Replies

Thanks so much Charles, that’s really helpful orienting material!!!
Maybe you could also check out my question I’m about to post in the ‘General’ section, and enlighten me further?!

Wow this is great guys (on a scan!) Thank you!!! Will try to make space this weekend to digest these riches!

Ok let me try it this way 🙂

You talk about capitalism as a form of economic egoism, am I right?
What do you think are the causes of generic egoism?
Is capitalism a cause of egoism, or an expression of it? (Or both?! Or …)
Is capitalism the sole cause of egoism?!

K, nvm: got it!

Thanks so much for introducing yourself David! Your experience and contribution are so welcome: I will definitely make time to read your work.

Re Integral: been involved from the fringes for some time, last in any visibile way in helping prototype early Integral Life Practice offers in 2005, in Boulder. Will be interested to hear where you see ‘Integral Economics’ right now (if it really exists?!)

Thanks again for being here!

All great points, Kent: especially ‘teeth’!!!

Generally, thank you for your measured, grounded and well-informed contributions to this forum: much appreciated!

Loved the way you made the abstract real, by grounding your discussion in Portland realities!

I just wanted to share a thought I’ve been having about ‘externalities’, as regards how they’re being discussed/address so far in the readings and discussion.

The impression I rather get is that people think economic theory was developed in a classroom or a university or a think-tank, and then applied in the world. This theory left out pollution etc; so it had to add them back in, to ‘get complete’. Then this adding-back, and the prior neglect, become a valid critique of economic theory, of capitalism as a system etc.

The more accurate meta-view is this. People have behaved for a long time as if Nature is a toilet/garbage-can/etc. Humankind could ‘get away’ with this on a global scale as long as it was small enough. (Although local disasters – polluted rivers etc – were often noticeable … sometimes even noticed!) Then economic theory comes along an describes this prior, actual behavior, and doesn’t account for or include for ‘externalities’, in the first instance – because human behaviour doesn’t! In this view, to lay the blame for unaccounted-for externalities at the feet of economic theory (or capitalism) is like blaming the mailman who delivered your bank statement, for your overdraft!

A third view: there is a co-existence and co-evolution between theory and practice. For example, a pro-active economic theory could have got ‘ahead of the game’, and called out environmental dumping by business, and insisted on proper accounting. It didn’t. But again, isn’t the root of that in the people doing economic theory, not some abstract ‘discipline of economic theory’?

Certainly, we can learn from all this. Change things. In particular, change what is taught, because the goodness-of-business-excluding-externalities can and did shape young minds.

Methinks, tho, blaming the dismal science without noticing, diagnosing and responding to the dismalness of the human scientists, is a mistake …

McKibben not McKibble hahaha – thanks Rolla!
Yes, bit of a learning point for me after writing that: ‘check prior art for title before crafting new art!’ :):):)

Will do, thanks so much!
I’m at rosseinsky.nicholas.m@gmail.com, just so you have that.
(Others also welcome to reach out to me there!)

Hi Ahmed 🙂

Are you by any chance a systems theorist? (You didn’t write an intro, so I have no idea about your background.) I’ve done work in that field, and one of my close friends is a field leader. She persists in saying things like ‘a system’s purpose is what it does’ – which sounds a lot like what you are saying? (I still Love her. I’m just that open-minded …)

But most systems do many things, and there are interventions that can shift that collection-of-things in various directions. For example, a human body is a system. It can do lots of things. It can be shifted in lots of ways.

Like Charles, you seem to find it helpful to adopt an extreme black-and-white view of capitalism, in which it’s ONLY purpose, WITHOUT LIMITATION, is the accumulation of capital.

I’d just observe to you (and Charles) that if you actually want to make change, this kind of stance is in fact misplaced-concreteness: your extreme abstractions bear no relation either to the facts-on-the-ground, nor can they have any concrete traction in actual transformational engagements (because they are themselves the sorts of silo-ed echo-chamber behavior that is part of the problem).

Of course, the economic system that we have is extremely problematic, to put it mildly. But if you mischaracterize it as a first step, how can you possibly hope to engage in diagnosis, remedy etc?!

