A New Economy

[NOTE: These posts are an ongoing presentation, meant to be read beginning with the earliest and ending with the most recent. If not read in that order, there is a potential loss for the reader in an overall understanding of what is being presented. You have been warned.]

So the world economy goes bankrupt during World War I. And with that bankruptcy the Great Pirates lost their control over the world. BUT. And this is a big and important “But.” Nobody knew what had happened.

See, nobody knew that the Great Pirates had been running things for thousands of years. They always thought that it was the kings and queens and other figureheads, but those people were exactly that: nothing but figureheads, frontmen for the true powerbrokers. Now the figureheads weren’t going to admit that they were just figureheads. And the Great Pirates weren’t going to tell anybody, because the existence of the figureheads kept people from knowing who was really in charge. Therefore, when the Great Pirates lost control of what was going on, nobody knew. In other words, nobody was in charge any longer and nobody knew that nobody was in charge. Furthermore, when the world went belly up, nobody realized what had happened. If anyone did realize it, either they kept their mouth shut, somebody else shut their mouth, or nobody listened to them.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling. Sure it is. Just shut up and go back to your hole.

So no one was any longer in charge of what was going on and nobody knew it. Furthermore, nobody knew what was going on.

And therefore everybody continued to live as though things hadn’t changed. But they had.

Now I’m going to tell you what really happened.

As I’ve already stated, the old economy was based upon possession, production and movement of stuff (goods and resources) and services. Next I claim that the old economy was overwhelmed by the explosion of evolving science and technology. Think about what was happening. How did this expansion take place, what was the driving force behind all of this expanding creative output? Was it not ideas that spouted from the innate curiosity of humanity? Ideas. And when ideas come into expression, how are they related to one another? Through information. Through data. Now think about this for a minute. The old system of basing wealth upon physical possession was swamped by a rapidly emerging expansion of ideas and information which was generating a new wealth. And increasingly these ideas were concerning that which was beyond the normal scope of humanity’s physical senses.

So, the contention here is that the old economy was replaced by a new economy, an economy based upon ideas and information. Let’s pause for a moment and try to let that sink in. The old economy of physical accounting was replaced by a new accounting. But an accounting based upon what? Obviously something beyond the physical. The Greek for “beyond” is meta. Therefore, we could say that the basis for the new economy was meta-physical. Metaphysics.

Since the old economy was based upon physics and the new economy is based upon metaphysics, how does that change things, if at all? First, a basic principle in the world of physics is that of entropy. Entropy means that everything is running down and running out. This is why it was so easy for Malthus to decide that there must not be enough to go around. He was functioning in a world founded in entropy. Everything is running down and running out. That’s not the case with metaphysics, a reality that is beyond that which can be measured physically. In metaphysics, a basic principle is that everything is in a constant state of expansion. Funny, but isn’t that a goal of capitalism, to be constantly expanding the market? A constant state of expansion.

And we find that there is an inherent balance between these two realities. In a universe where everything is running down and running out, we observe that the universe is in a constant state of expansion. It’s like breath. We breath in, we breath out. Neither the “in” nor the “out” can survive for any length of time by themselves. They are co-existent. And so it is with the physical and the metaphysical. The physical springs from the metaphysical, yet the constantly recycling physical comprises all of the tools and building blocks necessary for the metaphysical to manifest itself. And together, they are constantly creating a universe that is truly beyond our wildest imaginations. Finally, in the past century, humanity had finally evolved in consciousness where it could begin to access this “other side of the coin” of economics, the creative source behind it all.

For those who are religiously oriented, this reality has been hidden in the Christian New Testament for almost 2,000 years. In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 1 he says “Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” Those are powerfully insightful words. Yet, that’s not all of the story, as Paul Harvey might say. If we look to the Lamsa translation of that line from the original Aramaic, we find a hidden phrase that adds a new dimension to this scripture and expands our understanding of “faith” to infinity. Here’s what Lamsa saw, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, as it was the substance of things that have come to pass; and it is the evidence of things not seen.” Then in the third verse, Paul says, “For it is through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen came to be from those which are not seen.”

What we find here is that the source of “all that is” is that which is not seen. And faith, or belief, is the portal through which it comes into expression. In our reality of experience, we are the agents of faith and therefore the creators of our reality through manifesting that which we believe. And that source for all of this faith and belief is infinite. And I would then contend that all things are possible.

Now, a very important part of what led us to our current economic woes had to do with credit. Some of my old friends in Amway used to spout about the evils of credit and how the appearance of the credit card, back in 1950 began humanity’s slide toward financial Armageddon. But they could only see the surface. It’s what was taking place behind the credit card that was most interesting. You see, credit is value extended to someone with the promise implied that the debtor will repay the creditor in the future. Well, we all know that things don’t always work out as we anticipate. And we also know that there are unscrupulous people who are always looking for ways to take advantage of others. So it is a given that anyone who gets into the business of crediting value to others is taking the risk of not being repaid for everything that they loan out. The coverage for those bad debts comes from the interest, and other charges, that one might get from other debtors. But the creditor must always stay alert to insure that they have enough value of their own to cover any potential losses from credit not being repaid.

So what would keep someone from loaning out far more than they could ever recoup? If you have been paying attention, the answer is regulation. We, the people, created laws concerning how much value one can loan out, or extend in credit to others, based upon one’s own value. And because lawyers and accountants were involved in all of this, every step of the way, upon every side imaginable, you can rest assured that the legislation that has been designed to protect us from the evildoers in finance is convoluted beyond the imagination of the common man. These laws decided who could loan and extend credit and how much they could loan or extend. I know that when I first got interested in this, banks could load out 9 times as much as they had in assets. I used to say, if you’ll only allow me the same latitude, I’ll loan 9 times my assets to myself, straighten out my finances, and then pay myself back. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice if you could pay all of that interest to yourself instead of having to pay it to someone else?

