ECONOMY THAT HEALS: CHALLENGE OF THE NEW EPOCH

Erle Frayne Argonza / Guru Ra

Magandang Hapon! Good afternoon!

Please know first that this writer/analyst is both (b) economist and (b) mystic-healer. For some time now, the challenge of contributing to the construction of an ‘economy that heals’ has been knocking at my ‘mental coconut’, a task that explains this article and many yet that will succeed this one.

As an economist, my lines of subspecializations are: (a) development economics, (b) political economy & public policy, (c) international political economy, (d) economic sociology, and (e) enterprise economics (or biz economics). As a healer, my subspecializations are: (a) psychosocial counseling, (b) pranic healing, (c) distance healing (w/ angelic reinforcement); and, (d) soul healing (includes chakra alignment & cleansing, past life issues resolution).

Having laid out my brief economic & healing credentials, let me now proceed to my thesis. First of all, as a developmentalist (practical economist) and healer of long standing, let me declare my categorical observation that the ‘world system’ economy of today, which is an admixture of capitalist-dirigist-fascist-clerical economic systems, is characteristically: (a) non-healing, or pathological, (b) is hoarding-based rather than sharing-inspired, and (c) is already on its terminal phase, needing replacement rather than its recycling.

To simplify my terms, the present system, which is principally organized around capitalism (economy for profits, based on money system), is:

• SICK: A ‘sick economy’ is one based on flawed, sick principles that no longer work. Necessarily, a ‘sick economy’ (borrowing from Erich Fromm’s and Erik Erikson’s ‘sick society’) is a parametric condition that induces anxiety, anomie, alienation, and related pathologies that can lead to neuroses, sociopathy, psychoses, and total self-fragmentation.

• GREED-BASED: The ‘hoarding orientation’ (see Erich Fromm’s works) of the ‘world system’ (see Immanuel Wallerstein’s works) had propelled greed to the level of madness, thus reinforcing ‘system sickness’. Greed multiplies greed, more greed creates more greed, and so on, ad aeternum, thus leading to more ‘economic sickness’, to more madness and system collapse and societal catastrophe.

• SCARCITY PREMISE: Western economics had postulated (declared as a self-evident given) that scarcity is the fact of life. This postulate had since underpinned ‘hoarding’ economics, and had remained unchallenged in the West and mainstream circles. This is flawed from the very inception. Scarcity is not given, not a universal law either, but is a product of enslaving, hoarding power relations. It is an ideological rampart in support of the more real exploitative relations between the ‘hoarding classes’ and the producer underclasses that they bound and gagged in property relations.

• DYING & DEATH-INDUCING: The system is now dying, it is now on its death throes, yet many refuse to see it die. Bank bailouts and interest rate interventions are among those examples of tools that no longer work, yet they continue to be employed. Furthermore, the ‘sick economy’ also induces so many deaths due to poverty, anxiety, starvation, consumerist pathologies (obesity, cardiovasculars), genocides, etc. What is needed is to bury the system and build a new one rather than to perpetuate it.

Let me then declare the next thesis: that a new economic ‘world system’, which is in the nature of a ‘healing economy’, is a viable one. We may perhaps use different terms to refer to the same ‘world system’—sharing economy, cooperative economy, non-hoarding economy, consensus economy—but let us better recognize where we all converge: the ‘healing economy’.

Following from the foregoing statements, the contours of the new ‘healing economy’ or world system would be the obverse of the previous observations. They are:

• WELLNESS ECONOMY. A vibrant, wellness-oriented world system is one that will also see that everybody will have enterprises, jobs, and related pursuits that will see their talents grow and utilized to the utmost. It is an economy that also promotes the wellness paradigm, welcomes the advent of the alternative healers as ‘new kids on the block’ rather than to denigrate them as ‘quack doctors’, promotes equity and the highest values of the general welfare in their true sense, and is generally conducive to healthy relationships, institutions, communities, and healthy world.

