Humanity 4.0

Been thinking a bit about the winds of change that are racing through the social media speedway. I have to say, for the most part the perspectives seem misguided to me. Well-intentioned maybe. But from where I’ve seen the world in my crazy travels we need to think out of the ol’ box way more than that.

A lot of people are seeing this pandemic as both a sign and an opportunity. A sign that we need to stop-and-think differently. An opportunity to change the broken systems that were and still are plaguing us. So far so good. 

But then inevitably the recurring theme I read and hear is that capitalism is evil, and that we are slaves to it. And therein lies the trap: that’s where those perspectives are setting themselves up for failure. 

Capitalism as the predominant “ism” did not come about just last century. To be clear it was not born even two hundred years ago. It goes back at least to the Phoenician merchants of millenniums ago, never mind a couple of centuries. 

What we DID do sometime in the last couple of centuries was give capital-driven systems their very own “ism”. We spanked it from birth and watched it usher in Humanity 3.0. 

It was very well intentioned at the time, given that we were trying very hard to wean ourselves away from totalitarian monarchies and despotic empires. No self-respecting future historian is going to ding capitalism for that. So far so good.

Enter abuse and greed, stage right. Yes, we couldn’t help ourselves, and the fucked-up human tendency to want to “have it all” comes every-damn-time at the expense of too many. A mere handful at first, but soon enough it spirals down to hundreds, thousands, and invariably millions of fellow humans. And THAT’S were the system begins to act like a runaway freight train.

Some societies shut the doors to capitalism early on. China and Russia among the most obvious. Didn’t work out very well for Russia, China is probably not too far from its own implosive fireworks. Others embraced capitalism, but after two horrific back-to-back wars they fell to their knees and suffered through a shock-based change. That was Europe. America on the other hand, not so much. 

Just about the biggest suffering that the US has ever endured on its own soil was not 9/11. Or Pearl Harbor. Or the great Depression. Or even this pandemic - knock on wood. No, it was the Civil war. 

It’s not just the raw number of deaths mind you: 620,000 is as close as it gets to genocide. The US population at the time was around 31 million. So about 2% of the population died in that war. Two percent of today’s US population would make it 6.6 million. Chew on that for a bit.

So the fact that the US has not embraced a socialist democracy most definitely comes from a lack of extreme suffering, like the one Europe felt since the fall of their monarchies. Over one hundred million deaths from two world wars alone. ONE HUNDRED MILLION. And we’re worried about a quaint virus? Bitch please. It is Covid-19 that fears humans, not the other way around. Animals fear humans. Life itself fears us.

It hasn’t been paradise for European socialist democracy, no doubt. Most US conservatives make a very good living poking holes through the Swiss cheese of European socialist democracies. The lesser intelligent among these conservative pundits point to the likes of Venezuela, but hey. Those Americans are their own worst enemy, so there’s not much we can do to save them. 

Which brings us back to those who are heralding a new post-capitalist era. A brave new social order. That’s great, except for one minor detail: they don’t have a plan. Go back and re-read where they spend most of their energy in their premise. It’s a brutal critique of capitalism, in all its worstness. You can’t build anything out of sheer criticism. Well, not anything of value or sustainable. 

That’s not how isms work, so fail they will - unless they change their tune. From the get-go capitalism was way too busy looking to capitalize on productivity. It was too busy to be whining about the dark side of humanity. It had a plan. A vision. A mission. Strategies, and deliverables. To quote from one of my favorite Don Henley lyrics, “and Jesus people bought them...” (yes, I know. They were ugly boxes.)

You want this Covid-19 experience to change the world? Focus on a positive force for humanity. Leave capitalism alone, it’s just an “ism” we created to get us to the next level two centuries ago. Humanity 4.0 awaits. But we’re not going to find it in the holes of capitalist Swiss cheese. There’s nothing there to begin with, that’s why it’s called a hole. Either fix it or create something better, but we’re beating a dead horse by pointing out how toxic it has become. Yes, in many ways it has become toxic. And yet it’s still the only ism we have. Personally I neither hate it nor am I in love with it. It’s just a system, a tool. To me it’s like a car: it got us from point A to point B. We’re at point B. Kicking the old car is not going to launch us on our next journey. 

Guys like Bernie Sanders were proposing we join our European brothers and sisters on that next journey. Love him or hate him he was proposing something positive. He had a plan. You don’t think it will work? Find something better. Or get in the old beat up car and keep driving it until the wheels fall off. That’s it, no other options. Kicking it is a dumb option, please stop doing that. It is just as dumb as poking through the holes of European socialist capitalism. It’s Swiss cheese, stop poking through something that’s not there. Take a sad song, and make it better. Otherwise let it be. Words of wisdom indeed. 

