Our global financial/economic system consists of a network of computers programmed to trade to make money. The system has one goal – to make money. For what? For whom?
Manuel Castells writes in his analysis (in The Information Age) –
The outcome of the process of financial globalisation may be that we have created an Automaton at the core of our economies that is decisively conditioning our lives. Humankind’s nightmare of seeing our machines taking control of our world seems on the edge of becoming reality – not in the form of robots that eliminate jobs or government computers that police our lives, but as an electronically based system of financial transactions.
And, as Marc Havély writes in Prospective 2015 – 20125 (my translation)
the modern economy has only one goal – growth – to the detriment of human beings who are enslaved by work and consumption, and to the detriment of the biosphere which is plundered, polluted and destroyed bit by bit.
Isn’t it time we stopped and asked ourselves what our economic and political systems are for? What’s their function?
Is it the support of human happiness, wellbeing and thriving; the deepening of the human experience of meaning and purpose; the flourishing of Nature and all of Life; the furthering of the evolutionary development of the Universe?
Can we agree greater goals than accumulation of objects, consumption of resources, and a numbing of the experience of living?
Havély asks that we ask of our work or our purchases –
- Is this excellent for my health, physical, moral and mental?
- Is this excellent for Nature, for Life and for the Earth?
- Does this add good value and richness to human beings as a whole?
Heroes Not Zombies 