Times number one bestseller, selling more than one and a half million copies short after its English version appeared, given the dry and academic way it has been written. It was not that economics and such an academically written book, devoid of any mysterious plot or incendiary rhetoric, suddenly became attractive to a larger public. It was because of its central theme, namely the growing income inequality, which is growing worldwide and generating increasing social imbalances and polarization. In his book, Piketty debunked the post-war optimism and the so-called Kuznets Curve, pointing to a supposedly automatic reduction of inequality in the advanced industrial nations. A theory I had repeatedly been taught as a student and which, as it goes in economics, was based on a logical model, not on empirical facts. As it happens, the so-called ‘trickle-down’ effect whereby the increasing wealth of the rich would benefit the poor is often quoted to legitimise unequal growth dynamics or tax cuts for the rich. Indeed, it was a central ideological argument used during the ‘Brazilian Miracle’ of the early 1970s when it was argued that we needed first to grow the pie, then distribute it. It never happened, but the theory was still believed by conventional economic theory. Piketty brought the empirical facts and showed something all could see, namely the growing income gap between the so-called 1% and the other 99% of the world population. Between the very rich and the rest of the population. He showed that free markets were not driving us towards general equilibrium and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_14

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peace grounded on common interest but growing social polarization and income inequality. Kuznets hypothesised that industrialising nations experience a rise and subsequent decline in economic inequality, following a supposedly ‘Bell-shaped curve’. Notwithstanding, particularly after the 1970s, a steady increase in inequality could be observed both in newly industrialised and advanced industrial societies, as shown by numerous studies and data. Indeed, the idea of the 1% or even the 0.1% as concentrating the bulk of the wealth had become a popular way of looking at the world. A small number of increasingly rich people whose wealth just keeps on growing, while a majority is being left behind. Piketty pointed out that the growing income inequality observed in the developed and developing countries results from the capital gains growing faster than the gains obtained by labour. But, by not clearly distinguishing between various kinds of capital income like rent, financial profits, dividends, royalties, and other capital gains in his statistical analysis—something which, for methodological reasons, is hard if not impossible to do at the scale done by Piketty anyway—he did not shed light on a crucial distinction between capital gains derived from productive capital investments and those resulting from purely speculative gains. His data and studies do not distinguish between incomes deriving from producing different and new wealth from those resulting from the mere increase in prices of properties like land, real estate, artwork, antiquities, collectables, stocks, and other financial instruments and goods. By not distinguishing between these different sources of capital income, Piketty does not sufficiently highlight the role of monetary inflation resulting from the steady increase in the money supply as an increasingly important factor leading to the growing income gap between the ‘have and the have-not’. Every society, every civilisation, has its ways whereby some members have privileges and stand higher in the social hierarchy. From the patricians and plebeians in ancient Rome, nobles and serfs in the Middle Ages, caste system in India, slaves and slave owners in the colonial times, to our present world. Some are living in privilege, while others are doing the lion’s share of the work. While writing my book and thinking about the role financial markets had assumed in our contemporary world, I could not stop wondering to think about how it comes that, for instance, Bill Gates after retiring from Microsoft and devoting a significant share of his wealth to charity, remained among the wealthiest individuals in the world. Indeed, how come he was becoming much richer than when spending long hours working as the CEO of the company he created? The answer is that he created Cascade, an investment company whose investments in stocks of various companies and other financial assets continuously fluctuate according to their market valuations. Notwithstanding, globally, its financial assets have been growing at incredible rates. His wealth is no longer a result of producing and selling something but simply from speculatively buying financial assets and selling them at a profit later. The first million dollars of his wealth Bill Gates made through long hours spent creating Microsoft (he has been working 16 h a day for at least 5 years, personally checking every line of code in his early ventures). Nowadays, I learned, his wealth has been rising at an astonishing rate, more than a hundred dollars at the ticking of

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every second, 24 h a day, 365 days a year in 2019 alone. This all while the owner of this capital, himself, was doing whatever he pleases. After the pandemic, his fortunes have skyrocketed, as for other billionaires whose main fortunes come from speculating in financial markets and not from investing in the real-world economy. Indeed, during the pandemic, his wealth has been rising at more than US$820 each second, earning a million every 20 min or so. The point is that Bill Gates, now retired from his paid activities, earns much more than before. He no longer earns his money and daily bread by the sweat of his face, but from his money, begetting more money. Without adding any new wealth in use-value terms to the world, his wealth is increasing just because the monetary value of his assets is steadily growing. As does the wealth of all these new hyper-rich figures who possess more wealth than they actually would be able to spend during many lifetimes, thus investing it in stocks, artwork, bitcoins, or real-estate bought not to be used, but to be sold at a later moment at a profit. I had the experience myself, as can anyone who has some money to invest in financial assets nowadays. With some funds, even conservatively invested, and possessing a minimum initial capital, I earned more than teaching at the university. Thus too, companies like WhatsApp or Uber, although operating at a loss for years, once gone public converted their founders into new millionaires and part of the new elite once eager financial speculators have acquired their initial offerings at record prices. From then on, just like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, they can live by cleverly investing their money in stocks and other financial assets if they choose. They just need to let their money grow by itself, self-referentially. Already Aristotle, as we saw, from all kinds of ways of getting rich, considered financial profit, money begetting more money, as being the most unnatural and dangerous once it had no limit. There seems to be no limit to the fortunes of those billionaires whose wealth exist as zeros and ones, abstract numbers constantly fluctuating according to the whims of the financial markets. It may be no coincidence either that, given the limited opportunities to invest their money productively during the pandemic, more billionaires have been added to Forbe’s list of billionaires worldwide than ever, nearly 500, while income inequality has soared too. Once cells start to multiply in our bodies without considering the organism’s needs, they become growing tumours and a threat to our health. The same happens with money once, instead of being used as a means to an end, it starts growing in a self-referential manner as financial capital. Productive capital may be used to acquire production factors, consumer money to acquire goods or services to be consumed. By contrast, speculative financial capital is used to buy something cheap and sell it at a profit later, although unchanged. It grows by itself, time intervening, between being bought and sold. To better understand the effects of this kind of self-centred accumulation of exchange values, we may differentiate three alternative forms whereby someone aims to enrich himself by accumulating more money, using money as capital. As commercial capital, money is being used to buy commodities at a given time and space, aiming to sell them at a different time and space at a profit. In terms of the intrinsic use-value of that which is being bought and sold, nothing has changed. The

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merchant just bought something to be sold again somewhere else at a profit. But by changing the spatial-temporal context of the commodity, new use-values for the consumer are created. Thus, the merchant’s profit results from providing this service as an intermediate link between production and consumption, providing the dislocation of a commodity from one spatial-temporal context to another. Alternatively, as we saw, as productive investment capital, money can be used to acquire certain goods and services in the form of resources and production factors, combining and transforming them into new goods and services to be sold at a profit. Thus, be it in the agriculture and other primary sectors aiming to change nature through human labour, be it in industry or the service sector, new wealth is being produced by combining and transforming existing use-values to make different use-values for a profit. In both cases, commercial or industrial/investment capital, capital is used productively, creating new use-values and, eventually, again in exchange-value terms. But, it radically changes in nature once money manifests itself as speculative financial capital. Here no changes in the use-value of commodities are attempted. Still, directly a growth in the exchange-value is expected by exchanging money for hopefully more money, time intervening between giving/lending the money at the beginning of the process and receiving it back added to interest or a financial profit at the end of the process of it. The time-lapse intervening may be as short as those intervening in high-frequency trading or as long as those intervening between some speculative acquisition and selling of great masterworks and real estate. In all these cases, assets are bought not for their primary use (stamps for sending letters, artworks to be admired or grains in future markets to be consumed) but for their exchange-value, like money. Here the commodity is bought not because of its primary use but, as in the example given by Aristotle of the shoe that can be used to walk or be exchanged for something else, for its secondary use. The commodity is used as money, being financialised. That is so because money is defined as a commodity whose use-value is to be used as a means for exchange. We only accept money in exchange for a use-value we may be selling because we trust its value to be exchanged for something else further down the line. That is precisely what financial investors do. They acquire something for their money because they believe it may be exchanged for something else further down the line. Even when acquiring artwork, jewellery or real estate or commodities in future markets, these are not bought to be used but as an investment to be sold at a profit later. Thus, their use-value is no longer their primary use (artwork to be admired, jewellery to be used, and penthouses to be inhabited) but their secondary use as speculative, self-growing, exchange-value. From that perspective, the more and the faster their exchangevalue grows, the higher their use-value as a financial asset. Once the valuation of financial assets depends on other speculators investing and buying the same asset, it is not a matter of what we are talking about—whether bitcoins, artwork, jewellery, gold, or junk bonds—but whether more speculative money gets direct into its markets, pushing its price up. Every time capital circulates not as commercial or industrial capital, creating new use-values in its wake, but is invested hopefully earning more money later, we have

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money beget more money. We observe an ongoing growth and accumulation of exchange-values which is not accompanied by the creation of new wealth in use-value terms. That is precisely what is happening nowadays with the process some authors termed ‘financialisation’: ‘a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production’, as defined by Greta Krippner following Giovanni Arrighi (Arrighi, 1994; Krippner, 2005). Like cancer cells which multiply not as a part of the growth and regeneration of the organism but just keep on growing and multiplying on their own, money used speculatively to earn more money may generate a speculative profit to the investor, but has not contributed to the larger whole it is but a part of. Cancer cells do not contribute to the organism; speculative money does not create any wealth in its wake. Thus, like growing tumours in an organism, consuming more and more of its vital energy while squeezing and not allowing healthy cells and organs to fulfil their role and contribute to the organism’s health, financial bubbles attract more and more money until they eventually burst. Whenever something is acquired not because of its use-value to be consumed by a final consumer, to be transformed by the merchant connecting producers and consumers, or by the producer producing new use-values, but is acquired as a speculative investment aimed to be resold or recovered at a profit later, it becomes money. It is financialised. From that perspective, we can see that money may be classified in terms of its degree of liquidity, that is, how easy and fast a good or service can be converted into a medium for exchange. Some forms of money have immediate liquidity—thus a high use-value as money—others not being as readily accepted or having to be reconverted into high-liquidity money first, possessing a lower use-value as money. During wartime, cigarettes often became a form of high liquidity currency as they were a ready means of exchange. They were widely used and accepted by the community as means of exchange, even by non-smokers. Nowadays, fiat money issued by central banks has immediate liquidity where they are legal tender or within social contexts where they are trusted and accepted. The same goes for electronic money, once the accounting procedure whereby numbers on one account are electronically transferred to another account is accepted as proof of payment. Thereby, due to information technologies, electronic money has immediate liquidity worldwide at the speed of light. It is important to note that money’s use-value, being that it may be used as an exchange-value further down the line, means that the actual value of money is a pure matter of trust. As long as the community believes in it and vendors accept money in exchange for other use-values they may be selling, money’s use-value is maintained. The day trust is lost, people no longer believe that the money they may receive or hold will be accepted in an exchange down the line, money’s value disappears. Thereby, particularly nowadays, when increasing fortunes are circulating and growing in the financial markets, trust in money’s worth has become critical to the functioning of the whole edifice. If faith be broken, it would all crumble down and existing financial wealth would turn into dust.

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Back in the early days, we had commodity money. From shells to stones, cigarettes or salt paid as a salary, gold, silver, or bronze, a particular commodity became the trusted means for exchange. It became money. As for Aristotle’s example of the shoe, it meant an item picked out to be used for its secondary and not its primary purpose. But it still had an immediate use as such. Cigarettes can be smoked, and salt can be eaten. Then, people discovered that instead of carrying commodities with them, a deposit certificate by a bank stating that the holder had these commodities or wealth in deposit somewhere could suffice. It meant, as well, a change in the possibilities of growth of the system. While gold or any other commodity, money can be accumulated only to the extent of the actual existence of this particular commodity. Thereby, the amount of circulating money is limited by its very existence. Notwithstanding, given time, banks and other deposit certificates issuing entities learned to cheat and issue certificates above the existing reserves— speculating that not all holders of certificates would lay a claim on the ‘real thing’ at the same time. Eventually, they did, and we had the bank runs and the collapse of monetary systems of the past. Governments too, pressed by wars and debts, tended to print more money than they had reserves, and, particularly after the first world war and the great depression of the 1930s, all countries gave up the gold standard and assumed that money was worth just what it said to be worth. A British pound is worth precisely a British pound, a Swiss franc not more, nor less than a Swiss franc. Its value is given by itself. Money’s exchange-value is provided exactly by how much someone is willing to give in exchange for it. As we saw, vendors only do so to the extent that they trust that they may exchange the received money for something else further down the line. ‘In God we Trust’ is printed on all US Dollar bills. Thus, we all have to do. Notably, because the worth of the US Dollar, which is the leading international currency holding our global market system together, nowadays too is entirely a matter of trust alone. It is not backed by anything else besides itself. It has not always been so. After World War II, the US Dollar became the nearly unique world currency for international trade and financial transactions. Being the main winning power of a war fought far from its territory, the United States of America hosted the Bretton Woods conference to create the post-war oikonomic order. Harry Dexter White, the chief American representative, headed the Commission to create the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This institution was supposed to guarantee the financial order of the post-war world. Opposing his views, the British chief negotiator, John Maynard Keynes, asked to create an International Clearing Union and establish an international currency, the Bancor. But it was Dexter White who prevailed, arguing that the US Dollar, being the only currency still pegged to a fixed gold price, would introduce a self-regulating mechanism for international foreign accounts—just as it happened in the nineteenth century when all major currencies were pegged to the gold standard.1

1

The main idea, in a simplified form, is that any country who has a deficit in its foreign accounts will see more dollars leaving the country than entering (that is, dollars will be in short supply and the

