One of the central tenets of my work is that everything happens in a context of relationship—a shared background of concerns, commitments and practices—what I call a background of relatedness. We may make commitments as individuals, but we always fulfill them in networks of relationships with other people.

The other day I was asking, “What does it mean for an economy to collapse?” What is the worst-case scenario of the current ‘meltdown’ and ‘freezing of credit’? (Interesting that these two most frequently used metaphors, extremes of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ are referring to the same thing and both are ‘state’ changes.) My conclusion is that the collapse of an economy means people stop trusting each other and are, therefore, unable to exchange goods and services using some form of ‘promise’. In other words, we lose a sufficient background of relatedness to do business based on some symbolic form of exchange such as money. Since people will always need to coordinate action to survive this means other kinds of ‘relatedness’ replace that which we normally take for granted in a healthy economic space. An obvious substitute is bartering, but in a meltdown, it would probably be focused within a community of people that one can trust.

When I went to Argentina in 1999, one of my questions was “What is it like to live in a reality when money isn’t worth anything  (e.g. 1500% inflation) and people stop trusting the government and each other?” What I learned (while oversimplified) is that, in the face of no certainty about the future and not a lot of background of relatedness, at the level of a society, the result is a population that learns to live in the ‘now’ and to create and live in tight communities. The people who are unable to achieve either of these become almost immobilized by fear and cynical to the point that they lose all possibility beyond what is already happening. Moreover, commitments become subordinate to mood and circumstance. In general, new initiatives become very difficult to launch in the face of a prevailing resignation that reality is ‘beyond our control’ and, to some degree, not of serious concern.

In this kind of environment, corruption and black markets become rampant. In fact, one way to look at corruption is as the ‘privatization of trust’. When you can’t trust the systems and institutions of the society, then you must seek and do favors for friends or those who may make it worth your while. Once these kinds of patterns take over (and become a kind of de facto economy), they displace other values and cultural norms and are extremely difficult to change, since most people have lost touch with any possibility that things can change or that they have choices about the way things are.

How we navigate the coming years may determine whether this current breakdown will give birth to a stronger, more economically stable and sensible society or whether we will go the way of Argentina and many other nations and just resign ourselves to wait for better times and some mythical leader who will change ‘the way it is’. I suggest that this is likely, unless a lot of mature, responsible individuals take on designing new practices, new institutions and, above all, rebuilding a background of relatedness in which real possibilities can be created and acted upon.

I think that Elders are such people. If not, then who can be? We must clean up this mess before we die.

This means me.

This means you.

This means now.

This means here.

So let’s do it…

Written by admin at Wisdom in Action

Tagged with: economy elders possibilities privatization relatedness trust