Hello Humanity 4.0... my god, it’s full of stars...

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Of Black Fridays and Red Octobers

Velikaya Oktyabr'skaya sotsialisticheskaya revolyutsiya, commonly referred to as Red October, was the October Uprising or Bolshevik Revolution, the seizure of power within the larger Russian Revolution of 1917. As most of the world knows by now, the Soviet experiment was a failed one. But over the life span of an average human being, the Soviet Union sure gave the other world superpower a run for its money.

The irony behind the blood-rich symbolism found in Soviet history is that the Union was brought down by a red bottom line: the empire essentially went bankrupt.  An Italian friend of mine once commented, as we both watched the literal teardown of the Berlin Wall, it is unfortunate that the Soviets were more concerned with control than with authentic socialist wellbeing. In his opinion, from that milestone moment on, US style capitalism would go unchallenged. The good, the bad, and the Black Thursday.

For those not familiar with the origin of the term, Black Friday refers to retail businesses going from red ink to black ink on their ledgers – in other words, profitable. To go out on a limb, the “Black” in Black Thursday / Black Friday is not where the ugliness lies. At least not until someone steps up as the leading, post-Soviet challenger to the American way of life. Many believe China, another “red state” of sorts, has been trying to fill the Soviet shoes. With its own Great Wall full of symbolic cracks and ready to come down any decade now, China has ironically been busily producing some of the stuff that Black Friday is made of. Not as much as Americans think, less than 10% in all categories, but a sufficiently ominous portion nonetheless.  So instead of aiming its nuclear arsenal at us, China is attacking the leading superpower with… stuffed toys. This would seem like a Disney-esque plot in a world power conflict, if it weren’t for one unfunny complication: merchandise coming from China is manufactured in great part by a labor force that would not be legally allowed to exist in America. We are, after all, “better” than that.

That would seem like enough of a conscience-tugging problem for the US. But wait, there’s more: the US has not merely offshored labor that it does not stomach on its own soil, it continues to rely on hyper consumption as its structural foundation. A consumption-based economy, within reason, is technically sustainable. Cyclical recessions are simply the price to pay. But hyper-consumption, consuming at a rate higher than income, savings or investments, is not sustainable. In hyper mode, it in fact becomes a pyramid scheme – an approach that in great part explains the 1% controversy.

According to a US News Money report, the US middle class peaked in 1969. That’s 45 years ago, in case some of us have lost track. An entire generation was born, graduated from high school, college if they figured out a way to pay for it, started a work career, and found themselves… worse off than their parents in one too-many cases. Of course “worse off” is a relative term, and it shouldn’t just be measured by economics. But a shrinking middle class is not exactly the direction a system that professes to be better than socialism should take. Five republican presidents and three democratic ones have presided since 1969. This is not a partisan issue – it is a systemic breakdown. It is a crack in our very own Wall Street.

I have always been a fairly skeptical person. I don’t believe in most conspiracy theories, and I am put off by agenda-driven exaggerations. Having said that, I recognize I have committed mistakes in judgment, personally, economically, and politically. Yet as we all know, learning from those mistakes is its own reward. With that in mind, it seems to me that every year the average American keeps making the same mistake: Black Friday typically comes at the expense of Red Saturday. There's a fundamental reason the great American middle class is shrinking – it is consuming more than it produces. Wall Street's perennial hunt for Black December may just take the American system to its own version of Red October.

I blogged about the Occupy Wall Street movement a few years ago, my conclusion was that our obsession with Wall Street was not the answer. I do agree that the systemic damage being inflicted by the 1% is outweighing its “trickle-down” contributions. It’s the proverbial “taking more than you give” dysfunction. And yet, obsessing about what fat cats are or are not doing is not where the answer lies. I believed then as I still do today, every time the fat cats put cheese in the mousetraps, we only have ourselves to blame if we keep falling for the same impulse. The American middle class has in fact become addicted to consumption.

A few years ago I made a promise to myself: do not criticize without offering a solution. With that in mind, I am increasingly in search of post-capitalist – not anti-capitalist – movements to support in one way or another. Create one if I have what it takes.

One such example is the “Landfill Harmonic” project, born out of a trash landfill in one of the poorest countries in the world (watch the three-minute preview of the project below, I am confident you will be inspired by it). This project is a wonderful example of how change can happen, not by continuing the blame game against the 1%, but by curing our addiction to what they are selling. This particular project may or may not survive, but that's hardly the point: none of us do in the long run. That's where the beauty of change comes in. Change does not have to always stem from pain and fear. Smart change needs to increasingly come from inspiration.

The Landfill Harmonic Project