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But, for the US Dollar to be an adequate world currency and to bring liquidity to the system, US Dollar reserves had to be accumulated by the different countries for them to be able to engage in the international markets and global trade. It required, thus, a net outflow of dollars from the USA to the rest of the world. Due to the destruction brought about by the war on the European continent, as well as Japan and Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, in the early years, the USA ran substantial trade surpluses when most industrial and capital goods and even consumer goods had to be imported by these countries, rather than exported. This brought about significant stress to the system as it led to liquidity squeezes and deepened the crisis in countries whose financial and monetary systems had already collapsed. Thus, different countries had to use their gold reserves instead in exchange for printed US Dollars. In 1947, around 70% of the world’s gold reserves were held by the USA, while Britain ceased to be the world’s largest creditor to become its largest debtor. In Germany, barter and particularly cigarette money became a primary way of sustaining the shattered chrematistics. Inflation was hurting all major oikonomies. As stated by the IMF, ‘by 1948, wholesale prices were 200% higher in Austria, 1,820% higher in France, and a massive 10,100% higher in Japan than they had been before the war. In 1948, the French government devalued the franc by 80%, making a 5,000 franc note practically worthless.’2 Adding to this chrematistic scenario, the political divide between the USA and Soviet Russia’s expansion brought a further element of geostrategic interests into the equation. Thus, as Thomas G. Paterson (1972–1973, p. 119) argued, ‘in the SovietAmerican confrontation after World War II, foreign aid became a familiar United States diplomatic tool and weapon. (. . .) Before launching a massive co-ordinated assistance program in 1947—the Marshall Plan—Washington had granted aid haphazardly through a variety of programs and special loans’. ‘In his historic speech at Harvard’s graduation ceremony in June 1947, George Marshall announced the US plan to give additional economic aid to Europe. The offer was made to all of Europe, including the US wartime enemies and the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. However, the recipients would be required to work together to formulate a unified recovery plan’.3 A plan which required the countries to subscribe to market agreements and free enterprise, thus placing them in the orbit of the USA. As a result, 16 European countries applied to the plan and accepted its conditions. In chrematistic and industrial terms, it was a success, particularly for the USA. By

local currency in excess). Thus, the local currency will have to be devaluated, making the price of local goods, services and assets cheaper vis-à-vis the foreign ones. This, in turn, leads to lower imports and higher exports (bettering its foreign commercial balance), as well as a bettering of the general balance of payments due to the devaluation of the local currency—entering into more details, tourism and other services will become cheaper vis-à-vis external ones, as well as the influx of external speculative capitals may be fostered once local assets become relatively cheaper. 2 https://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/center/mm/eng/mm_dr_01.htm available online 22 April 2017. Part of the IMF ‘Money matters’ permanent exhibit. 3 https://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/center/mm/eng/mm_dr_03.htm available online 22 April 2017.

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1950, the participating countries had recovered or exceeded their pre-war production level. At the same time, the USA managed to increase its imports from around the world in exchange for its currency, thus, exchanging all kinds of goods for printed paper, thus monopolising the privilege of seigniorage globally.4 Said otherwise, the USA could import or acquire foreign assets, grant foreign aid or credit in exchange for its printed money. It could import oil in exchange for its dollars, or when a US company or a US citizen wished to invest or acquire assets in a foreign country, he could just use his national currency to do so. Not so people and companies from other countries. To give an example: if German Volkswagen wished to invest in Brazil as it did in the 1950s, it had first to get a given amount of US Dollars to be exchanged in Brazil for Brazilian Cr$ to do so. It could not use its D-Marks from its profits and reserves in Germany. Nor could the German government just print some D-Mark and offer a loan to the company to support its international expansion. US Dollars were required. Thus, both American companies and the USA had a considerable advantage over their competitors as long as US Dollars were flowing out and converted into foreign reserves and acquisitions with no equivalent claim laid upon wealth produced by the USA. At the same time, it helped to bring more liquidity to the world markets. US Dollars are being used not just to trade with the USA, but among third countries too. Germany is paying Brazilian coffee with US Dollars, Saudi Arabia, too, sells its oil to Australia in exchange for US Dollars. Thus, huge amounts of US Dollars had to leave the USA without returning to provide the liquidity required by the international markets. Therefore, billions and billions of new US Dollars were being used to acquire real wealth worldwide, just a fraction of it returning to the USA. They were pumped into the world markets as US loans, US aid (both civilian and especially after the Korean and Vietnam war, increased military assistance), plus direct private foreign investments, loans made by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (which, together with its lending arm the International Development Association is known as The World Bank) etc. In this context, we can better understand the Marshall Plan set up by the USA and financed by its own currency. The Marshall Plan centred the US efforts in the postwar reconstruction of Europe and keeping it in its influence sphere. It was a first successful experience. Increasingly, the USA perceived that countries in other continents could not be taken as natural allies, particularly those in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, which were liberating themselves from their former European colonial masters. There too, Soviet influence, communist and socialist ideals were growing, and the Cold War became a global affair. Here, again, the ‘fight against communism’ was financed by US Dollars. Like for the famous Point Four program announced by Harry Truman in 1949 in his inaugural speech. As Paterson The term derives from the Old French meaning the ‘right of the lord’ (seigneur) to mint money. It refers to the profit made from the difference between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it. Given that it costs just around five cents to print a US Dollar bill, including a US$100 bill, it is a huge profit indeed. With digital money, which does not even have to be printed, the profit is even higher. 4

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(1972–1973, p. 119–120) argued, ‘developing nations, particularly after the Marshall Plan, asked for direct American assistance. Gradually, Washington recognized that developing countries could not be taken for granted as allies of the “West” in the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union. (. . .) Then, too, raw materials shortages in the United States were acute in the post-war period and could be relieved through expanded trade with former colonial areas. And developing countries were real and potential sites of disruptive revolutions. American aid and trade, went American thinking, could establish global stability. “Point Four” a State Department officer indicated, “is only the latest in a long line of United States activities that seek to strengthen and generalize peace throughout the world” (. . .). Programs like Point Four and the Marshall Plan meant more than simply “stop communism” or “economic expansion”. These goals were intertwined in the prevailing American “peace and prosperity” idiom. That is, Americans believed that world peace—the absence or containment of revolutions and communism— depended upon a healthy international economy. The latter in turn required prosperous unimpeded world trade’. It is often overlooked that all the enormous foreign civil and military assistance done by the USA after World War II expanded its influence and power using its currency. A trade and assistance Americans could pay for in their currency while simultaneously supporting the expansion of its companies and interests worldwide. Indeed, it was the only country able to do so, besides the Soviet Union, which tried to do the same within its sphere of influence. The USA could build military bases in Germany, Japan, or Korea, paying for them in US Dollars. Other countries were prevented from doing the same trick. When, for instance, Donald Trump and other Americans complained that they had been the most significant contributors to the Post-War international agencies like the World Bank or the United Nations, they did not mention that the USA can do so by paying in US Dollars. All other countries had to earn these Dollars first and build up their reserves before doing so. They could not simply print more. Moreover, the USA was able to import wealth from all over the world, sustaining its ‘American way of life’, giving paper money in exchange. But, as it could have been expected, mainly once its influence kept growing and the USA entered into increasingly costly undertakings like the Vietnam war, soon it was issuing more US Dollars then it had gold reserves to back them at a fixed price as assumed and promised. In France, this state of affairs was called ‘privilège exorbitant’, exorbitant privilege. Challenging it, in February 1965, President Charles de Gaulle announced his intention to exchange its US Dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate. A move that threatened the whole system should other governments follow. Indeed, by 1966, non-US central banks held US$14 billion, while the USA had only US$13.2 billion in the gold reserve. Of those reserves, only US$3.2 billion was able to cover foreign holdings as the rest covered domestic holdings. But the FED, to a great extent due to the strain placed on the American budget by the Vietnam War, continued to expand the monetary base and, by 1971, the amount of US Dollars circulating had grown by a further 10%. In May 1971, West Germany left the Bretton Woods system, unwilling to revalue the Deutsche Mark. Following it,

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other nations began to demand the redemption of their dollars for gold. Switzerland redeemed US$50 million in July. France, too, acquired $191 million in gold. Finally, speaking on television on Sunday, August 15, when American financial markets were closed, Nixon declared the initially temporarily suspension of the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, ‘except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States’. In practice, it meant the end of the Bretton Woods system and the end of the gold standard. From then on, as for any other currency, one US Dollar was worth just one US Dollar, and it could be exchanged for gold at a fluctuating rate in the markets. Just as any other currency. But, by then, the USA hegemony had already been firmly established. The world economy was utterly dependent on the US Dollar and the consumption appetite of the USA, the biggest importing market of the world. It remains so today. Thus, although all could see that the emperor was naked, US Dollars just being a currency issued by the FED who could freely decide whether to give their gold in exchange for it, no one dared to say so.5 As a result, all money, including the US Dollar supporting the global oikonomy, is no longer backed by any real-world wealth, having its use-value grounded on trust alone. The trust someone may have to give you something in exchange for it. But money is not like any other commodity. Accepting it or not in a deal has profound consequences. As Polanyi argued, money is as central to a market oikonomy as is water to agriculture. Without it, plants will not grow, nor commodities will be produced and traded. By dissociating money from any real-world entity, it can be obtained at will. Thus, at the central banks and increasingly so at the commercial bank’s choice, more liquidity can be injected into the markets whenever needed or desired. And it was. For instance, the oil shocks of the 1970s and the resulting inflationary pressures were counterbalanced by a massive increase in the circulating money. The so-called petrodollars, which were the US Dollars the rapidly enriching OPEC countries accumulated, found their way into the financial markets, where they were speculatively invested in all kinds of financial assets hopeful for a monetary profit. These profits ended up coming as long as more liquidity entered the financial markets, pushing the value of the traded financial assets further up. Eurodollars is another denomination of this foreign-held US Dollars, which kept growing much more than the production of new wealth by the global oikonomy. Then came the information technologies, the modernisation of financial markets, and what has been called ‘financial engineering’, creating all kinds of financial instruments and assets. This allowed all this money to be used not to irrigate the so-called ‘real-world’ oikonomy where use-values were being produced, traded, and consumed, but to be speculatively invested to earn even more money—betting on all kinds of present and future markets, derivative, stock options, and increasingly fancy-termed funds. It is a place where money is being transformed into more money without producing any real wealth in its wake.

5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock (retrieved Friday, 5 February 2021).

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What is often overseen is that it is a place where inflationary pressures resulting from pumping more money into the system are welcome. In the financial markets, rising prices mean profit. It means a higher purchasing power for those who happen to possess financial assets. It is not a decrease in wealth and purchasing power as it happens to those buying goods and services to consume and use, not speculate with them. Thus, instead of flooding the crops and destroying wealth, flooding the financial markets with more money enriches those who happen to be participating and speculating in these markets. To better understand this, we may have a quick look back at the old quantity theory of money (QTM), which states that the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation. Already proposed by Copernicus and known since the renaissance, it tries to understand the fluctuation of market prices as a function of the existing circulating money and, at its root, it only states an accounting equivalence: goods and services can only be bought and sold in the markets to the extent of the available money to do so. Thus, at its root, it is a simple accounting equivalence between MV
PQ stating that the amount of money (M) multiplied by the velocity it circulates in the economy (V ) is equal to the number of goods and services acquired (Q) multiplied by their prices (P). As long as there is no direct barter or credit sale, it is a needed accounting equivalence once all market transactions have to be backed by the amount of existing money, depending on how fast it circulates. Just to give a simple example, if there are in total just ten US $10 bills (M ¼ 100) and, in a given period, each one is used twice in a transaction (V ¼ 2), 20 goods or services (Q ¼ 20) worth each one US$10 (P ¼ 10) can be transacted during that period. 100  2 ¼ 10  20. Or 40 at the price of US$5 each. Or any other combinations whereby the amount of used money equals the monetary value of what has been sold. At the aggregate level, there has to be a direct relationship between the existing circulating money, the velocity it circulates (and thus, the times the same money can perform a purchase), and the number of goods and services sold at given prices. Any change at one side of the equation has to be matched by an equal change at the other side of it: ∑M1 – n  V1 – n ¼ ∑P1 – n  Q1 – n In simple terms, each time the amount of circulating money (M) or the speed at which it circulates (V ) increases there has to be a growth in real wealth, that is the quantity of goods and services produced (Q) or of the prices of these commodities (P). If money multiplied by its circulation velocity (MV) increases more than the growth in Q, prices have to rise too. That is, we have inflation. Historically, all these variables have been steadily growing (although with occasional decreases at certain times). But they did so at different paces and rhythms. The output of produced and traded goods and services (Q) has steadily and rapidly grown since the industrial revolution. After the Second World War, their growth has accelerated more once industrialization and western-style development spread worldwide. With the deepening of the economic globalisation process after the 1980s, later the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet regime, China’s turn to greater market economy and the economic growth of the 1990s and early twenty-first century, industrial output got a further boost.