Originally, there were limitations as to who could and could not loan out money and extend credit. Over the years, however, those definitions expanded to include more and more financial entities and they spread out dramatically as to how much value could be loaned and extended in credit. And lots of this came through the form of deregulation, through removing the original regulations that were passed in order to protect us from financial entities getting too carried away with the game and thereby deep sixing the economy. With time, more and more people were able to jump into the money game of high finance. I mean today people can work and gamble from home 24/7. Gadzooks! Ah, the wonders of the modern age.

Around 1990, a friend turned me on to a book that has had quite an influence on my outlook on the realities around us. It was written by Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The title of the book was “The Media Lab” and subtitled “Inventing The Future At M.I.T.” It was about the Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology and how the students were working upon the merging of three fields of Broadcast and Motion Pictures, Print and Publishing, and Computers into one field. To this day, 20 years later, the book is still a fascinating read. But it’s not the Media Lab itself that I want to talk about. In the final third of the book in a section entitled “Media Lab Of The World,” Stewart interviewed a couple of world class economists, Peter Schwartz and Jay Ogilvy. In reference to the world’s economy they said, “no one is in charge and no one knows what’s going on.” Hmmm. Sort of fits into my scenario that the Great Pirates are no long in control, no one knows it, no one has taken their place, and the world economy has evolved into a new economy that no one yet comprehends.

Peter and Jay further pointed out that although no one was in charge and no one knew what was going on, nevertheless, the world’s economy was moving right along with billions of dollars flashing around the planet at the speed of light every second. They went on to say that a Nobel Prize awaits the person who can describe the economics of information.

Well, I do not begin to have the credentials to even qualify to be heard by those who move in the realm of Nobel ideas. But I’m going to give you my take on the matter, just the same. No one is in charge. True. That is why things are so out of hand right now. Oh, a few are making money off of the current situation, but they are not in charge. They are actually just lucky players or descendents of the Great Pirates. No one knows what is going on. True. Those who get an inkling of what is taking place are quickly discredited by those who are riding the wave. But nobody truly understands what is going on. Now how can I say that? Simple. No one that I know of has said what I’m about to say. (Oops, as I write this, researching as I go, I discover Hakim Bey aka Peter Lamborn Wilson making comments upon metaphysical economy. Credit where credit is due. Ideas whose time has come.) I happen to believe that what I am going to tell you is what is really going on and what can be done about it.

When the Metaphysical Economy came into being some 90 years ago, in the sense of taking precedence over the physical economy, it grew slowly, but deliberately. New ideas begat more new ideas, but the consequences of these new ideas were twisted and turned in an effort to make them fit into the equations of the old economics. The crash of ’29, which, as I told you, was the outpicturing of the actual crash a dozen years earlier, came about because the new economy was already generating new wealth and people didn’t know what to do with it, how to make it fit into the old economic molds. Hey, so what if it couldn’t be explained. Enjoy it. And enjoy it they did until it split the sides of the old mold and all hell broke loose as the house of cards collapsed. The Great Depression was a depression of the bankruptcy of the old system.

We were rescued from that depression by taking ideas and putting them into our physical reality through programs like the WPA. In other words, the government put people to work turning ideas into reality. (I’d love to see a list of everything that was built in this country by the WPA.) Yet, still we were seeing things through old outdated eyes. This new economy wasn’t just emerging in the United States. It was attempting to break out all over the world. Some slick marketers took advantage of people’s depression experience and playing upon fears that they manipulated into a self pride, vaulted themselves into positions of power where they fell back on the old, outdated power games of survival of the fittest and drove us into a second World War.

As with World War I, the atomically explosive growth of ideas put into action accelerated the new economy into a hyper drive. Yet the politicians and the economists and the financiers were able to continue fooling everyone by grabbing this new evolving wealth and finding ways to convert it into the old economic molds and extensively padding their pockets in the process. But they had to start getting more creative in their endeavors. So, in 1950, they created credit cards. This worked well because now they could funnel this new wealth into the fiction of credit. Remember when I told you that banks could loan out nine times more than their assets? This is what was backing that fantasy. The new wealth. But they funneled it to the coffers of the big players rather than to the people. And, after all, it is people who are the channel for all of this wealth, through the manifestation of their belief and creativity.

The Cold War tries to keep a lid on things, but it leads to the Space Race and more and more wealth is generated. Vietnam. More war ramp up of ideas. But wait folks, coming up on the outside is what many thought was a long shot. It’s computers expanding by leaps and bounds and in the process linking the entire world in one gigantic communications network. Truly nuclear expansion of wealth is now taking place. The Internet offers opportunities for creative outlet for billions of people on the planet. Egads! How do we keep a lid on it. How do we figure out how to account for it? Sub-prime mortgages. Derivatives. Risk insurance of packaged debt. Let everybody play. This is so much fun. This is so amazing. This is so unreal!

CRASH! The world market is in disarray. Millions have lost their savings. Millions have lost fortunes. Millions have lost their retirement. Millions have lost their homes. The ripples extend around the entire world. Yet, just as with the aftermath of 9/11, in many ways, for many people, things aren’t really that dire. Well, at least not yet. Now, a personal note here. Although I am posting this with a date of October 3, it is actually being written on election eve.

So, what happened, what crashed? Well, the economy, of course. Actually a facsimile thereof. Remember, it’s all just smoke and mirrors. The economy crashed almost a century ago and has not recovered. What we’ve been living in is just a movie loop that is played over and over while we desperately try to figure out what the hell is going on.

And just what is going on? That’s next.