system of values, which following natural laws, traces the contours of our hearts…
Unfortunately, the contours of our hearts are too often shaped by the mutilating forces of an exchange system that values people as objects and positions them vertically according to self-reinforcing and arbitrary judgments of worth.
It is this, the valuing of the material markers of value, that drives the stampeding herd of capitalists over the cliff. We are similarly doomed if we remain unable to extricate ourselves from their ubiquitous, under-examined and therefore poorly articulated values.
For instance:
1) Our economic system supports objectification, competitiveness and materialism, each of which in a thousand ways results in oceans of tears;
2) It supports social stratification and the many manifestations of disrespect;
3) By organizing around a principle of scarcity, our economy nourishes a rampant anxiety and the use of compensatory control strategies. Anxiety also decreases intelligence and relevance of response as it coarsens our perceptive filters and increases our autonomic reactivitiy. This in turn produces a general apathy to oppression, rationalizes poverty and institutionalizes greed;
4) Our system also disintegrates family units, disenfranchises dependency, and punishes, or fails to reward, many expressions of compassion;
5) Our system supports mass production and discourages craft and accountability, and only sporadically rewards allegiance to quality. The very best of us is easily lost between the ledger lines, as the subjective matrix of our complexity is reduced to units of production and consumption, profit and loss…
~~~
There are many pods that deal very well with different facets of this dialog. It is not my wish to compete, but to carve out a niche dealing primarily with values-formation and evolution as manifest in the character of the larger system of exchanges between us.
I want to open a discussion for matters of the heart, and to explore how this is a relevant and primary contribution to the development and maintenance of a fair market. The history of capitalism, and of culture in general, is too much a story of how to design a system based purely on the, “hey, it's just business,” back-slapping, wheeler-dealer, power-broker, rootin-shootin' frontier brand of capitalism, and to see how this results in an economic system capable of any level of deceit and atrocity to preserve its own interests, to express its own values.
Please help me to focus this dialog. Links to these pods are welcome. I will be happy to post them as I find or receive them.
Also, I appreciate your patience as this site is currently under construction. What is gone may return, and what is here may evolve… ;-)
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