• SHARING &/OR NON-HOARDING. ‘Hoarding orientation’ had degraded us humans to the most putrid hovels of the non-human or anti-human for many eons now. It is time to reverse such demonic conditionality and state. In the economic sphere, the highest principles of the ‘rule of Divine Love’ (compassion as core value) and ‘principle of giving’ (golden rule) must become dominant and sacrosanct. To talk of ‘compassionate capitalism’ is an oxymoron and subtly demonic. We have no more need for capitalism and the other isms, what we need is a non-ideological sharing economy and enough of those isms that have only exacerbated our ‘sick economy’ and ‘sick society’. Ditto for competition principle, the core of capitalism, which has no place in the emerging context. Cooperation-loving-sharing is the value trilogy of the emerging context, not competition-hatred-hoarding of the capitalist world system.

• ABUNDANCE. The true state of the universe is one of abundance, not scarcity. “From above, so below,” declares the Teaching. From the abundance of the cosmos, to the abundance of the Earth & Solar system, this is the sacrosanct law and not that peddled lie about scarcity. Healing economy is one that is attuned to the very dynamics of the cosmos and not divorced from it. An operative healing economy will ensure that all members of society, all citizens of Earth or Terra, will be attuned to this sacrosanct law, and will experience abundance in everyday life. “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed,” declared the late Mahatma Gandhi in his swadeshi writings. Gandhi referred to the same law, and stated it in axiomatic manner.

• DYNAMIC & LIFE-INDUCING. The healing economy will prove itself to be dynamic and life-inducing as well. It does not follow from absurd ‘creative destruction’ demonology worship of capitalism, but from ‘creative constructivism’ of a Godly society. In the present system, just by destroying the currency of one nation (e.g. currency attack versus ASEAN/East Asia, 1997), many workers will lose their jobs and many small enterprises forcibly close shop, leading to anxieties and deaths. Is that what you call Godly and ‘creative destruction’? Very boldly I’d say, echoing spiritual masters who said the same, that a wellness-sharing-loving-giving economy will be truly life-inducing, as it will not need wars and destruction of nations to sustain it.

Having shared to you in brief the contours of the new economic world system, let me now close with the reiteration of the challenge: building the healing economy is the greatest economic task of the moment and the eon now unfolding before us. We can no longer be clinging to dinosaur world systems that bred so much maladies in the past, we should move on and build a new one that will be the economic foundation of a new society of loving, giving, sharing, Oneness, and authentic human liberation.

Enough with those bailouts, IMF-World Bank mergers, bank mergers, interest rate manipulations, stock markets, speculations, government take-overs, hedge funds,…Enough with greed, hoarding, hatred, competition, bloody vampire economics of the Old World!

Peace & Love Advocates of the world, let us build the New Economy of Healing without reserve. Let’s not be cowed by the intimidations of the demonic Pied Pipers and fascistic war machines of the Old World elites. We shall overcome! Carpe diem!

[Writ 08 December 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]

CAPITALISM’S DEMISE: WHAT WENT WRONG?

Erle Frayne Argonza

To all fellow men and women out there who may have deep fondness for the liberal capitalist model of economic adaptation, I hope that you can make some adjustments in your cognitive banks. Capitalism is not a permanent facet of human life, but merely one among various epochs that will come to pass. Only impermanence is sacrosanct in the cosmos, so please refrain from singing hallelujah to a world system that is on its death knell as I articulated in a previous article.

And please refrain from swallowing hook-line-&-sinker the contentious propaganda of Francis Fukuyama about the ‘end of history’, that accordingly history had concluded with the galvanization of liberal capitalism, that history makes no more sense. Fukuyama’s theory is a slapstick narrative of hyper-valuation of the ‘mad economics’ of late capitalism and hypo-statization of reality that has no relation at all to the real in the world out there. Fukuyama had taken as ‘real’ what is actually ‘virtual’, and froze time much like unto a fairy tale of timelessness, of history-less Nietzschean moment that is fit more for infants than for adult humans.  

Fukuyama epitomizes the ‘mad economics’ of all those Pied Pipers of the global oligarchy for whom he works, and his discourse is akin to the ‘mad discourse’ so described by the late Michel Foucault. The ‘mad economics’ of Friedman, Hayek, Fukuyama, and all those technocrats who serve as processors and bagmen for the global oligarchy, is precisely symptomatic of that colossal ailment of a world system, and as we all know, madness can never salve ailments but rather hasten the system’s death. Caput! Blow your horns, prepare dirges to this Dead One!