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Notwithstanding, it is at the monetary side of the equation that the growth has been more accelerated. In the early colonial times, the gold and silver of the Americas brought enormous inflationary pressure to Europe by significantly increasing the gold, silver, and bronze money in circulation. In the nineteenth century, the use of deposit certificates as money, the growth of commercial banking, and the creation of the first central banks issuing paper money allowed to increase the money supply even further once daring and cash-hungry regimes, as well as private banks and companies, eventually issued notes and bank certificates beyond the existing reserves. Notwithstanding, globally, maintaining the gold standard and commodity money meant an effective brake on expanding the monetary. But, after the 1970s, with the effective end of the gold standard, the money supply could grow at will. And it did so exponentially. Moreover, due to the spread and progress of information technologies and the increasing globalisation of the oikonomy, the velocity of money circulation has increased even more. Nowadays, money can be transferred from one side of the globe to the other at the speed of light. Increasingly using powerful computers, algorithms, and high-speed Internet connections, high-frequency trading (HFT) is based on transactions, buying, and selling, done at fractions of seconds. Digital money has lost its physical form, being just a series of zeros and ones electronically transmitted and stored. Thereby, the barriers to the circulation speed of money (V ) are continuously being reduced. Another aspect that has to be stretched and is not usually explained in its full implication to economy students, and the public, is that money is increasingly and significantly so created out of nowhere by commercial banks. Much beyond the actual existence of printed money. Usually, in economic theory, financial markets and commercial banks are presented as mere intermediaries between borrowers and lenders. Those who have spare capital to invest do it through banks and the financial markets, those who need it borrowing it there and paying interest or dividends. In this view, banks and financial markets get their share from the service they provide as intermediaries. But this is not how it works. In practice, commercial banks are allowed to lend much beyond their actual reserves. Usually more than ten times so. Anyone, be it consumers asking for credit, entrepreneurs looking for investment money or someone asking for money to bet in the markets, by asking for a loan from a bank, this money is credited on their behalf through a mere accounting procedure. The bank will credit this value on his account and debit an equivalent debt increased by the agreed-on interests. But here, too, unlike those issuing deposit certificates and the US treasury issuing dollars beyond its existing reserves in the past out of need or out of greed, commercial banks are legally entitled to credit money to a lender that they do not possess. Thus, they are creating money out of nowhere, trusting that there will not be a bank run showing that the deposits that were supposed to be being taken care of by the banks and the credits that were handled to the borrowers did not match together. Notwithstanding, although lending money beyond their actual reserve capital backing it, commercial banks ask for the full payment back, increased by interest. Thereby, borrowers are paying back money that was not even there at the beginning

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of the process. Once paid back, the money is added to the banks’ capital reserves, increasing the total money in circulation. Thus, allowing the bank further to lend money at a multiple of that increase. That is why banks are so avid to lend. It is their business: being paid back for the money they did not possess in the first place. Banks do not simply intermediate between those who have money to lend and those who like to borrow it. They create money to be borrowed. With the creation of digital money and the spread of information technologies, this process has virtually no limit to growth. Indeed, nowadays, just a fraction of the existing dollars and euros circulating in our markets exist in their printed and coined form. Around 92% of the world’s currencies are digital money. Should just 10% of all people wish to have their money in its physical form, let us say to keep it safe at home or in a hidden treasure box in a cave or a solitary island as pirates used to do, there would simply not be enough to attend the demand. Most of our money exists only as ones and zeros programmed on some hard disks somewhere on some servers. But, as written on the printed Dollar bills, in God and the US Dollar and all other currencies we use to do our business, we trust. It would mean the collapse of the system should we stop doing so. The same would happen if, suddenly, people and governments decided to exchange their US Dollar holding for actual wealth in the only place where this currency is legal tender, namely the USA. It would mean a massive influx of liquidity into the US domestic markets, which, like a giant tsunami, would generate a vast hyperinflationary pressure. It would mean a tremendous blow and probably the end of the American Dream, which has been sustained by the hegemony and expansion of the US Dollar after the Second World War. Unless, of course, this money is used to speculate in the financial markets—as governments with their sovereign funds increasingly do—thus skyrocketing financial bubbles and wealth even further up. Just China, Japan, and Switzerland, currently those countries holding the most significant reserves, happen to have more than US$5.8 trillion in reserves.6 Each of these countries alone, mostly China, could bring havoc to the US Dollar, should it decide to get rid of its reserves by dumping them in the currency markets and betting against the US Dollar. The same would happen should just those hyper-rich billionaires and some millionaires, each with hundreds of millions invested in financial markets, decide to withdraw their money from them and buy themselves real-world assets. It would mean inflationary pressures in the real world oikonomy and, once followed by other worried investors, a catastrophic downfall of the stock exchange markets. But, as long as the money keeps on spiralling into more money, the inflationary pressures mean that financial assets bubbles keep growing. Thereby, the purchasing power of those buying speculatively financial assets increases without any new wealth in use-value terms having been created. But what we are not perceiving is that we keep talking about wealth as if zeros and ones on a computer

6

Just to have a broad idea, taking the 20 highest US Dollar foreign reserves at the end of 2020, we have more than US$11.5 trillion in potential claims on USA’s wealth and assets.

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server can be eaten. But they cannot. Even less than the gold Midas tried to swallow as food once his lips touched his meal. Here, just as Midas, whose wish that everything he touched was converted into gold came true, modern money speculatively flowing into the financial markets is converted into more money as long as it keeps pouring in. There are, indeed, two kinds of inflationary pressures, with hugely different effects on income distribution. Money pouring into consumer goods and services markets above the supply growth means a net decrease of all monetary wealth once consumers acquire less than before for the same money. The same happens if traders have to pay more for the goods or services they trade, or industrialists have to spend more money to get the same production factors as before to produce. Inflationary pressure effectively means a decrease in the purchasing power and wealth of those engaged in the so-called real side of the economy. The opposite is the case if there is an increase of liquidity flowing into the financial markets or being used to speculatively acquire assets like real estate, gold, artwork, or just bitcoins. Here, it is precisely a rise in prices of financial assets which is sought for. If someone buys a London flat, a collectable Oldsmobile, stamps, a master’s painting or stocks not for their primary use-values, but as means-to-an-end, because of their hope for higher exchange-value down the line, the inflationary rise of its monetary price is what is hoped for. It means not a decrease but an increase in wealth to the owner of these financial or financialised assets. For money and all kind of financial assets, whose use-value is given by its value as a mean for exchange, the higher its price, the higher the use-value derived from it. It is by understanding this simple truth that we can see how the way our financial system and monetary policies are structured works as a powerful mechanism enriching the few. Those able to benefit from the growth and fattening of financial markets have their wealth expanding, at the expenses of the many who do not participate in these financial market’s and suffer from the inflationary pressures on consumer goods. Once new money is pumped into the system, inflationary pressures may increase financial gains at the monetary side of the oikonomy. Notwithstanding, the total purchasing power of all remains the same once no new wealth in use-value terms has been created. Thus, the share of those whose monetary wealth increased due to the inflationary growth of financial assets became bigger, leaving less to those who do not. The income gap has grown. We easily ignore that if someone made a financial gain from buying cheap to sell at a profit without generating any new wealth along the process, these gains have to come at someone else’s expense. Freed from any real-world equivalence, the amount of money pumped into our global markets has been rising exponentially, particularly after the end of the gold standard and even more with the exponential growth of digital money. The same happened to the speed this money circulates due to high-speed Internet connections and our information technologies. Freed from any real-world limitation, just a notional amount, exchange-values can keep growing forever. Nowadays, from governments investing their huge sovereign funds in the financial markets, the hyper-rich reinvesting their already disproportionate monetary wealth to grow it even further, up to all kinds of small investors lured by the easy way to earn money

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betting in all sorts of financial investment platforms or fancy-named funds offered by their bank, new money is pouring into the financial markets at growing rates. Out of nowhere, cryptocurrencies are mined by computer algorithms, speculatively traded and generating massive chrematistic gains to all those speculators buying and selling them at a profit as long as the bubble keeps growing. Thus, billions and trillions worth in cryptocurrencies are added in purchasing power to speculators, without being related to an increase in global wealth in use-value terms, as new goods and services. The same happens with speculatively bought artwork or real estate in cities, bought not to be used but primarily to be financialised and sold at a profit further down the line. It is still the same thing but sold at a profit by those successfully speculating with them. An increasing number of financial gurus on the Internet teach others how to have wonderful lives by investing in the stock markets from home or a paradisiac island— telling us to spend just a fraction of the time we would if we had to earn our living from labouring productively. Instead, we just need to let our money work for us, as the advertising of a Bank I once read went. Thus, if Max Weber could still argue about the importance of labour ethics and sacrifice in the early stages of capitalism, nowadays, the idea is to become rich and enjoy life without working. It has even generated a culture and lifestyle, the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, whose goal is to gain as fast as possible enough financial independence to retire early, living from the profits of speculatively invested savings. Becoming particularly popular among millennials in the 2010s, with the COVID pandemic, much real-world business falling out while financial capitals have been soaring, it is bound to increase even further. After a long period of home confinement, distance working when working at all, many people aim not to return to the workplace. Those seeking to attain FIRE intentionally maximize their current savings, along with aggressive investments that again increase their wealth. Some, lucky enough to inherit enough financial wealth from their parents, may even plunge into a no-work future straight away. The main idea is that paid work becomes optional once financially independent, allowing for retirement from traditional work decades earlier than traditional retirement. But what is not considered by this movement is that if you rely on your financial gains to sustain your purchasing power, someone else has to be producing the goods and services you will be purchasing to maintain your life. Thereby, why some may escape the work ethics, others have to work even harder. Whenever your purchasing power increases from a purely speculative bet of ‘buying cheap and selling at a profit’, someone else has to be on the losing side. The more the financial side of the oikonomy grows vis-à-vis to the real side, the more we have those who enrich without generating any new wealth from their activity, increasing their purchasing power, at the expense of those who cannot do the same. Like in an organism, the more some cells multiply by themselves, disconnected from their needs, the less the rest of the organism fulfils its other functions. Thus, more and more life-supporting metabolic processes are being consumed and required not to regenerate a healthy organism but to support the growth of cancer tumours.

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This growing dissociation between the real and the financial side of the oikonomy has been laid bare by the current COVID-19 epidemic. While everywhere, due to the restrictions worldwide, the real oikonomy has been crumbling down, wealth in use-value terms being lost at a vast scale, stock markets have been booming after the initial falls. The reason for that is that most of the monetary stimulus given by governments, as do the quantitative easing policies, ended up not irrigating the realworld oikonomy to recover from the drought but has found its way to the financial markets, looking for speculative gains instead. Thus, despite the pandemic, the wealth of the super-rich has continued to grow—as it has for most of those betting in the financial markets, despite the oikonomic crisis and hardship of those earning their living in the real-world oikonomy. At the same time, the enormous new government debts incurred during this time mean that increasingly public funds will be needed to pay for those investors and banks holding public debt and treasury bonds in the future, instead of helping to boost the regeneration of the oikonomy. Thereby significantly increasing the divide. Being such a localised problem, there certainly could be ways to handle them. For instance, simple policies like huge taxes on financial profits or the monetary valuation of assets could be introduced, thus discouraging its speculative acquisition. Indeed, how would it be if anyone who makes a profit by simply selling at a higher price the same, he bought previously at a lower one (be they real estate, collectable items, cryptocurrencies, stocks, etc.) had to give up a significant part if not full of his profits in taxes? If shareowners were getting their earnings from paid-out dividends resulting from the company’s actual operations and not from the simply speculative growth of the monetary value of its shares? If funds investing in real estate acquisition could not gain on their purely speculative bets, having their profit from actually improving them? People no longer being able to profit from the rise in the price of Van Gogh’s and Leonardo da Vinci’s, but museums buying them to be admired or even private persons buying them because of their beauty and love for them, knowing that they will not make a monetary profit from their acquisition? What if big investors had no incentives to artificially manipulate markets by secretly buying strong positions, creating a frenzy, luring other speculative investors in, and then selling at huge profit? How would it be if having insider information no longer would help make a personal profit from buying cheap and selling high, or the other way around? If all or at least most of the eventual profit resulting from the inflationary growth in the exchange-value of something without altering its use-value is reverted to the government in taxes and thus to the common good instead of ending up in private pockets, there would be no more incentives to earn our living speculatively. It would undoubtedly lead people to acquire goods and services for their primary use-value, for what they were meant to be, instead of speculating and buying them for their potential exchange-value down the line. Renouncing speculative profits implies that people and companies will have to focus on the real oikonomy. Thereby, money will again be used as a means for exchange and measure instead of begetting more money, self-referentially growing and expanding in a cancer-like process. At least to me, it looks like a sensible thing to do if we wish to regenerate our oikonomy and

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societies once the current model increasingly damages the health of our oikonomy and our social, political, cultural life.

References Arrighi, G. (1994). The long twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our times. Verso. Krippner, G. (2005). The financialization of the American economy. Socio-Economic Review, 3, 173–208. Paterson, T. G. (1972–1973, Winter). Foreign aid under wraps: The point four program. The Wisconsin Magazine of History, 56(2), 119–126. Stahel, A. W. (2020a). Oikonomy—The art of living and living well. Montseny Spiral Edition. Stahel, A. W. (2020b, September). Why are the rich getting richer while the poor stay poor? RealWorld Economics Review, 93, 113–131.

