I've likened the whole of economics, including capitalism, similarly. It's as if all our economic experts spend their wasted lives examining in the minutest detail our society, and mostly its money - sometimes from a distance, using powerful binoculars, sometimes closely, using a microscope. They can construct wonderful theories on all the multitude of measurements they can make using all sorts of rulers, gauges and graphs, and construct models of mind numbing complexity, they can even make portentous prognostications about people's wealth thirty years hence - yet they can't even predict the world's greatest financial crash and the biggest event of their professional lifetimes a month before it happens. Because all these millions of man hours is a futile use of their collective intelligence; they totally deceive themselves, and totally deceive us, because it's what lies outside the view of the binoculars, or the microscope, that's truly fundamental. What economics can safely tell us must be less than 5% of what it is to be human being existing on this planet, it ignores and is incapable of measuring, or even understanding, the other 95%.
Our view of the cold stars, the luminous moon, the blinding sun, the porcelain sea, the colour of a rainbow, love, hate, jealously, grief, joy, a Rembrandt, beauty, friendship, warmth, comfort, family, intimacy, the sound of the wind in the trees, the pebbles on the shore, the crackle of frost on the ground, the smell of hay or the stockpot, laughter and tears in the theatre, the goose bumps from a Handel aria, the throb of rock music, laughter in company or in reading a favourite novel, a sense of care for society, the taste and pleasure of a pint of bitter after a hard few hours in the garden, a prickly conscience, our wonder at everything, earnest argument, easy companionship, not just amongst ourselves, but with the creatures and flowers that share our existence, the thrill of knowledge and the thrill of sport, the tug of the fish on the line, the familiarity of a well-known poem ---- there is a whole 360 degree world unfolding and acting and playing around our head of which economics and capitalism can usefully describe or guide us but a small fraction. A whole 360 degree world that describes, inchoately, what we are and what we think we are.
The whole of human society coped (imperfectly admittedly) without any economics for thousands of years. We now have economics, and our planet and our society is in deeper trouble now than at any time in its collective consciousness. An economics that ignores most human's rights and needs, but panders to unfulfillable human desires, lying to us and to itself to say it can fulfil them. Wearing blinkers, looking through the tunnel, doesn't even begin to describe the way we've imprisoned our brains and our entire culture to a certifiable insanity.
I've likened the whole of economics, including capitalism, similarly. It's as if all our economic experts spend their wasted lives examining in the minutest detail our society, and mostly its money - sometimes from a distance, using powerful binoculars, sometimes closely, using a microscope. They can construct wonderful theories on all the multitude of measurements they can make using all sorts of rulers, gauges and graphs, and construct models of mind numbing complexity, they can even make portentous prognostications about people's wealth thirty years hence - yet they can't even predict the world's greatest financial crash and the biggest event of their professional lifetimes a month before it happens. Because all these millions of man hours is a futile use of their collective intelligence; they totally deceive themselves, and totally deceive us, because it's what lies outside the view of the binoculars, or the microscope, that's truly fundamental. What economics can safely tell us must be less than 5% of what it is to be human being existing on this planet, it ignores and is incapable of measuring, or even understanding, the other 95%.
Our view of the cold stars, the luminous moon, the blinding sun, the porcelain sea, the colour of a rainbow, love, hate, jealously, grief, joy, a Rembrandt, beauty, friendship, warmth, comfort, family, intimacy, the sound of the wind in the trees, the pebbles on the shore, the crackle of frost on the ground, the smell of hay or the stockpot, laughter and tears in the theatre, the goose bumps from a Handel aria, the throb of rock music, laughter in company or in reading a favourite novel, a sense of care for society, the taste and pleasure of a pint of bitter after a hard few hours in the garden, a prickly conscience, our wonder at everything, earnest argument, easy companionship, not just amongst ourselves, but with the creatures and flowers that share our existence, the thrill of knowledge and the thrill of sport, the tug of the fish on the line, the familiarity of a well-known poem ---- there is a whole 360 degree world unfolding and acting and playing around our head of which economics and capitalism can usefully describe or guide us but a small fraction. A whole 360 degree world that describes, inchoately, what we are and what we think we are.
The whole of human society coped (imperfectly admittedly) without any economics for thousands of years. We now have economics, and our planet and our society is in deeper trouble now than at any time in its collective consciousness. An economics that ignores most human's rights and needs, but panders to unfulfillable human desires, lying to us and to itself to say it can fulfil them. Wearing blinkers, looking through the tunnel, doesn't even begin to describe the way we've imprisoned our brains and our entire culture to a certifiable insanity.