Then again, maybe I’m hearing you wrongly? These kinds of forum are notorious for that …

Marcus,

Thank you for your comment. My commentary was driven by this phrase in the Cobb article: ‘God is the Creator of the Earth’ – maybe John needs to know he is being elliptical?! 🙂

I’m not interpreting that ‘Creator’ statement in a sort of literalist, 7-days-Genesis, way, if that’s what you’re pointing at?

Here’s the key thing I’m getting at. In the theocosmology I use, I’d call Whitehead’s primordial the Ground-of-Being, and Whitehead’s consequent the Holy Spirit. In this view, the Ground actually has *no* prehension of our sub-reality, for various technical reasons, until a sort of glitch (mistakenly imaged in the Christian Bible as a punitive expulsion from the Garden) is undone. But the Ground sent the Holy Spirit into our glitch-ridden sub-reality, to ensure glitch-undoing, and partner with us in it.

What does this have to do with nuances of Who Created What? Well, those same technical reasons mean the Ground *cannot* have been a direct co-creator of what humans currently-and-typically call reality, because a pervasive experiential feature of that ‘reality’ is a fundamental separation-and-separatedness, that is literally unimaginable to the Ground.

Now why – especially in an ECON class – should we care about any of that?!

Because there is ONE thing that mainstream econ has absolutely correct, in a very twisted and inverted way: the very first line in almost every introductory text says that econ is the study of production, consumption and distribution of SCARCE resources. It’s this fundamental pointing-to scarcity that’s actually a great gift! (Of course, econ then ignores the QUESTION of scarcity, and proceeds as if it’s a given! If there’s a misplaced-concreteness, as model-ignoring-key-reality-feature, it’s right here!)

Crucially: scarcity is again *unimaginable* to the Ground, whose essential reality is ‘eternally More [Love, Truth, Joy …]’.

If that’s so, why is OUR pervasive experience scarcity? (‘Toiling in the dust’, as I believe Genesis puts it.) Because of the separation FROM the Ground (a separation which WE create; there is no participation in that by the Ground). Separation is the glitch, the Holy Spirit is here to help us with it, it will be undone, we will return to eternally-More etc. In the long run, we’re not dead, per Keynes: we’re returned Home.

Bottom line: in this view (right or wrong), the nuances of reality, Creation, etc, cast dramatic light on the economically-fundamental scarcity issue, its origins, and what’s to be done. Rather than focusing on theories (neo-liberal etc) or systems (e.g. capitalism), it sets the economic question FIRST in a transformation-of-identity-and-reality frame. Only from there – with context right – can we proceed to make any Intelligent remarks about how we might proceed …

And all of that hinges on, and co-stands with, getting really precise about reality-aspects, their functions, relationships etc. (I.e.: avoiding misplaced concreteness, via abstracting away all the crucial nuance in this territory …)

Hi Allen/Evan (is that one person or two?)

Thanks for your introduction, I’m excited to track your gift economy experiments (briefly saw a long post about it in a later forum): thanks for representing that significant and growing strand of economic practice, here!

Hi Leslie 🙂

I’m glad you’re here too! Thanks for your vivid introduction, I really feel connected to you and your life, through your words. (A good lesson for me – my own self-introductions are pretty dry!)

‘a challenge … to find a practical economics grounded in the common good’. Preach, sister! Hopefully we can make some progress on this, in the coming years …

Hi again again Zhenbao

Yes I am interested in the relation between consciousness and the brain. But I think you have may leaped to a conclusion that this interest means I think consciousness is necessarily reducible to brain-states. I don’t. (But I also see the problem in a simple *assertion* of non-reducibility …)

Re meditation etc: of course. I had a non-dual awakening over 20 years ago. Of course, the study of consciousness needs to include the consciousness of the scientist, and mainstream science doesn’t do that. (I do, though …)

I don’t agree tho, with your claim that philosophy should be what deals with consciousness: it’s really clear to me that it can reach no definitive conclusions, without well-formulated scientific experiments. But that’s not something we could explore in any depth in a comments forum!

Anyway, we could maybe talk more in person, or online (eg Zoom), about these issues.

Hi again Zhenbao!

(‘Again’: I just replied to an earlier comment you had made!)

Your journey is fascinating, and I find many parallels between our trajectories. I’m in San Diego, but if you have time when you are in LA, I’d love to come up and spend some time together in person.