Chapter 15

Conclusion: In Freedom and Responsibility

15.1

Going Beyond Markets and Government Control

Leopold Kohr, writing in the 1950s, devoted chapter ten of his book to affirm that the elimination of great powers can be done out of consciousness and a desire to put life and human wellbeing at the centre of our concerns. Notwithstanding, he asks himself in the title of his next chapter, ‘But will it be done?’ ‘No!’ is all that is written in the probably shortest chapter in history (Kohr, 1957, chapter XI, p. 197). In the following chapter, Kohr (1957, p. 198) justifies his short and blunt answer by attributing it to the need for analytical rigour and not just conforming to the mood of the time avoiding ‘a sad ending for a book whose principal purpose was to prove that there could easily have been a better one’. He grounds his conclusion on his observation that those in power do not easily give up their power and privileges. Past historical examples may suggest the same, and it is hard to imagine us doing any better. Among many self-reinforcing negative dynamics, we observe nowadays, the selfreferential growth of financial capital we saw in the previous chapter may be one of the most challenging. Although it allows for a relatively simple solution, heavily taxing speculative gains obtained from selling the same asset at a higher price without generating any new wealth in its wake being the most straightforward, it is not something that necessarily will be done. Just as the Eastern Island’s elites did not stop commanding new statues once their power, at a symbolic level, relied on it, contemporary elites whose power and privileges increasingly derive from their growing financial fortunes are hardly willing to curb or even try to eliminate speculative financial markets. First of all, those who have the power to curb and regulate financial markets— legislators, judges, the executive branch of government etc.—are themselves growingly dependent on speculatively growing financial capital to become even more powerful. As private citizens, they too are part of the wealthy elite with enough spare money to invest, hopefully gaining more of it by doing so. Moreover, super-rich © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8_15

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magnates reproducing their fortunes in financial markets are often the first with enough money to generously spend to campaigns of those politicians called, among others, to regulate these same financial markets. Adding to the list, the governments’ sovereign wealth funds have become strong actors in the financial markets. Last but not least, indebted governments finance themselves by issuing treasury funds speculatively bought by investors to be sold at a profit. Thereby, not just our oikonomic practice, but our political world has become increasingly dependent on these financial markets. Indeed, financial capital is becoming the hegemonic power in our contemporary world, unifying the interests of the private and public elites. At the same time, it is where growth and the ‘chrematistic art of getting rich’ can keep expanding without any apparent physical limit. Notwithstanding, just as previous elites failed to see that having its power based on overexploiting the larger whole on which their privileges ultimately depended is the long-term receipt for the downfall of all, we still fail to see that growing short-term speculative financial gains are obtained at the expenses of the larger oikonomic organism and our long-term perspectives. Thereby, despite increasing signs of distress and unbalances, financial markets and speculative bubbles keep growing, and more assets are being financialised and added to the list daily. Beyond financial markets, we are still growth-obsessed in the so-called ‘real world economy’, creating bigger and more powerful technologies, conurbations, industries, and weapons. Our fate, thus, may not be any different from that of past civilisations that ended up crumbling under their weight. As Kohr reminded us, bigness has one main advantage: the ability to impose its will on the weaker and grow even further. Thus, it tends to become even bigger until it eventually explodes like a supernova or collapses under its weight like a black hole. If at an individual level change is difficult, it is even more so collectively where many of the powerful elite benefit from the current state of affairs and thus, hardly are inclined to give up their short-term privileges in favour of the long-term interests of all. Given the importance and the scale financial markets have assumed in our contemporary world and the enormous monetary wealth and power resulting from the current state of affairs, it may be ingenuous to believe that those elites holding power nowadays will kill the hen laying the golden eggs they feed on. Even those multimillionaires devoting an important part of their fortunes for philanthropic undertakings have an increasing, if not the totality of their wealth, resulting from their speculative financial investments, buying cheap to sell at a profit. They are not redistributing newly created wealth, but just diverting purchasing power to different directions, according to their choice and beliefs. They, too, have their philanthropic identity heavily based on the growing speculative financial markets. Thus, the repeated mantra about the benefit of free markets, particularly free financial markets, promoting ‘economic efficiency’. By coming in touch with Rudolf Steiner’s ideas and, mainly, his book Philosophy of Freedom, I started to understand what freedom means and implies beyond the shallow discourse of economic liberalism. As Rudolf Steiner argues, freedom relies on human self-reflective consciousness. Only by becoming fully conscious of our

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own inner and outer realities can we be capable of wilful choice. Internally, we become aware of our convictions and preferences, the ideologies and theories we came to espouse, and which we project once we assess and evaluate external reality. By having this self-reflective look inside, we may take full responsibility for our feelings and thoughts, perceiving that they reflect our unmet needs and how we see ourselves and the world. Moreover, by becoming aware that we produce the world that we see and the feelings we have, we can, wilfully, look at the world from another angle or react differently to our feelings and emotions. Feelings, as we saw, are not something ‘others’ or ‘external circumstances’ provoked and, thus, can be blamed on external factors. They spring forth from our inner self in response to internal circumstances only triggered by external events. Therefore, it is something we are responsible for. When angry, it may be because we would like something to be different or feel a vital need not satisfied while judging the object of our anger as being responsible for it. It is by taking responsibility for our anger, we might wilfully decide to take our lives into our hands by channelling our emotional energy differently or, by recognising its root cause, change our feelings. Thereby, we act out of our inner will and not in response to internal or external subconscious or unconscious circumstances. Instinctive behaviour is not free, nor is the behaviour and responses given ‘in the heat of the moment’ or the lack of response when ‘frozen by fear’. By becoming aware of who we are and how we are co-creating our world by every act we do, we can start to take our lives and our response-ability into our hands. A lion cannot be held responsible for killing a gazelle, not knowing how to decide otherwise. Nor can a child be held accountable for behaviour whose consequences he cannot understand and evaluate. That is why minors are treated differently than adults by our legal system. They neither have the freedom and rights an adult may have nor the obligations and legal responsibilities. As parents and adults in general, we are responsible for our children. Responsible for limiting their behaviour and, if we manage to accompany them correctly in developing their consciousness, gradually granting them more freedom of choice and, concomitantly, asking them more responsibilities. Nor can we blame those earning their profits from investing in fancy-termed funds in ignorance of what these funds stand for; or those making their living or retreat by investing in bitcoins. But the fact remains that their gains come fully from someone else’s losses once their behaviour has created no new wealth. The increase in purchasing power of the successful financial speculator has to be compensated by an equal decrease in purchasing power of others. Pecunia non olet (‘money does not stink’) the emperor Vespasian is said to have said, pointing to the fact that money did not reveal its origins when he decided to tax sewage. Nor do we perceive what kind of industries and practices are hidden behind profitable fancy-named hedge funds. Nor do we ask ourselves about the money laundering, drugs, and arms trafficking deals or tax frauds that our buying and selling of bitcoins favours. By acting in ignorance of the broader impacts of our behaviour, we may not be guilty. Like everyone else, we do what we do according to the world we see, to the best of our knowledge and capacity. But, as free individuals capable of doing

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otherwise, we are always responsible for what we do. Mainly, we are responsible for not enlarging our understanding and consciousness, thus changing our behaviour accordingly. Our consciousness is always incomplete, individual perspectives limited. Notwithstanding, there is always the possibility to expand and improve our understanding. Given human’s ignorance and the self-centred, short-term horizons in which chrematistic’s ‘art of getting rich’ works, two basic ways to pursue our collective oikonomic aims have historically been proposed. On one side, following Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand of market competition redirecting individual selfish chrematistic behaviour to the collective good, we have economic liberalism and the, sometimes, radical defence of free markets as the only way towards prosperity and harmony. This view is grounded on the maybe naïve idea that, although short-sighted and selfish, free-market competition redirects individual greed towards the common good. It is this idea which, as we saw, is a central ideological element of modern economics. It was not just espoused by the first economists but has become the central tenant of contemporary economics. Abstract models ‘proving’ that free markets and chrematistic competition lead to more ‘efficiency’ and ‘maximum welfare’ or ‘Pareto optimality’. It works very well in carefully designed abstract models but is not reflected by historical practice and observable evidence. On the other hand, free market’s critiques argue that there is a need for government control and curbs to free enterprise, restraining individual freedom in the name of the common good. Thus, instead of the invisible hand, there is a need for the state and law’s visible hand to redistribute wealth—replacing spontaneous, self-organised chrematistics through planning and redistribution politics. Thus, at one extreme, we have the so-called ‘wild capitalism and the other, state-capitalism’. ‘Free economies’
‘planned economies’, ‘right
left’. In between, all kinds of more or less free markets. I always had trouble with both extremes. Since its origin, the abuses and exploitative relations resulting from unhinged, short-term selfish chrematistic behaviour have accompanied capitalism. Despite the belief in the automatic and self-healing virtues of the ‘invisible hand’. The depiction of the early industrial revolution or the current time exploitative working conditions and sometimes semi-slavery in third world countries; the destruction of ecosystems, the over-exploitation of our natural resources and heritage around the world; among so many other examples; are eloquent reminders of how market competition and the blind pursuit of chrematistic profits do not automatically translate into collective wellbeing and balances. The same can be observed from the excesses and financial scandals spreading from Wall Street and the City to reputable and supposedly serious banks like the German Deutsche Bank or the Swiss UBS/SBG and Credit Suisse; the way our wants are being manipulated by marketing, advertising, and computer algorithms to attend the growing production needs despite impending limits to growth; the practice of big multinational companies or the way political campaigns are nowadays funded and held: these are all just some of the actual world realities pointing to predatory behaviour whereby the chrematistic interests of some are obtained at the detriment of all in the long term. These are all dimensions where

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the historical reality of capitalism paints a different picture than the one found in economic theory. Freedom is a beautiful word and an idea dear to me, having grown up in a military dictatorship. But, applied to market freedom and how the so-called ‘Brazilian miracle’ of the early 1970s left the majority of the population behind, it just did not seem right. Growing up in Brazil, I witnessed the abuses and socially and ecologically predatory behaviours associated with a system centred on short-term gain and chrematistic greed. I saw the growing inequalities and environmental destruction, pollution, and deepening social and ecological imbalances, despite being assured in my classes that ‘free-markets lead to general equilibrium and Pareto-Optimality’. Notwithstanding, the abuses and the environmental and social cliff we were and still are heading to in the name of ‘free enterprise’ and ‘free markets’ are there for all to see. But so were the problems associated with freedom being restricted in the name of equality and redistribution and some of the revolutionary ideological experiments of the past and present. When governments whose legitimacy is grounded on ‘economic justice’ and wealth redistribution assume it as their task to plan and order a better society, they always end up in other ways of institutionalised abuses. Indeed, usually, the remedy turned out to be worse than the illness it was meant to cure. There are plenty of examples in the twentieth century showing that, despite the hopes of a ‘better world’ and the ‘fight for justice’ that fuelled these movements in the early stages, they turned into bloody dictatorships and abuses: from the Soviets, Lenin and Stalin, to Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Chavez/Maduro, and Noriega still today. These are all a powerful reminder of the importance of scale-balances, as discussed in Chap. 9, to prevent abuses by those entrusted with the power to do so. Although noble their reasons may sound, and themselves may believe them to be. Thereby, as a son of the Western world adhering to the ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity, neither free markets nor the central state seemed to be giving the correct answers. On both sides, one ideal has repeatedly been trampled in the name of the other. Individual freedom leads to inequality in some cases, and freedom is restricted in the name of equality and social justice in others. Fraternity, mostly being lost by both of them. At least in their more polarised versions. But even without going to the more extreme examples, both markets and governments have repeatedly shown their shortcomings. The corruption associated with the institutionalised government in Brazil and elsewhere, the lack of initiative and adaptive behaviour found in some public servants and individuals who had become dependent on paternalistic protection and redistributive policies around the world, they, too, point to the shortcomings of replacing individual freedom and responsibility with paternalistic government policies and security. As have the ordered standard development practice even in the more developed and so-called ‘free societies’. Despite a working representative democracy and environmental regulations and laws, landscapes are still being destroyed. Ecosystems are over-exploited, cars and roads are increasingly covering our lands and crowding our cities, new suburbs are replacing agricultural and wildlands. At the same time, people and companies exert their rights to freely consume and decide,

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although alienated their behaviour may be. Indeed, including the so-called European ‘Welfare State’ balancing government intervention with individual freedom, although having avoided the costs of both extremes and ensured decades of growing material prosperity and relative social justice, are facing increasing social and ecological crises. Moreover, many apparent improvements perceived in the developed world have been obtained by increasing their ecological and social footprint elsewhere. Thus, in some countries, land has been recovered from industry, forests from farmland, just to be lost elsewhere. Post-industrial and ‘service economies’ are presented as the way to the future, while we increasingly consume industrial goods from China or beef and soybeans from the Amazon. Having been living for more than two decades in Europe, I could witness how in developed nations of the world, despite all kinds of environmental regulations, social protection, and redistributive policies, we are still collectively following an unsustainable path. This all despite the fact that the awareness about the problems we face is not new. At least since the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm 1972, governments, scientists, and officials have been gathering in international conferences and meetings to reconcile the oikonomy, the environment, and the individual and social aspirations of all. Notwithstanding, despite the magnitude of the resources spent to understand our reality better and try to assume our individual and collective responsibilities through these state-sponsored conferences, studies and campaigns, no single nation, even less so the world at large, has so far managed to rebalance our development practice to ensure social and ecological regenerations. Certainly, punctual improvements have been made, some challenges like the depleting ozone layer of the 1980s successfully tackled. But, overall, all indicators are worsening. Our oikonomy is not dematerializing, nor are we consuming fewer fossil fuels or exploring our ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole any less. At the same time, inequality and social polarization are growing everywhere, both internally in all single countries and globally, among regions and populations. Like for previous civilisations, our dominant institutional settings and ways of perceiving reality seem not to be good answers to the challenges we face. Nevertheless, despite the quote attributed to Einstein and profusely shared that ‘we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them’, we still seem to be unable to find a better solution. But the quote does seem to be pointing in the right direction. We certainly need to overcome the ideological discourses and abstract theories of the past. We need to learn to look at reality with new and living eyes. For me, it was by reading Karl Polanyi that I could better understand that ‘freemarkets’ are a utopian concept, just as were the ideas of a future communist paradise on Earth. Indeed, he made me understand that there has never been something like complete ‘free-markets’, except for the abstract models I have been taught during my studies. Modern oikonomic and political history have always resulted from the balance, sometimes contradictions and, others, complementarities, between the growing and expanding markets at one side, and the intents to control and limit

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their freedom on the other. What is at stake is not a matter of either one or the other, but different degrees and levels of market freedom or external controls. In this polarity, the balance and relations between chrematistics and redistributive oikonomy have become the main actors shaping our contemporary world. They underlie all changing shades and relations between self-organised competition and vertically controlled and planned redistribution. Notwithstanding, both have their limits and become abusive and predatory whence unbalanced and uncontrolled. Governments and officials may resort to corruptive behaviour, taking for themselves the more significant share of the socially reproduced wealth. Conversely, ‘free capitalists’ may do so by abusing their superior scale and power following their short-term chrematistic profit aims. But, even when relatively balanced as in the mixed European economies, they still have their problems and shortcomings. Thus, although important, our hopes cannot rely on governments alone. Nor can we rely on the magic virtuous of the invisible hand of the free markets or even a mix of both. All are serving the interests and the worldview of a new elite called by John Kenneth Galbraith the technostructure.1 By this term, Galbraith referred to a global elite that obtains its power and benefits through industrial and chrematistic growth. An elite which, as Galbraith argued, by their majority have been trained by the same elite universities, having networked and build-up their social capital in the same elite MBAs, frequent the same kind of social venues, the same lifestyles and cultural values and whose top representatives may gather in the annual ‘Davos World Economic Forum’, deepening their shared worldview and interests. Through the so-called revolving doors between public and private services, individuals may alternate between chrematistic and redistributive oikonomic behaviour. Both companies and governments internally follow hierarchical power structures, planning and deciding through political and administrative means to produce and distribute wealth. Simultaneously, externally, they defend the benefits of individual market freedom and free enterprise. Thereby, the same entrepreneurs advocating for more market freedom to do their business may hold a vertical power structure within their company. At the other pole of the spectrum, centralized states like China create the conditions and support for the growth of private companies to compete in the markets. It was only by learning more about Steiner’s ideas about the oikonomy and human freedom that I discovered a third, certainly more challenging but maybe the only way out of the dilemma between individual liberties and oikonomic justice and solidarity. It is by understanding that freedom-consciousness-responsibility go hand-in-hand—we cannot have one without the others. By reflecting on his ideas, I could better understand the real meaning of ‘free-oikonomy’, ‘free-markets’, and

1

This is a recurring theme by Galbraith, who, following Veblen and other institutional economists, pointed to the social, political and cultural dimensions of the oikonomic process as fundamental elements for any analysis. The idea of technostructure was first explicitly stated in 1967 in his The New Industrial State.