Unless that you yourselves have become maddened by the seemingly infinite monies flowing unto your purses as you are among the beneficiaries of ‘late’ capital, unless that you are indeed now suffering from combined maladies of sociopathy and schizophrenia, unless that sanity had departed from thee forever, please heed the last plea of your own conscience where sanity had retreated: CAPITALISM IS DEAD! No amount of propagandizing, of contorted interpretations, can ever change the course of history at this juncture, as we are all headed for a TOTAL SYSTEM COLLAPSE in the months ahead. Read that please: MONTHS AHEAD, not years ahead.

What went wrong with capitalism? I’m sure all of you fellows knew what went wrong, do I even need to answer that? Your previous thinker mentors, among economists and sociologists, forewarned you all of the forthcoming demise of capitalism, but you paid nary an attention to those brilliant minds as you were so engrossed in your ‘conspicuous consumption’, behaving more like some infantile EATERS or as anthropoids rather than as thinking and spiritually evolving humans. You are all very much human, so please consistently behave like one, and begin by listening to the Inner Voice of your conscience, for that voice is your soul’s.

Let me summarize the diagnostics, forewarnings and/or prophecies of our thinker mentors from the West, and I’d stress WEST because there are some other thinker mentors from the EAST and SOUTH whose peregrinations are so recondite they are not so easily digestible. Let me just stress the WEST as this is what is common to us all. So let me re-echo the thinkers and their theories:

·        Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: The internal contradictions between the private nature of capital (ownership of means of production) and the social nature of production. The ‘crisis of overproduction’ and the ‘law of the falling rate of profit’ are attendant patterns. Social revolution results, then the alternative society will be constructed.

 

·        Max Weber: Industrial capitalism’s granite product, the bureaucracy, led to dehumanization. He never forecast though whether this dehumanizing system can be sustained—but please read between the lines. (His contemporary Emile Durkheim had a similar observation about ‘anomie’ or normless state of urban/industrial society.)

 

·        Thorsten Veblen: The end-phase of industrial capitalism is markedly pathological. ‘Conspicuous consumption’ is the disease of this phase, the toxic behavior from the ruling class that later filtered down to the emerging middle class.

 

·        Joseph Schumpeter: The internal contradiction between the desire for profit and the revolutionary character of innovation. The demise of capitalism will see the possibility of the technical class taking over society and build that alternative system later.

 

·        Daniel Bell: The ‘post-industrial’ society had already been born right inside capitalism. A distinct modality in itself, post-industrialism will eventually prevail in a system that isn’t capitalist (or money economy) but rather knowledge-based. The ‘service worker’ had arrived on the social landscape, the prototype class of the future.

 

·        Theodore Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse: ‘Late’ capital is characterized by the pervasiveness of ‘instrumental reason’, where reason is used to justify the non-rational (‘madness’ in Foucault’s argot), where state planning/intervention was infused into a system that scorned intervention.

 

·        Alvin Toffler: Both capitalism and socialism are based on hoarding, both are variants of the same industrial society of yesteryears, both are based on ‘2^nd wave’ capital-intensive technologies and non-renewable energy sources. The ‘post-industrial’ society is altogether distinct, isn’t based on hoarding, production-consumption (‘prosumer’) is based on ‘3^rd wave’ knowledge-intensive technologies and renewable energy sources, knowledge cannot be hoarded.   

I need not articulate further, do I? They all converged on one theme: capitalism is transitory, it bred social maladies (alienation, dehumanization, anomie, conspicuous consumption,…), is systemically flawed, and will be dismantled at sometime in the future.

No matter how delimited their theories maybe, as they all proceeded from certain perspectives (they were all ‘paradigm’-based in the jargon of Thomas Kuhn), they all proclaimed—in either tacit or explicit fashion—the coming demise of the system. They weren’t as silly as Fukuyama who popularized seemingly ‘satanic verses’ (distorted precepts) about a non-changing, permanent economic landscape called ‘liberal capitalism’, but were rather so adroit at social forecasting that they saw a vision of the future as they were articulating on their empirical observations of the present society.

So, fellows out there, prepare for the months and years ahead. We are headed towards those stormy months, years, maybe even decades. How the future society will come to shape is not easy to forecast. “Something blurs the Force, darkens our sight of the future,” declared a Jedi Master in the Star Wars cinema fame. Let me end right here.

[Writ 22 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila.]