Global Economic Collapse

Ultimately, when an entire society subscribes to an economic ideology and all work together in order to make its implementation sustainable it is, in effect, a socialist system no matter what name we give it. The central problem is always on how to sustain a moral administration.

Capitalism encourages individualism, which in turn requires a very high degree of personal integrity.

The pool of liquid capital in any society represents the value of the GNP. Capitalism allows private individuals to dictate how that money is invested. Printed promisary notes are an artificial representation of human effort that can easily undermine reality and distort one's sense of personal integrity. One forgets that one is dealing with people's lives. Distortion sets in when the State encourages a trading system that allows those with a few excess dollars to gamble on the stock market. It gets volatile when it is deregulated and the State removes its retraining hand. That is asking too much of personal integrity. Gamblers want the competition to lose, not improve their hands. Thus the original ideaology of investment towards creative growth via healthy competition, inevitably degenerates into betting on the failure of all competition. All gambling eventually gavitates towards a single winner. Such a system only works while enough players are still winning. Gambling is a highly addictive pass-time. When an entire society gets hooked on it, either on the stock market amiong the wealthy or via a national lottery system among the poor, trust in the future is based more on false hope than honest effort, and moral integrity inevitably suffers. Thus in the end capitalism is self defeating. Instread of encouraging team effort it ends up quashing it.

One would then think that a communist ideology that discourages individualism and encourages collective team effort, would end up on the global stage as a hands on winner.

Communsim failed on two counts of moral disintegration.The basic problem in Marxism was the denigration of religious observances - which, no matter how cynical one may view it, never-the-less sets an absolute standard of morality that cannot be argued with, even if most workers could not attain to it. By making a corruptible government set the example of goodness, it led inevitably to corruption of party power.

The second failure was that it did not try to set a peaceful international example. It took on the West in a dangerous gamble of Russian roulette with nuclear guns. The gamble demonized the ideal of team effort and eventually bankrupted them. That together with state corruption took the heart out of the communist worker and the system failed.

Like communsim, we too now stand on the brink of system collapse. The heart is being systematically taken out of the capitalist worker. Quadrupling the gas prices sucked his savings and frightened him about the future. Then his house is being foreclosed. His retirement fund has been devalued. Out-sourcing has put millions of jobs on the line. CEO's who claim that their input is a thousand times more valuable than the average worker is profoundly insulting.Reckless gambling has made the chips close to worthless. Fears of global environemental collapse add to the pressure. National motivation is suffering.

It is hard to say how speedily we can correct ourselves, if at all. Obama is talking about a whole new form of green-based economic recovery. Sustainable energy production, cleaning up the environment, a more ergonomic infrastructure, better health care and education etc .. which theoretically should create millions of new jobs and put us back on track. But none of that is really capitalist friendlly.

All of Obama's new deal requires massive funding over the long term and nobody knows where the money is coming from. Capitalism prefers short term investement, quick-product turn-over, planned obsolescence and high consummerism.

As far as I can see, looking down the road, though i have been roundly laughed at for suggesting it, is to gradually wean ourselves off a money-based/ownership, sytem with all its artificial barriers and place far more stock on the evolutionary behavioral imperatives imprinted in our specie's DNA.

As stated, ultimately every system relies on morality. People are mostly kind-hearted and hardworking and highly creative when given the opportunity. We should not allow a minority of bad apples to determine how we seek our collective happiness.

If we can paint a clear enough picture of the world we would most like to live in, and lay out a pragmatic, step by step plan of how we can get there - if we all focus on the same goal, a more sustainable and friendlier existence is not impossible. There can no question that there is masses of amount of work to do, and we have a huge reservoirs of workers looking for jobs, and the technology is there at our fingertips.

The barriers in front of us are purely ideological. If communism has proved to be immoral. And then capitalism follows suit. You tell me what will motivate a global workforce, if not a moral standard based on universal custodianship and sustainable planet management?

How we view the world and respond to the ideological mores of our cultures boils down to child indoctrination. The same child born in Russia, the USA or Sweden, would respond in kind to each of them and would fight to the death any seeming threat by a counter ideology, even though all three of those cultures cultivate the the same basic moral values of kindness, sharing, chores, crafstmanship, courage, love, creativity and intellectual agility.

Any final answer to the world economic crisis would require the end of divisive and primitive ideological indoctrinations and a concerted effort to rear the global child as a future planet manager. Since all parents have been deeply indoctrinated since birth into their particular ideological mind-set, a mass change of the next generation's consciousness cannot be accomplished by reason alone. Existing circumstances have to reach a point of deterioration on a global scale that are severe and lasting enough for all cultures to seriously question the value of their economic ideologies. Only then can the mass deprogramming begin and more holistic ideas on how to effectively manage a planet in a sustainable manner be given a rational hearing.