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‘free-enterprise’: they only make sense if by ‘free’ we mean ‘conscious and responsible markets and enterprises’ too. As we saw in this book, life and Nature are whole and constantly changing. Interdependence, impermanence, autopoiesis, that is, self-creation, are all essential features of reality. We are what we are through our relations with the world we were given to live in, and by every act we do, we are recreating it with others. We are but a node of the broader web of life, stretching both in space and time. From its origins, we represent a further step of the changing ways matter and energy combine, creating new compounds, objects and realities. Moreover, through our self-reflective consciousness and language, we embody an additional step in how consciousness evolves. By amplifying and deepening our consciousness, by becoming aware of our place in the chain of events and our responsibility not just with ourselves, but towards the world we emerged from and depended on to be who we are, we may freely and responsibly choose to affirm our lives and interests not at the expenses and in opposition to others, but with others. Looking for ways to, in synergic ways, satisfy both our needs and those of others. Thereby, by putting limits to our freedom where the freedom of others begins, we contribute not just to our personal but our collective future. We take our lives into our hands by enlarging our consciousness and taking responsibility for the impact and effects of our behaviour on others and our shared world. Carrying for others, whence done in freedom and out of consciousness, is not the result of a paternalistic ideology, a moral duty of the ‘rich’ to give to the ‘poor’ for instance, or an ideologically tainted idea of ‘justice’ and ‘equality’. Nor is it something administratively fixed and planned as for redistribution oikonomy. But neither is it something to be expected to happen automatically from the competition of selfish individuals, each one looking for his short-term chrematistic interests and profits. Instead, it is something born from our inner consciousness, from our understanding—the result of becoming conscious of our place in the world and the interdependent and impermanent nature of reality. By following this path, I came to understand the common trait permeating our different spiritual traditions. From the wisdom found in animist societies and practices where the great spirit and life manifest in every creature and every aspect of our living world to the idea of compassion and acting out of love on which traditions like Buddhism and Christianity are grounded. Understanding our interdependency and kinship not just to our fellow humans but also to all creation, like Francis of Assisi realised and animist cultures knew. From our brother and sister animals to the wind, the forests, the mountains, and the rivers. Everyone is sacred and part of the living world we have been entrusted to live in and will leave to those who will follow. From the images of a living and nourishing Earth, be it named Gaia or Pachamama, to the idea of stewardship entrusted to humankind by God. We, humans, are part and responsible for that which we have inherited from all that preceded us and which we will leave as our legacy to all that will follow. The Christian commandment of ‘love thy neighbour as yourself’ or the Buddhist idea of compassion is something we may aim to fulfil out of moral duty because we

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have been told to do so. But it may be something we wilfully do out of becoming conscious that it is only through others that we become ourselves. By loving and respecting ourselves and empathically putting ourselves under the other’s skin, loving and respecting them and their right to ‘live and live well’ too, we may encounter ourselves and the others in freedom and communion, thus enhancing and promoting our common good. Indeed, as interdependent beings, the more each one has his own needs and balances satisfied, the more and better he can contribute to others. Just as in any organism or any ecosystem, diversity and the capacity of each part to have its needs attended to fulfil its role in the larger whole enhances the prospects, health, and wealth of all. Thus, instead of a selfish, short-term, egotistic behaviour or, at the other extreme, severe political or moral restrictions to individual freedom, we have a free and responsible behaviour emerging from our consciousness will. As a result of our understanding of who we are and how we came to be. We are not isolated individuals but are through and by means of our relations. A more than eight decades-long study, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, has followed more than 700 men since being teenagers in 1938. More than 60 of the original participants, now in their 90s, are still taking part. Over the years, researchers have interviewed the participants in person, collected their health information (even brain scans and blood samples), and asked them to answer questions about their work and home lives, as well as mental and emotional wellness. Researchers eventually began interviewing the men’s spouses and grown children. As commented by Dr. Waldinger, the current director of the study, what stood out is that ‘People who are more socially connected to family, friends, and community are happier, healthier, and live longer than people who are less well connected’. (. . .) ‘People who are more isolated than they want to be are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain function declines sooner, and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely’. (. . .) Relationship quality matters. ‘Living in conflict, such as in a high-conflict marriage, is bad for your health. Living in the midst of warm relationships is perhaps protective’, says Dr. Waldinger. He points out that people in the study who were most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 years were the healthiest at age 80. (. . .) Good relationships appear to protect our brains. ‘Being in a securely attached relationship is protective in your 80s. Those people’s memories stay sharper longer’, says Dr. Waldinger. ‘People who feel they can’t count on the other person experience early memory decline’.2 Creating balanced relationships with others and with our environment, carrying and attending to the needs of others while having ours treated by them, is a key factor for ‘living and living well’. After all, we are interdependent beings. There is a reflection done by Schopenhauer which resonated deeply in me and which has accompanied me since I first read it from Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist

Harvard Health Letter (June, 2017). Can Relationship Boost longevity and Well-Being? https:// www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/can-relationships-boost-longevity-and-well-being

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and master. Schopenhauer asked himself about the observable fact that people may put their own life at risk to save others’ lives. Thus, he wondered what leads someone to risk his own life trying to save the life of someone else? Even sometimes that of a stranger or even from another species? From heroic acts on the battlefield and companionship during wartime to firefighters risking their lives to save others, someone jumping into wild waters aiming to save a stranger or another living being: there are plenty of examples of altruism and compassion around us. Schopenhauer’s answer to his question was enlightening to me: it is because, at this moment, the barrier between ‘me’ and ‘you’ falls. Whence risking our own life trying to save that of another person means that, at this moment, we do not feel separate from the other. Thereby, saving the other’s life is as crucial as holding our own. These are moments in which the individual loves his neighbour the same way he loves himself. It is a free act of love and consciousness. He did not have had to do it out of duty, nor did he stay selfishly thinking about his wellbeing and interests. By enlarging his self and consciousness, overcoming the barriers separating him from the world, he meets the other and, together, they look for ways to attend to both his and the other’s needs. To sustain his own life as much as he looked to support the life of the other in distress. He is giving according to his capacity and according to the other’s needs. As we saw in Part Two, there is an evolutionary reason for this: Nature and evolution favour those who manage to establish balanced relations with their environment, thus satisfying their own needs and those of their surroundings. Indeed, as argued in this book, the survival of the whole is what matters. Hence, altruism and symbiosis are more determinants and prevalent than selfishness and competition in the long term. What is not that much said is that it is central to oikonomic behaviour too. Indeed, we may best pursue the ‘art of living and living well’ by acquiring this kind of consciousness. By doing so, we realise the ‘fundamental social law’ not because we adhere to an abstract theory but out of our present understanding and consciousness. We open ourselves, thereby attending to our own needs out of self-love while compassionately attending to others in conscious freedom and communion. Here, as for a healthy organism or a resilient ecosystem, the potential for wealth creation by the individual and the social organism is best realised if each one gives the best he can while receiving from the others according to his needs. The same happens with our relations to the non-human world. By listening to Nature, by understanding its needs, we may best attend to our own needs. By doing so, we are contributing to both the regeneration of Nature and our own lives. We may further explore this more in detail, trying to realise what it means in practice.

15.2

The Origin of Wealth

In the realm of our human oikonomy, employing our labour and helped by our tools, wealth (re)produced by the free functioning of natural processes is transformed into use-values. Some need little or no processing, like the air we breathe and water

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consumed directly from the spring. Many, like the functioning of our organism when we are healthy, we take for granted, forgetting that they too are continuously being regenerated. They are not simply given but an emergent property of larger wholes in which we humans play an increasingly important part through our technological and industrial processes. As for the climate stability and all kinds of natural homeostatic processes sustaining life, some of which we briefly outlined by looking at the ways of Nature’s oikonomy. The process of desalinisation of the seas, the hydrological cycle spreading water within the biosphere as a whole and many more whereby matter, energy, and information are transformed and circulated within our biosphere. They are all not given but in the process of continuous regeneration in which each node of the web is important. Some are even crucial. In ecological economics, it is called ‘critical natural capital’: elements of ecosystems which, if removed or critically debilitated, lead to the collapse of the whole. As we saw in this book, they are all at the foundation of our lives and wellbeing. Thereby, we ignore our house, our oikos, at our peril when we overexploit and plunder it for chrematistic profit’s sake. Other products of Nature are processed and altered before being able to satisfy our needs. Like cotton or wool woven into clothes; iron ores mined, smelted, and then forged into steel; soil, air, and water being grown into crops and livestock before being processed into food. Thus, are all these hundreds of elements combined into a smartphone responding to the tip of our fingers or the sound waves of our voice. Still, other use-value, like meditating, feeling love, or solving mathematical puzzles in a solitary room, are strongly immaterial. But they, too, need to be sustained by the body performing them, although their meaning and value are given at the symbolic level. Like increasingly all our technological devices, supported by massive technical systems working in the backstage of our world. Like those powerful servers situated in large refrigerated industrial buildings needed to sustain cloud computing; or those satellites orbiting our Earth and helping us to navigate through the streets of our crowded cities. Indeed, as Wolfgang Sachs (1999, pp. 13–14) reminded us, we have increasingly become interdependent not just socially but technologically too. Although we use tools and perceive them as separate objects, we connect and relate to massive interdependent technological systems once we use them. ‘Not a tool but a system. Commercial artists love to represent modern technologies as the triumphant heirs of primitive techniques. (. . .) Hardly any piece of fiction has contributed more to hiding the true nature of technical civilization than that of seeing in modern technology nothing more than a mere tool, even if a particularly advanced one. Take the example of an electric mixer. Whirring and slightly vibrating, it mixes ingredients in next to no time. A wonderful tool! So it seems. But a quick look at cord and wall-socket reveals that what we have before us is rather the domestic terminal of a national, indeed worldwide, system: the electricity arrives via a network of cables and overhead utility lines fed by power stations that depend on water pressures, pipelines or tanker consignments, which in turn require dams, offshore platforms or derricks in distant deserts. The whole chain guarantees an adequate and prompt delivery only if every one of its parts is overseen by armies of

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engineers, planners and financial experts, who themselves can fall back on administrations, universities, indeed entire industries (sometimes even the military). As with a car, a pill, a computer or a television, the electric mixer is dependent on sprawling, interconnected systems of organization and production. Someone who flicks a switch is not using a tool, they are plugging into a whole system. Between the use of simple techniques and the use of modern equipment lies the reorganization of a whole society’. There is a society based on growth and bigness and growing social and technological interdependence. The famous slogan ‘think global, act local’ is precise because local action has global repercussions. Throughout human history, there has been a tendency of increasing human labour intensity of the oikonomic process. Using more powerful tools, we started to emancipate ourselves from Nature while, at the same time, raising our social interdependency. But still, everywhere, we may find, at the ground of the oikonomic process, Nature’s oikonomy provides the foundations, the context, and the starting point of our human oikonomy. It is based on and within the larger ecological whole that human labour and production unfolds. Taking Nature’s produce and, after processing and transforming it through human labour and consumption, expelling it changed as human waste. Some of it may sustain other life forms or be transformed by abiotic processes of the biosphere through erosion, burning, or physical decay. Others will resist and maintain their identity for extensive periods, accumulating in the biosphere. The oikonomic process is always a rhythmical process whereby human labour applied in extraction, production, distribution, and consumption, takes existing matter, energy and information, transforming it into new forms. Natures’ and humans’ oikonomic realms and processes are connected, parts of a larger whole in which we are not external to Nature but part of it. Thus, through the ages, information, matter, and energy are continuously changing and being regenerated, cycling around the biosphere, assuming different forms and emergent properties, passing from one realm to the other, from one state to the other. Along this process, the various species, societies, and cultures evolved in their adaptive learning process. Those who sustain stable (co)evolutionary dynamics survive, those who do not eventually become extinct (Fig. 15.1). Some elements resulting from human oikonomic behaviour have short lives before changing into something else. Others become more or less permanent elements of the environment, providing services like a bridge over a river, a statue made of stones, or a pasture in the Alps. In some cases, they may be used as an element of a new production cycle or process as seed capital, like those grains saved by the peasants from one agricultural cycle to the other. In others, as processed raw material and components, like a metal plate made from mined ore to build a car. In all cases, although larger or shorter, it is human oikonomic behaviour producing, that is, labour, that takes something from the realm of Nature to the human one, processing or displacing it, to satisfying human needs through its consumption. Thus, we have already a first element whereby wealth is (re)produced by the human oikonomic behaviour, namely labour.

