pressure to clamp down personal emotion. To not be emotional, to never cry in public.
Take lumps and pretend like it doesn’t get to you. And I think that past and my past leads to
a necessity to find revelations that peel away the protections you’ve developed. In my case I
was taught a lot of stuff that was just absolutely wrong through graduate school. You know,
from downplaying slavery and native genocide—downplaying the origins of our country and
racial typing in literature and history—to the primacy of economic markets, that the only
duty of business is to the shareholder. It was absolutely just lies. Lies, lies and damn lies.
I had to get to be a pretty old person to strip them away and find out what I actually believe
to be the truth. And I ceded to the parallel path where men have had to show a hardened
exterior to everything, and return to the place where they get to have an open heart too.And that’s where I think the love show “mutualism” lives the best, which is, we can be clear-
eyed yet optimistic and generous and open about the possibilities that human beings can be
good to each other and we can redesign society to be based on mutualism. And where this
finally hits the ground is that I believe we’re having a crisis of our economic development
paradigm which has never been based on equity, much less sharing in mutualism and
generosity. So we have to go in and deeply transform. It may still be something called
capitalism but if it is, it has to have the modifier of “co-operative.”Mhmm. So I’ve been thinking
we can just change the goals.
I think in the United States
we got sold a “bill of goods”
(instead of the Bill of Rights)
and everyone decided that
the ultimate goal of the
economy is to be efficient.
Optimised. Even though I like
optimisation in some contexts
but optimising within a
business firm usually means treating many, many stakeholder groups really badly. And if you
think about it, efficiency in human relationships is called rudeness. It’s like, why would we
choose efficiency and optimisation as goals for our economy if they’re so deleterious to our
human outcomes? But we did and we executed by human’s will.Yeah exactly. And they’re false premises, like
the marginal utility of a dollar is the same for
all actors in all settings. Which is just not true.
It’s just not true that the dollar getting lost in
my car is the same value as the dollar you hand to a person living on the street. It’s just not.
Maybe mathematically they accrue the same amount. I’m reading Winners Take All and
he talks about when we reduce things to too small a level, when we parse it down to a unit
that we can actually manipulate, we lose sense of the fact. We lose so many other realities.Ye s.
Co-operative capitalism. I like that. That’s a nice segue into how that journey
is manifest in you at the systems level. Donella Meadows has identified the
two greatest leverage points for shifting systems as the ability to change
the goals of the system, and at the highest level, to reimagine the paradigm
within which the system exists. So how might we bring a heart-led, love-
based approach to our economic system while honouring the wisdom of
the capitalist system that got us to this place, and be able to bring them
together? To me that’s the work that you’re deeply engaged in right now with
clean money, clean food and clean energy. So maybe you want to talk about
that integrated approach, how you chose those systems and why?It’s almost like a myopic measure of success. Like through
optimisation, through efficiency, the only way we’ve
measured that is through a dollar. And more of them.We have to get to the place where everybody
owns a little of everything and nobody owns toomuch of anything.
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KAT TAYLOR
DUMBO FEATHER