The word, "economy" has become such a ubiquitous and media saturated notion, that it has grown to rival the Olympian realm, towering above humanity, housing the gods with their powerful boons and curses. Like a monolithic engine that runs on by itself, the "economy" presses forward - and everyone else gets dragged along with it. It is no wonder then, that the World Trade Center was singled out for a terrorist bombing attack: for it had become the most imposing icon of global economic power, a symbol so potent that its physical destruction will just be another phase in its ongoing renovation.This because the international market place has become our dominant social reality. When family decisions depend upon the daily fluctuation of interest rates, and working people need to be trained in the intricacies of accounting just so that they may pay their taxes, we know that we have been colonized by a different sort of regime. Indeed, people enter banks like they once entered churches, and the high priests of finance alone are privy to the esoteric rituals of transaction, the floating of bonds or financing of companies, upon which entire nations may rise and fall.
Could it be, however, that despite this imposing multi-trillion dollar a day juggernaut, which could perhaps more aptly be characterized as a world-wide roulette wheel spun off center, we still remain bound to the most primitive ethos of the hunters and the hunted; with markets motivated by fear and moved by panic, with individuals and communities desperately protecting their territories, even as they dissolve, shift, and reshape before their very eyes. No one is immune from the laws production and the effects that emerge from them: both planned and free market partisans argue this, but what few power structures are willing to entertain is the notion of "economy" as a subset of ecology, as the Poet Gary Snyder put it, that is - the economy and its energies of exchange as part of a much greater fabric of natural life.
Economy certainly participates in the laws of nature, but it is also most basic to the dynamics and intimacies of culture. Indeed the word "economy" stems from the Greek "oikos" a "house" and "olkovopia," "the management of the household." The traditional Roman household was said to be ruled by Juno, the goddess of partnership. To live in a house and participate in its undertakings, in its complex web of inter-relationships that embed economic exchange in deep networks of kinship and social relations is the root sense of "economy."
Now, for some reason, a very particular form of economy has developed out of this root, typified by the now pervasive assumption that the primary way humans are to connect is by making things and selling them to one another. Sharing by the fire at night, sentimental meandering through cookie jars from childhood, sitting on stoops or in cafes and watching the world go by; these have become the pursuits of the lowly, the disenfranchised: to really be a part of the game you have to keep producing, buying, and selling. And your children, of course, must likewise be educated in order to "compete" in the free market system.
When we seriously examine current relationships of exchange between sellers and buyers, however, we find that along with constant movement and frenetic activity, there is an extraordinary level of toxicity. Toxins, on a literal level, are poisons in our biological system that are carried through the bloodstream and often lodge themselves in various organs. But they can be viewed as having correlative, metaphorical manifestations in our life stream, for when we look at the energetics of mainstream market-exchange we find a poisoned economic system and a deeply toxic field.
How does this poison manifest in the social-economic world? What are its symptoms? They are the still the same symptoms articulated by the romantics and revolutionaries of previous centuries (William Blake, Karl Marx and others of their kind): gross inequality and alienated labor supported by elaborately constructed mythologies of ruling classes, only now magnified by technology and a new "lean economy" geared toward maximum productivity at minimum cost. The "mass-production" economy has always threatened skilled craft-persons and artisans, but contemporary information technology, which supports ongoing "downsizing" and "reengineering" in the corporate world, may create an even greater transfer of wealth from regional communities and from skilled workers to the owners of capital assets. Add to this inevitable resentment over increased corporate productivity without a measurable increase in employee living standards, the anonymity factor: working without personal commitment to or from those whom you work for, and a chronic imbalance bred by mistrust and uncertain market fluctuations (i.e. the price of ink rising tenfold in a week and putting small printers out of business), and you have an extremely toxic economic field.
This is not to say that things were ever any different in some idyllic past, but still, the neighborhood economy, where you knew the person buying and selling to you, has all but disappeared. The model of monetary exchange taking place within the context of relationship - the grocer, for example, asking his customer how her family is doing - has been done away with. We have moved, in the words of Paul Hawkin, from a customer to a consumer-based exchange dynamic. Customers operate within a sphere of loyalty, relationship, and a shared tradition and history. When there is a customer there is a vital exchange in the buying and selling, giving and receiving process. You are sharing your life on much more than a monetary level with another. A Consumer, on the other hand, does not have any personal relationship with the people s/he is buying from, just as the mass-producer has no relationship with the people s/he is selling to. The producer does not sell to people, but to a "market." The Consumer walks into the mall and purchases something off a rack. If there actually are sales people there, they are so resentful about having to work a mindless nine-to-five job that they have no personal stake in, spending eight hours a day under artificial lights and the rest, that they transmit their resentment to you: whether through lack of care or knowledge about a product, lack of courtesy, or any sort of relational skills. Anyone who has had to wait at the "information" desk in a department store knows this scenario all too well, what to speak of dialing a company for product information and spending the next fifteen minutes of your life trying to navigate through a series of pre-recorded messages without even being able to speak to a human being?
And then there is the phenomenon of on-line purchase, which can allow you to eliminate human contact altogether; ultimate convenience, and full-ranging power to click onto anything, but at what price? If it is sitting home alone and being the ruler of your own world, will it suffice? The issue I am driving at here is not necessarily one of technology usurping humanity, for new modalities of exchange and communication can be quite creative and stimulating: they are not at all bad in themselves. Rather, I am concerned with the unconscious utilization of materials and resources to avoid the more fundamental questions of how we may relate to one another.
continued in Part 2...
Rick Jarow, Ph.D., is a practicing alternative career counselor, and author of "Creating the Work You Love -- Courage, Commitment, and Career" (1995 Inner Traditions). For more information click here or visit http://www.anticareer.com or e-mail soul@anticareer.com.