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Fig. 15.1 Human’s and nature’s oikonomy interdependency

From all the wealth produced through natural and human oikonomic processes, some may be used and combined not as seed capital to (re)start anew a production cycle, nor will they be consumed to satisfy an immediate fundamental need. Instead, these products may be used and combined in a new form to produce new and more wealth. Projecting into the future, the human creative spirit combines elements differently, innovating. Thereby, new products or new production methods are created through human creative labour. We can imagine future outcomes and the needed steps to get there in our inner imagination, not just repeating behaviour learned and inherited from the past. Thus, those Schumpeter called ‘entrepreneurs’ can develop new satisfiers or new ways of producing them according to a plan that first is imagined internally and then projected and implemented externally. Here, a production cycle is not ended by a final consumption, nor is it (re)enacted according to proven labour methods of the past. Thus, as Rudolf Steiner (1894/1964) argued in his Philosophy of Freedom, the relationship between cause and effect is reversed: the desired effect leads us, humans, due to our capacity to imagine hypothetical futures, to create and combine given causes. The future end is affecting the present and not the other way around. The effect precedes the cause conceptually in the innovator’s mind, and it is only once the production process is realised that the result of the innovation can be assessed. This can be seen when people apply the ‘backcasting’ method, a kind of reversed ‘forecasting’. In this procedure, first, a desired future outcome is defined. Then, working backwards, the last step to get there is specified, then the previous to this one until finally, arriving at the present, we can see what our first step should be. Thus, identifying actions, programmes, and policies which will connect this desired outcome to the present. Successful innovators attain the desired results if the assembled causes efficiently produce the desired effects or surpass expectations. Unsuccessful ones are falling

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short of the desired results. Within the context of the free-market competition, they eventually fail in their chrematistic calculus, going bankrupt as their projected effects turned out not to be, retrospectively, true. Therefore, what Goethe termed the exact sensorial imagination is a fundamental aspect of successful entrepreneurs. Correctly imagining and anticipating future outcomes, entrepreneurs discover new paths and, thereby, increase our human potential and behavioural plasticity. At the same time, the ability to imagine and project our minds into the future increases our freedom and ability to respond to life challenges. Through entrepreneurship, the oikonomic process is not simply repeating proven forms of the past but penetrating new realms and opening new paths to the future. This creative use of the products of past labour to innovate is a process that, although resulting from our capacity to imagine freely, is nevertheless confined and limited by the world’s reality as such, since concrete and observable results are expected. Although creating new realities, an innovator does so have to respect the laws and ways the different elements of reality relate and (co)evolve if he wishes to attain the concrete imagined results. Thus, innovation may be assessed in its ‘efficiency’ to achieve the desired effects from the observable consequences of his actions. This aspect distinguishes the invention from innovation: as long as our imagination wanders free, not yet aiming at concrete results, we are in the realm of free creations. The domain in which our imaginative mind can freely invent alternative realities following our own imagined rules and dynamics. We may explore new worlds, do science fiction or let our poetic imagination take us wherever it takes us, without any limit. Something else is the realm of creative innovations, where creativity has to bend to the limits and laws relating different causes to different effects. This latter is not a free realisation of our ideas and imagination, but the completion of that which is possible in each concrete and ever-changing context and reality. Therefore, creative imagination and future projections must be informed and grounded on the entrepreneurs’ correct understanding of reality, its ways, and limits. Innovation is thus born from dialogue and, as for labour, emerges from a successful coupling of the human to the natural processes. But, while labour follows proven paths, reproducing those ways of the past, innovations project themselves into the future and, when successful, produce more and differently, generating profits. And, once successful, innovations, as Schumpeter and before him Marx already pointed out, will generate a surplus value and an extraordinary profit, attracting others to follow. Being adopted by others, innovations become widespread, creating a new normality and circular production cycle. It becomes labour. Those who embrace innovation behave no longer by imagining future outcomes but by repeating practical ways of the past. Besides these two ways of producing wealth, through labour repeating known procedures or through innovation projecting new possible outcomes into the future, there is a third and final way whereby we humans (re)produce and create new wealth. It is neither through labour reproducing the past nor entrepreneurship aiming to change the future. We simply create new wealth through a free expression of human creativity connected to the present. When artists create, mystics, philosophers,

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Fig. 15.2 Human’s oikonomy wealth reproduction

scientists, or inventors discover new meanings, produce new things, or acquire new understandings, they neither reproduce past behaviours nor project their behaviour into the future. They are simply expressing their deeply felt human creative potential while attending to some fundamental needs in the present, such as creativity, freedom, understanding, or even transcendence through sacred art or spiritual practice. Cause and effect, conception and perception happen all at once, in that the creative act has its meaning in itself—art for art’s sake. Inspired by the muses and driven by the desire for understanding and free creative expression, cultural wealth is thus created. From the cave paintings in Lascaux to Van Gogh’s sunflowers, from Siddhartha Gautama’s Buddhahood to Leibniz’s differential calculus, passing through Archimedes and all other eureka moments, we observe self-contained acts of creation that find their meaning in themselves. Here the individual opens himself to the creative and intuitive expression of the present moment. And, by doing so, new cultural realities, artistic expressions, insights, and understandings may emerge, unlike those of the past; nor are they the result of a projection into the future. They are a full expression of the present and its openings (Fig. 15.2). Rudolf Steiner argued that this last, free artistic creation is the most productive in terms of oikonomic wealth creation globally. Leibniz and Newton developed the differential calculus not to enrich themselves by selling the idea in the markets but out of their inner desire and need. Nevertheless, modern science, industry, and engineering are significantly built on it, and many have profited from it. Nor has Buddha reached his Enlightened consciousness and given his teaching to create a sellable easy-step programme to enrich himself. Nor did he aim to create a new

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institutionalised religion employing thousands and even millions of people worldwide. They have just followed their inner drives and concerns, ending up giving back to the world to the best of their capacity. By doing so, they have created a wealth that still enriches our lives centuries later. By following their inner needs and the creativity of the moment, people often end up providing satisfiers for the fundamental needs of others as well. Although not aimed at generating wealth from an instrumental perspective, we have and still are all greatly enhanced and may attend to our fundamental human needs by the existence of this shared human cultural inheritance created by those creative minds who did so with no other external instrumental aim attached to their behaviour than engaging in the free act of creation. Not according to the means-to-an-end logic driving both human labour and entrepreneurship, but as an end-for-itself. Indeed, the universe itself becomes more diverse, rich, and self-conscious by these free creative acts of the human spirit. Through their materialisation, new ways of consciousness and understanding, new forms of organising energy and matter are established and shared. Through this act of free human creation, not bounded by the past nor by the future but simply an expression of the present, the universe acquires new meanings and expresses itself in new forms. Through them, the sun nurtures not only our living planet and lives, nor is its radiation just transformed into food by our agricultural practice or into electricity by our innovative technique and industry. The sun becomes part of our cultural world and representations, being approached by our consciousness and creativity in new forms and meanings, shining through our myths, scientific, and artistic expressions. Nurturing Newton’s and Goethe’s inquiries into the understanding of light and colour, Turner’s paintings, fascinated as he was by Goethe’s theories, or Van Gogh, immersed in the light and colours of the Provence, which he tried to translate into his canvas. Thereby, through all these creative minds, the sun acquires new meanings. Human labour and entrepreneurship are fundamental aspects of the oikonomy. But so is free cultural and artistic creation. Moreover, all these dimensions are not dissociated, nor do they usually manifest themselves in their pure form. They are related and interdependent forms whereby we humans, in holistic ways, regenerate wealth and produce new wealth through our labour. Human labour is the product of past innovations and (re)created cultural wealth, sensibilities, and understandings. At the same time, labourers, through practice and experience, may innovate and improve their techniques in small and sometimes imperceptible ways, which add up to significant changes and innovations in the long run. In analogous ways, in the act of innovation, there is the dimension of free creativity, of invention, which is then projected into the future, aiming at specific results. Conversely, any artist creating his work is limited by the available material and resources, binding his creativity to its limits. Thus, we find the painters looking for new pigments and colours, the sculptors struggling with their stone and poets, mystics and philosophers alike struggling with language and the limits of words. All were looking for innovative ways to manifest their creativity through labour. Thus, these three primary forms whereby we humans (re)produce wealth—labour,

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entrepreneurship, and free artistic and cultural expression—are all interrelated and fundamental dimensions of the overall ‘art of living and living well’. Being related to different temporal dimensions, sustaining these three forms of wealth (re)production are essentially different. From a temporal perspective, human labour is mirroring past practices. Thereby, the way to sustain it is by allowing the labourer performing it to be maintained by the produce of his work. As long as he earns and gets from his labour enough to ‘live and live well’—be it self-consuming or exchanging it in the markets—the process may repeat itself and be sustained in time. This is the idea implicit in the labour value theory of the Classics, assuming that the exchange-value of a good or service is equivalent to the value of the subsistence of the labourers needed to produce it. As long as we, as consumers, are remunerating producers accordingly to their subsistence’s needs, the producers will have the resources required to repeat it and thus regenerate wealth through their act of production. Here, the fundamental social law that ‘wealth is the highest the more each one produces according to his capacities and receives according to his needs’ shows us that both as consumers and producers, responsible behaviour means to understand that, in its essence, we are interdependent. The more we establish symbiotic relations and empathise with each other’s needs, the more our collective and individual wealth will grow and regenerate. Whence producers receive enough to attend to their needs, they can produce at the maximum of their capacity and abilities. By doing so, they can provide to treat the consumer’s fundamental needs best too. The same works the other way around: whence consumers are adequately supported receiving what they need, they can acquire products from producers, paying them a fair price. Both sides profit from an equitable exchange once both gain in use-value terms from the exchange: producers receive what they need to support their lives and wellbeing, as do consumers. Those acting out of their short-term chrematistic interest, solely looking at how to pay the minimum and receiving the most in exchange-value terms, ignore the deep interdependency resulting from the social division of labour and how both parties depend on each other to thrive. They may have short-term benefits by not paying a fair price for the product or, in the case of producers, by duping consumers into buying a pig in a poke. But, in both cases, in the long term, less wealth will be reproduced, be it by the producer not being able to provide to the best of his capacities, be it the consumers ceasing to acquire goods or services from the cheating producer. By not having their fundamental needs adequately met, hardly will the losing side be able to continue supporting the other side to the best of their potential capacities in the medium and long term. Moreover, consumers not paying adequately for given services and products stimulate producers to engage in socially and ecologically exploitative practices to stay competitive in the markets and sell as cheap as possible. Conversely, producers, by doing so, may end up impairing the capacity of both ecosystems and humans to produce according to their maximum capacity in the long run. Similarly, consumers whose fundamental needs are not adequately attended to by obtaining the right satisfiers in the markets will not be able to pay a just price for the products they

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are buying once they fall short of money acquiring unsatisfactory goods and services trying to satisfy their unmet needs instead. We may forget that, in use-value terms, both parts give something they value less in exchange for something they love more in a free deal. In a direct barter, this may take the form of someone giving excess eggs in exchange for the neighbours’ milk and wheat flour. Both can bake a cake or simply diversify their diet as a result. As a means-to-an-end, once markets and money are used to facilitate the social exchange, we rather have the commodity we are acquiring with our money than keep the money in our pocket. Thus, we give it in exchange for a product we value more, which better attends to our needs. For the producers, it is the other way around. Indeed, it is a characteristic of the social division of labour that producers may produce something they have no use for, except for selling it. Thus, both parties gain from the exchange. Nevertheless, once the accumulation of exchange-values, the chrematistic profit, becomes our end and objective, we enter into a dynamic in which the gains of one part represent the loss of the other. Each penny paid more by the consumer represents an equal increase in the monetary profit of the producer. And vice versa. Thus, instead of perceiving the mutual interests which bind them together as parts of a larger interdependent whole in use-value terms, consumers and producers meet in the market as enemies and not as allies. The stronger position tries to impose its needs on the weaker part without attending to the appeals of the latter—predators feeding on their prey. By enlarging our consciousness and putting ourselves under the other’s skin, both producers and consumers may acknowledge the mutual benefit that binds them together. Thereby, we may perceive that agreeing on a ‘just price’ that attends to both parties needs and reflects their capacities is not a matter of paternalistic benevolence or pity. It is the result of conscious responsibility. Of doing the right thing: paying the right price and receiving the right product. Something different happens in the case of free entrepreneurship and individual initiative. As for all new entrepreneurial oikonomic undertakings, it is an idea, a vision of the future that guides behaviour. It starts with an idea, an imagined process leading to imagined outcomes. To become a reality, two things are needed: the freedom to undertake and the physical means to do so. Thereby, it requires investment capital. Thus, while labour may be sustained by its produce which, once consumed or sold, may support a new production cycle, innovations require that the resources are not consumed but invested. While labour may be re-enacted by paying producers ‘the just price’ for their product, allowing them to attend to their fundamental needs and thus continue producing, a new undertaking, not having yet given fruits, needs to be sustained in advance. Resources must maintain the entrepreneurs’ present life and the required physical and human resources to promote the undertaking until, eventually, the undertaking delivers its produce. Thus, a part of the product is not consumed but needed to sustain a new production cycle. Therefore, productive capital aiming at future development to attend to future and not present consumption needs is required. Money and resources become capital, and through entrepreneurship, not just oikonomic growth—which may well be achieved

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by employing more labour on existing production processes—but oikonomic development is fostered. A qualitative change once through innovation satisfiers are produced differently, or new satisfiers are created. But the critical point to retain here is that entrepreneurship can only be sustained by advanced capital—whether owned or borrowed. And as the innovative entrepreneur is exploring new territory, it is always a risk capital. There is no guarantee that the conception of the process matches the reality of its manifestation. Nevertheless, entrepreneurs create more or new wealth than previously produced through conventional labour when they succeed. As Schumpeter famously defined, they will generate a surplus value and be able to make extraordinary profits. It is this potential of an extraordinary gain that compensates for the risk invested capital may have taken. By perceiving this essential aspect of entrepreneurship, namely the ability to project ourselves creatively and imaginatively into the future and thus produce more and new wealth while assuming the risk of failing, we can see that entrepreneurship, to be sustained, requires risk capital. Simultaneously, the undertaking being a potential source of new and more wealth, it is potential interest or profit-bearing money. It may generate a surplus-value that may be paid back at an interest or a dividend depending on whether it is borrowed or owned capital. From this perspective, we perceive that the entrepreneur and the borrowing capitalist are united in the undertaking and interested in its success. It may even be the same person investing his resources in a new project, or it may be a bank or private investor lending the money to an entrepreneur. Notwithstanding, there is a convergence of interests in both cases. Indeed, the more an entrepreneur is sustained in his needs, the more he may deliver results and generate surplus wealth. It is by perceiving that interest money without representing a loss to the borrower is only possible through creating new wealth, we can see that ‘giving to each one according to his needs and receiving according to his possibilities’ means that conscious and responsible lending implies giving all possible support to the entrepreneur in his undertaking. Not just lending money and then leaving him alone to stand the storm. The convergence of interest between lenders and borrowers becomes apparent when a capitalist invests his capital: he expects his future extraordinary profits to pay for the risk taken. But it is as well what happens if we see the oikonomy as a whole. Both borrowers and lenders share the same interest in generating surplus wealth, although at risk of failure. Thus, in the long term and as a whole, the society becomes wealthier the more entrepreneurs receive according to their need (that is, advanced risk capital, support, and the means to innovate) and give back according to their capacity, that is, the result of their undertaking. Thus, banks and financial institutions, entrepreneurs and investors should see themselves all as partners: all supporting and potentially profiting from the benefits of this human creative capacity to project ourselves into the future. But all assuming as well the risk and the responsibility of potential failures. Here, too, the power to empathically connect to the other and find out how best to attend to his needs enhances the prospects and wealth of all.

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It is entirely different once each one thinks only about his short-term chrematistic interests. By considering only their immediate profit and losses, lenders may increase their chrematistic benefit by asking for the highest possible interest rate on the advanced capital. They may let the entrepreneur assume alone the risks of failure and go bankrupt whence failing, making sure that he will have to answer to his debt with his wealth no matter how. This means that entrepreneurs may be unable to adapt to unexpected developments or recover from failed attempts. Conversely, successful entrepreneurs may want only for themselves the extraordinary profits they may have or even find ways to default on their debts. We all too easily forget that globally and in the long run, more wealth will be regenerated and created if both lenders and borrowers work as partners, sharing both potential risks and profits. Thereby, lenders will be able to continue lending and investing, entrepreneurs to innovate. Both sides are concurring with the creation of new and more wealth and monetary gains. They are in the same boat and, ultimately, share the same fate. Both are best served the more each can give according to his possibilities and receive according to his needs. It is a different situation with the pure, present-focused creativity act. Artists, inventors, pure scientists, or philosophers are not aiming at a future result, nor are they following an instrumental logic where what is created is the means for a specific end. Even less, are they supposed to have a chrematistic result in mind, subordinating their behaviour to the exchange-value logic? Indeed, this kind of free human creative act cannot be sustained by the resulting product, nor can it promise a future marketable result as innovations do to reward invested risk capital. Once invention, artistic and intellectual creation finds its reason in itself, the only way to be sustained is through donations, providing the inventor, artist, or thinker the needed resources to ‘live and live well’ and freely create. Through donations, not generating the need to sustain itself indefinitely by its produce as labour does or to make a surplus wealth in the future, which may reimburse the invested risk capital as entrepreneurs, humans may freely (re)create cultural wealth. Cultural wealth, artistic creation, new ideas, and understandings are not made for a purpose but are their own purpose. It is a free human creation and has, thus, to be done in total freedom. As for the case of entrepreneurs, it requires that the means to produce are there in advance. Notwithstanding, unlike innovations and entrepreneurship, it does not aim to generate the resources to repay them and, even less, seeks to create an extraordinary profit. Nevertheless, as we saw, it creatively generates new and more wealth. Indeed, more wealth than repetitive labour or production-oriented entrepreneurship. It creates free, cultural wealth. We just have to look to the cultural wealth produced in this manner we inherited from the past to see the magnitude of the wealth thus created: religious art, medieval cathedrals, ancient temples, spiritual tradition, and wisdom are all still nurturing our consciousness and lives. From literature to music, paintings, and architectural beauty, artists have contributed to our cultural heritage and wealth everywhere. Not bounded by immediate instrumental objectives, the human spirit recreates the beauty and generates new meanings, enriching our collective culture and wealth.

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Here too, the idea of giving to each one according to his needs and each one providing according to his capacity means that free, creative spiritual, artistic, and cultural creation has to be sustained without strings attached. Artists, thinkers, and creators can best manifest their genius when free to do so—neither repeating formulas from the past nor aiming to attain any specific future aim. Here, creation springs forth from the inspiration of the moment, not from having to find ways to produce something ‘sellable’ and profitable. Thus, the importance of donations to ensure ‘artistic freedom’ and free creativity. Seen from this perspective, far removed from the concept of charity or a vertical relation whereby wealth is redistributed from ‘rich’ to ‘poor’, donations are an act of free will and consciousness. Having the means to do so, we may freely sustain free wealth creation once we understand the importance for our own and our collective wellbeing of the free, present connected act of creation of artists, educators, spiritual leaders, freethinkers, and, indeed, all those expressing their potential without being looking for immediate chrematistic and instrumental results. The same happens when we donate to NGOs and activists who work for causes where no chrematistic rewards are expected, but wealth in use-value terms is created or protected. They, too, need to be free to best work for these causes while still supported to do so. At the same time, being consumed by the act of creation and by the free-creators sustaining their own life and wellbeing, donations are a way to eliminate excess resources and chrematistic growth from the oikonomic organism. As we saw in the previous chapter, spare money may speculatively be invested to generate even more money, accumulating exchange-values without adding any new wealth in use-value terms in its wake. Notwithstanding here, it is precisely the other way around: being donated to support the creation and regeneration of cultural and spiritual wealth not aimed to be sold, it stimulates the (re)production of cultural wealth in use-values terms, without accumulating any new exchange-values on its wake. It allows that money not used to sustain the consumptions needs of the individual, or used as productive investment capital supporting entrepreneurs and new undertakings, is used to generate cultural wealth benefiting all, instead of speculatively generating more money to benefit the speculating few. Like when sustaining other’s labour by paying for their products the fair price or lending and supporting entrepreneurs to innovate, we may donate and support those creative and inquiring souls—or ourselves—out of consciousness. We do so out of the understanding that we are enlarging our common cultural wealth, deepening our knowledge, consciousness, wonder, and joy by supporting and engaging in free artistic creation. In this context, creative mathematical minds may freely discover hidden mathematical relations, philosophers and mystics may dwell deeper into meaning, artists and poets may create new realities and representations, and teachers, educators, and masters may freely share their teachings and consciousness with others. In the same way, volunteers, NGOs, and all kinds of associations and activists may work to protect and regenerate our environment, communities, and shared humanity. By being sustained in their ‘art of living and living well’ through donations or freely redistributed wealth, human creativity can manifest itself for its

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own sake, adding new dimensions and wealth to the whole humanity and, indeed, to the universe itself. At a different but similar level to artistic and cultural wealth creation, we can place the (re)production of what is called ‘public goods’ in standard economics. That is, use-values that may satisfy the needs of all in the community or be vital for all by their very nature. Natural spaces like public parks, wildlife reserves, beaches, lakes, rivers, and seas may enter into this category, as do public education and health care. Being recognised as a wealth that should be open to all and not just to the paying few or private owners, its (re)production is not maintained by itself but through public money or private donations. Notwithstanding, the main difference here is the demand: instead of being acquired by private individuals in the markets, wealth is freely offered and redistributed. But in terms of supply, its production may follow the same three principles mentioned: labour, entrepreneurship, and free creative activity of the human spirit. Although not matched by the chrematistic value resulting from it (once access to public services and public goods may be free or highly subsidised), public labour, or voluntary work done by activists or NGOs can be open to criteria of ‘efficiency’, ‘innovation’, or ‘free creation’ according to expected outcomes. The main difference is that instead of private persons or companies and organisations paying the ‘adequate price’ allowing labourers to repeat their work in time or giving credit allowing entrepreneurial innovations or donations supporting free cultural wealth creation, the government or a central redistributing authority which is called to do so. Or private citizens who donate and support these activities. But, here too, it is about responsible and conscious behaviour that may generate the highest wealth to the public at large—a matter of sound public policy and use of the available resources. Thus, public servants and activists alike may best provide according to their capacity by adequately being paid and supported. Conversely, by supporting creative minds to innovate or providing artists, teachers, and researchers with the freedom to create and express their genius, the public sector may best contribute to the collective wealth by considering the broader and long-term interest of the community instead of the short-term interests of those who happen to have the power to decide the use of public money. The same happens when the public administrations, instead of doing it themselves, support NGOs and associations to protect and regenerate communities, wildlife, or our shared cultural heritage. What may be necessary to stress here again is that ‘to each one according to his needs’ is not the result of an act of charity or paternalistic redistribution. It is a free act of responsible consciousness. By acknowledging the interdependent nature of reality and empathically connecting both to our own needs and those of others, we change our oikonomic behaviour and our relations to others not out of a supposed superiority or a moral duty, but horizontally, in a fraternal act. As a result, the wealth of all is enhanced, not least because of more balanced social and ecological relations. Creativity, participation, understanding, and freedom are all fundamental human needs. By creating paternalistic, vertical hierarchies, by not acknowledging each person’s responsibility and capacities to take their lives in their own hands selfsufficiently, we may be over-protecting others and damping their autonomy and

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other fundamental needs like creativity, participation, and understanding. We promote dependencies and lack of initiative once individuals see themselves needing to be cared for by others. It is entirely different when acting out of the understanding of life’s inherent relational and interdependent nature. Here we are not replacing the capacity and responsibility of each one, but just providing what is needed while still expecting individuals to consciously and responsibly offer according to the best of their abilities. Short-term myopic chrematistic interests lead to irresponsible free-market behaviour, which, as we can see all around us, leads to more extensive and profound social and ecological imbalances—eventually impairing the lives and wellbeing of us all. Conversely, paternalistic government intervention and redistributive policies lead to social control, lack of freedom, and vertical power structures. Eventually, as happened in those communist experiments or military regimes we still see worldwide, it may lead to dictatorships and all kinds of abuses in the name of the common good. In other places, as it happens within our modern Welfare States, the inherently vertical institutional character of redistribution and its top-down paternalistic nature leads to passivity and dependency. In both cases, individuals no longer take their lives and responsibility into their hands, becoming passive consumers or, as citizens, follow the law and restrictions where they exist and are enforced, circumvent them or simply act irresponsibly if they can. Power and responsibility are delegated to others and, in the oikonomic arena, we no longer produce for ourselves or be gifted to others, becoming passive consumers instead. In both cases, it leads to fragile balances and growing scale imbalances. Thereby, in the so-called ‘free economies’, we find the super-rich getting richer by simply speculating with their money in the inflating financial markets, producers exploiting Nature and fellow humans, and consumers not bothering about the social and ecological conditions under which what they consume came into being. On the other side, in the realm of redistribution, we find those higher in the political and administrative hierarchies of public and private enterprises redistributing to their own pockets the larger share of the socially produced wealth while imposing their own will and interests on others. Bureaucracies and dictatorships aim to control and shape reality according to their view and interests. Thus, both short-sighted market freedom and redistributive paternalistic state control create their contradictions and imbalances.

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Consciousness and Freedom

By focusing on the importance of individual consciousness and responsibility, we may find an alternative way that does not negate human freedom and chrematistics but places it where it belongs. Freedom is born from a deeper understanding of the whole picture instead of separation and the idea of ‘good’
‘bad’, ‘rights’, and ‘lefts’. Instead of past ideologies, theories and labels we try to impose on reality and others, we may take a phenomenological look at reality, as discussed in Chap. 4. We

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may observe reality with open eyes, connecting to what is alive, putting ourselves within the other’s skin. Thereby, in our oikonomic behaviour and relations, we empathise with the other’s needs, celebrating our differences manifested in the social division of labour at the source of our collective wealth. We do this freely, out of our inner consciousness, instead of being subjected to heteronomous rules and restrictions. Thereby, we may freely give according to our capacities while satisfying our needs through our free and responsible relations to the living whole. This is achieved neither by irresponsible ‘free’ behaviour in the markets nor by curbing the freedom of others and imposing our own will and criteria on them through government or moral rule. Instead, it results from a dynamic, ever-evolving partnership, a symbiotic dance of the parts and the wholes. While in both short-sighted capitalism and vertical redistributive oikonomies, there is a tendency towards higher degrees of polarization and imbalances, through our conscious and responsible freedom, empathically relating, accepting, and sustaining the others’ own freedom and needs as well, diversity does not have to end up in conflict and polarization. On the contrary, acknowledging interdependence may enhance our mutual relations, producing greater collective wealth and resilience in a harmonious and dynamic dance and dialogue between the different polarities. Once we look to reality from this perspective, it completely changes our relation to money and understanding value and wealth. Marshall Rosenberg put it brilliantly in a questions and answers session I just happened to find on YouTube.3 Talking about how to approach our oikonomic life and money from his nonviolent perspective, Rosenberg considers three simple aspects: (1) Never pay money for anything, (2) Never charge money for anything, and (3) Transform the concept of worth by no longer believing that anything is worth a given amount of money. Thus, as Rosenberg further explains, from a nonviolent perspective, the essence of any exchange and relation has to do with how we mutually support each other, satisfying each other’s needs—as it is at the heart of a life-supporting, healthy regenerative oikonomy. The money paid or received in the process is secondary and just a means to an end. By connecting to our own needs and that which is alive within ourselves and empathically understanding the needs manifesting in others, we learn to give and receive according to our and others’ needs. Not just according to predetermined and fixed prices or capacity to pay. To be alive and do what we can and wish to do, we need to receive what we need. Thus, do others. Thereby, we do not pay to receive something for our money but ask from others whether they are willing and able to give us that which we need to be able, at our turn, to continue providing at the best of our capacity in the future. Conversely, we do not just give to whoever manages to pay us, but willingly give them to sustain their lives and thus their ability to do or give others what we would be glad to receive ourselves. It is a symbiotic, cooperative relationship. More than hoping to oblige the other party to provide us with as much as possible for as little we

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Nonviolent Communication and Money: Dr. Marshall Rosenberg https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v¼aQYIQUS2VBQ

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may give in return; we willingly and responsibly attend to the others’ needs. Simultaneously, we receive from the others those satisfiers which may attend our needs. Each one is giving according to his possibility and consciousness while receiving according to his needs. If we can do so in certain circumstances, we may give more than asked once we realise that the other has less than he needs. In other cases, we may receive for free or for less than was initially requested. It is how a healthy organism works: each organ receiving what it needs and, in its turn, providing what other parts of the organism may need. Marshall Rosenberg gives examples from his own experience to illustrate this principle, which may help imagine how this can work in practice. He describes how once, wishing to bring his work to Israel and Palestine, he had not enough money to pay for the tickets. Then, contacting the airline directly, Rosenberg said to an employee: ‘I bet you that if you knew the kind of work I’m doing and if there are some spare seats on your plane, that you gladly would give me some free seats’. After exposing his case, he was then redirected to the superior of the first manager he contacted. The airline executive said he would be glad if Rosenberg did training to his flight assistants and personnel in hearing Rosenberg’s arguments. After hearing each other’s needs, the point is that a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship has been established. Rosenberg was getting the flights he needed, the company getting training in nonviolent communication for its employees. Concerning the fact of never charging for anything but instead talking to others about your needs, Rosenberg comments how, in some of his pieces of training given in places like Sierra Leone, people needed to receive money to be able to attend, having to skip their day jobs and the desperately needed income to pay for their daily expenses to do so. Therefore, he sometimes had paid some to participate in his training sessions instead of charging them. He knew that this tool was desperately needed there and that he had his needs attended once, in other places, having given the attendants to his course the freedom to contribute according to their will and possibilities, he usually was getting more money than he needed for himself. Thus, he could offer his services and training to others who were not in a position to pay him. Another touching example is when he remembers how once a mother called him asking for help and advice because her child had difficulties in school. He then tells her to come in, but she immediately asks the question we have become used to asking out of precaution or fear of being overstretched: ‘how much will it cost?’ He then asks his audience: ‘do you want to live in a world where people who may have something to help somebodies’ family only gives them if you give them money?’ It is, of course, a rhetorical question. But it is precisely the kind of world we live in when we all just think of our short-term chrematistic interests: providing only to the highest bidder and, when asked to pay, paying as little as we possibly can. By placing needs satisfaction at the centre of our oikonomic practice and behaviour and understanding that our lives and wellbeing are a tributary of others, we may centre our attention and consciousness on the use-value and not on the exchangevalue. We may focus on relational and qualitative life-serving and well-beingenhancing worth, not on the monetary price of things. We give and receive because

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it is needed and because it is the right thing to do. Give the baker the money to help him sustain himself to continue producing bread not just for us but also for others. Thus, through the continuity of his labour, he regenerates wealth, feeding ourselves, and our community. The same happens when we undertake a new venture as an entrepreneur or sustain others lending them or ourselves the needed risk capital to start. Or we maintain, through donations, the free spirit and work of artists, thinkers, educators, or spiritual leaders. This is how wealth is best regenerated, and new riches are created. The alternative is already here for all to see: people speculatively investing their spare money to generate even more money without contributing to developing any new wealth by doing it. Thereby, investors in financial assets are, indeed, taking as much for themselves at the expense of others, irrespectively of the other’s conditions and needs. At the same time, we can just imagine how much potential is lost by having trained labourers and production factors unemployed, entrepreneurs lacking capital to start their undertakings, artists, educators, thinkers, and intellectuals not producing cultural wealth for lack of support to do so. If they were receiving according to their needs, they could contribute to our collective wealth according to their capacity. But they do not, for lack of money which is growing selfreferentially in the financial markets instead. Of course, particularly in our modern, large-scale, and increasingly complex and accelerated world, we do not manage to understand the other’s and sometimes not even our own needs adequately. Nor manifest our capacities to the best. Unwillingly and out of a lack of consciousness, other times slightly aware but managing to find a convenient rationalisation to justify ourselves, we engage in unbalanced, exploitative, and selfish behaviour. We ignore life’s inherently interdependent nature. Therefore, the need to promote small-scale, local oikonomies and particularly other ways of oikonomic behaviour like self-sufficiency, gift, and redistribution at a regional scale, where our consciousness may be capable of better understanding the scope and impact of our behaviour. Life is a balance whereby we aim to satisfy our fundamental needs globally through our relations to others and our environment—a dance adapting to the movements of our partners and our inner movements. Sometimes we manage to glide over the floor smoothly. But other times, we may step on the feet of others or just fail to follow the rhythm of the music. Sometimes, we may wish to impose our music and rhythm on others or ask the tune to be changed by the DJ. But there is no guilt in it, no blame. But responsibility, yes. We all act according to our consciousness and awareness at every moment. It is by assuming our response-ability once we realize that we could have done something better that we learn and improve. We change our behaviour and increase our freedom. Looking back on our past behaviour, it is easy to see moments in which we rather behaved differently had we known better. But then, maybe out of fear, anger, or simply by not being attentive enough, we may have failed to act in the way we would have liked once we see it with more perspective. As Alexander Pope (1963, p. 160) famously said, ‘to err is Humane, to Forgive divine’. Thus, by not blaming ourselves or others but by taking responsibility for our feelings, thoughts, and behaviour, we

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may take every opportunity to learn, improve our skills, be more attentive to the music, and be aware of the space we occupy and require for ourselves on the dance floor. Listen and harmonise with the movements of the other dancers and our partner, thus becoming better dancers. Or we may keep on repeating the same moves, repeat the same formula on and on again. Thereby, we keep stumbling around and disturbing the dance efforts of all. The more I think about freedom and responsibility, the more I realise that the only true freedom is deepening and enlarging our consciousness. Whatever we do is the result of our current state of consciousness or lack thereof at the moment we do it. Accepting, integrating, and learning from our experience, increasing our consciousness, and being present and attentive in the ‘here and now’ is all we are free and responsible to build for us and all a better future. To become conscious of our place in the universe, dancing to its music. It is not up to us to choose the theme of our current historical moment and context, although we are one of the orchestra members performing it. But it is up to us how we dance to the tune. It is only by becoming more conscious that we become free, able to choose. Otherwise, we are just following our unconscious drives and emotions, subconsciously and mechanically repeating learned patterns of the past. ‘The truth will set you free’, it has been said not just in the Bible. ‘Know thyself’ was the first of the three maxims inscribed on the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. By becoming aware of who we are, we can take full responsibility for what we do and what we do not, for how we respond to kairós, to the changing ebbs of time. But, once we take full responsibility for who we are and how we respond, we know as well what we need to do. We know how to support life, both manifesting itself within ourselves and continuously changing without. Then, we may act out of consciousness and love, acknowledging the impermanence and interdependency which unites us all in the same symphony and dance. Although, sometimes, eventually, failing, misreading, or being taken out of guard by life’s movements and creativity. Notwithstanding these moments in which we may fail to respond to the changing rhythms or step on our dancing partners’ feet, these are all opportunities to become more aware, to see something we previously had not. Thereby, we have the chance to enlarge our consciousness and skills in the art of living and living well. It is that which the ongoing march of life is asking from us and which natural selection favours. As we saw, in the long run, and globally, love and complementary diversity are favoured by evolution. The sole fact that we are here, I writing this book, you reading it, is a sign that in the universe, the supporting and binding forces of life, love and symbiotic complementarity are more potent than those of death, hatred and divisive competition. In his life-affirming philosophy, Nietzsche (1967, pp. 532–533) stated: ‘if we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed’. We are what we are because of all that preceded us, ‘good’ or ‘bad’,

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and if we managed to get so far, it is because up until now, life and the regeneration of life have triumphed over death and destruction. As beautifully portrayed by the symbol of Daoism, life and all that exists emerge from the polar relations between yin and yang. One contains, complements, supports, and holds the other. One exists through and by means of the other. When we fail to see this interdependence and polarity dance, fail to recognize the importance of the other at our side, we fall into polarization and conflict—each pole looking to his interests and trying to submit or remove the other. But, as we saw, selfishness, conflict, and one party living at the expense and detriment of the others have no evolutionary future. Thereby, we find the natural, recurring laws binding atoms, molecules, planets, solar systems, and galaxies together in the world of physics and chemistry—unstable relations falling apart and disappearing. We find emerging out of automatic, instinctive behaviours and interactions for social insects and most of the living world, resilient and complex living structures that have created new richness, diversity, and ways matter, energy and information are transformed and processed. Thus, while the tension resulting from different polarities generates movement and change, the whole containing and binding both together allows for complementarity and balances: yin and yang. For us humans, having been given the gift of self-reflective consciousness and the possibility of choice, it is a matter of our consciousness, will, and ability to embrace polarity, find the balance, and respond to life challenges. It is up to us whether we support, enhance, and regenerate our oikonomic life or whether we enter into self-defeating socioecological dynamics. Andrei Tarkovsky (1989, p. 58) beautifully expresses our responsibility and freedom in his book Sculpting Time: ‘The time in which a person lives gives him the opportunity of knowing himself as a moral being, engaged in the search for the truth; yet this gift is at once delectable and bitter. And life is no more than the period allotted to him, and in which he may, indeed must, fashion his spirit in accordance with his own understanding of the aim of human existence. The rigid frame into which it is thrust, however, makes our responsibility to ourselves and others all the more starkly obvious’. This enlargement of our consciousness, our freedom, and responsibility are what Aldo Leopold advocated by his land ethic, inviting us to ‘think like a mountain’ and take a long term, holistic perspective. Thereby, he invites us to take a more responsible and life-serving approach to Nature and our relations. As he argued (Leopold, 1968, pp. 223–226), ‘it is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense. Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it (. . .).

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The ‘key-log’ which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (. . .) The fallacy the economic determinism has tied around our collective neck, and which we need to cast off, is the belief that economics determines all land-use. This is simply not true. An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse. (. . .) As a land-user thinker, so is he. (. . .) The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process. Conservation is paved with good intentions which prove to be futile, or even dangerous, because they are devoid of critical understanding either of the land, or of economic land-use. I think that it is a truism that as the ethical frontier advances from the individual to the community, its intellectual content increases. (. . .) By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodelling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use’. We have to open ourselves to others and Nature. Open ourselves to life and behave ‘as if life matters’. By empathically connecting to our own inner life and needs manifesting within and that of others through whom we come into being, we may regain ethics and aesthetics as fundamental value criteria. By doing so, we may recover the sacred aura of ‘value’ as ‘valuable’ and not simply the narrow notion of prices to which modern economics and culture have reduced it. By focusing on relations, needs, and use-values, we may enlarge our oikonomic references beyond the limited realm of chrematistics and ‘the art of acquisition’. Recover and rebalance the different oikonomic ways to strengthen our local communities through reciprocity and gift, rebalancing power, and wealth through redistribution. Moreover, we may enlarge our self-sufficiency and autonomy while redistributing wealth and making it flow according to life’s needs and the regeneration of our communities and our environment. At the same time, in the realm of chrematistics, we may learn to better use our money in freedom and conscious responsibility, at the service of life and not the other way around. In the same way that the different events and crises we go through in our lives, seen from a larger perspective, ended up being the opportunities we had to grow, learn, and become more conscious, historical events are but opportunities to learn. We, as individuals, are but a part of the evolution of our societies. Societies and civilisations are but small events of our collective story as a species. But even our human species’ evolution is but a part of Earth’s evolution and, indeed, compared to other species’ evolution, it is still short lived and youthful. Most likely, life on Earth is just one among millions or billions of other such events in the universe, given the sheer number of stars and planetary systems that exist. But we are, and we live. This is all we need to know and experience to look in wonder into the world and

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ourselves. The universe looks and becomes aware of itself through our eyes, realizing itself through our doing. We err, but hopefully, we learn from our mistakes and stand up again after our falls. All are doing our best to ‘life and live well’, aiming to live in peace and harmony. Sometimes doing the right thing, others failing. We have all been given this time allotted to us to be part of the universe and life’s magic and poetry. It is up to us to do our best out of it. Thus, I hope this book may help you, reader, enlarge and enhance your life and consciousness. To help you to find your own and unique way of dancing to life’s music. I wrote it to the best of my present capabilities and am happy and thankful to have been allowed to share it with you.

References Kohr, L. (1957). The breakdown of nations. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Leopold, A. (1968). A Sand County Almanac—and sketches here and there. Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1967). The will to power. Random House. Pope, A. (1963). The poems of Alexander Pope. J. Butt (Ed.). Yale University Press. Sachs, W. (1999). Planet dialectics—Explorations in environment & development. Zed Books. Steiner, R. (1894/1964). The philosophy of freedom—The basis for a modern world conception. Rudolf Steiner Press. Tarkovsky, A. (1989). Sculpting in time—The great Russian filmmaker discusses his art (Revised edition). University of Texas Press.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. W. Stahel, Regenerative Oikonomics, Springer Studies in Alternative Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95699-8

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