Sympathy involves at least two entities in a relationship. It can be said that when two bodies resonate at the same frequency they are in sympathy. Since prehistory sympathy has ignited basic human communications. Sympathy is an empathic concern that is triggered in the presence of inequality or distress, usually related to pain felt by someone else. It awakens our need to share. Over time moral codes have assembled contractual laws that bind relationships in sympathy. In equity and grace, sympathy is an essential part of a functional society. Economic laws have become unsympathetic to society and privilege the wealthy few. Even our civil laws and rights are disappearing to financial monopolies. Let’s not forget that sympathy belongs to the heart and laws are mind abstractions looking out for personal interests.
These laws become the prison walls that sustain economic power structures in place. The rest of us on the other side are alienated in consumerism camps. Justice and sympathy run on another rail. In sympathy, justice’s real mission is to maintain the equilibrium of the social fabric. We could say that never before have we had more laws and regulations and in the same token never before has there been so much injustice. Who could we blame for this? Perhaps the corruptible self-interest and greedy nature that resides in all of us. Its time to grow up. The capitalist age of hedonistic individualism is out of bounds. The social instruments that exchanged land for money and aristocracy for the bourgeoisie, has completed its historic function. Novelty changed the feudal structure into a post-industrial civilization. Novelty too will pull us out of this historic cocoon. This system began with the industrial revolution and the eighteen century “invisible hand” economics that created capital and its markets. This capital energized the fantastic growth of modernity. This system has been crucial in the development of ideas, science, art and creativity. However, with the growth of capital also grew the usufruct of financial instruments. Eventually the civilizing motor of modernity otherwise known as money became restricted in the hands of few. These powerful hands obliterated creativity and authenticity, suppressing the freedom to think for ourselves. At this point this system becomes authoritarian and tyrannical. When money is not used to create a not for profit bountiful and beautiful world with everyone on it living in sympathy, it is degraded and used to enslave and sheep the market place, we become psychologically inoculated by the gadgets of our desire. Our addictive nature can easily be seduced, and this knowledge has been deployed against the human family’s best interests. Sympathy for the other is tied to fraternity and equality. Even Adam Smith wrote about communication and sympathy as essential in functional societies. Social responsibility implies sympathy for others, for us, tied directly to all relationships and the social fabric. The whole organism of humanity is the new self, the greater I am that we long and truly desire. We must be sympathetic to this realization. The economic model of individualistic barbarism based on self-interest and maximizing return has to give way to this ecological model of symbiosis and equilibrium, Ecological not because of last minute measures due to catastrophic warnings, but because we are of this world, ingrained and not separated from it. We are not ravaging creatures running aimlessly over the land with no sense of boundaries. The tools that we have generated over the last 200+ years, allow us to empower this shift.
The economic views of powerful mafias working to better themselves with no regard for the common good evolve into predatory economics. This perverted relationship has to be exchanged for ecological economies that use monetization as an instrument for sustainability and creativity of their people. Past the historic money motor moment that created the materialistic market of things and values. A new form of doing business is emerging.
First we must object to this stuff forced upon us in the modern supermarkets of the world. Billions of people sacrifice their right to be alive in the pursuit of illusionary objects and false promises. Happiness and health sold to us in the form of goods and services. Innovation and beauty, knowledge and passion do not require any artifacts; they emerge out of you and you, providing priceless endeavors for humanity. This needs to be cultivated responsibly with sympathy for each other, cultivating social and individual responsibility, exercising our freedoms. Because freedom is not bought at the corner store but instead it needs to be exercised on every corner, along with the freedom of speech to voice our opinions, responsibly, acknowledging our limits and choices we make. We must exchange the predatory idea of competition so ingrained in the market place for the nourishing flow of cooperation. What are we competing for anyway, but habits of consumption imposed by the head edifices of the market economy. This market has derogated human value and persuaded us to find value in things and services. Its time for a shift into an economy of cooperation, responsibly in sympathy with each and every one of us, based on justice, liberty and limited resources. All this in the context of the possibilities and abundance of our universal situation. It’s hard to imagine such a system in the complex compartmentalized society of the 21st century western economic model. Yet cooperation among smaller groups in smaller communities exists already and are radiant islands lighting up this point of reference.
Competition is based on the law of the jungle and the brute forces that adapt the contours of survival in the crudest nature. Mindless competition in a potentially rich and abundant world is a hernia that is strangulating our present stasis. Consider that all the science and technology that has created the marvels of modern life, was discovered and invented by less than 1% of the minds in the last 200+ years. Imagine the potential for innovation after proper nourishing of all the minds on Earth in cooperation and in sympathy. The untapped geniuses inside each one of us are the reservoirs of infinite abundance that will move us forward. We all have the right to harvest this potential in sympathy for each other, in liberty; this is the only viable solution. Freedom, liberty and justice exist only when it is true and same for all and not when it only favors a technocratic few. The cheerleaders that champion the cartel institutions that protect these elites are contributing and resisting the newly emergent social behavior that will change our civilization, again and again. Social systems will always be evolving their status without monolithic laws or manifestos that stand before such driving force. Ultimately liberty like economics only happens in society, a single person can not be said to be an economic system. A society needs to be at least of two people in order to exist.
As a society moves into industrialization, it becomes complex in methodology and technique. Labor division and specialization generate an explosion of technique and innovation. This activity becomes the great super market place of goods and services. This method of subdivisions multiplies exponentially as more and more compartments, regulations, bureaucracies and laws are drafted to control this activity. Like in a factory assembly line where high productivity is achieved through mechanized specialized labor. Method and technique provides society with tremendous efficiency. Money has become the sole engine and absolute purveyor of these efficient exchanges. Money has allowed capitalism to ignite potential relationships; capitalism along with the money engine has created the magnificent crescent of modernity. We have learned to embody this concept and we call it progress. Capitalism has also dehumanized the soul of humanity, reducing our innermost gifts and treasures to printed paper notes on a sliding scale. Try putting a price on your mother, daughters, sons, father, love, art, health, pension plan, insight, friends, sympathy and a beautiful sunset. Money but all fails at containing the qualitative experiences involved in these relationships and experiences. Money also has the tendency to end up accumulated in the hands of a gluttonous few. Giant money lenders corrupt benefactors and we ended up in the tyrannies of capitalist wealth. Historically in the past 500 years we have gone from mercantilist economies, to the industrial revolution that led to the modern economy of financial markets and mob bankster debt based economies. They all took us to economic globalism and then to financially bankrupt tyrannies. This mentality has to stop, from top down actions and by many influential actors. But what if the division of labor was based on collaboration, cooperation in sympathy for our fellow beings. Yes we can now send people to the moon and we can clone ourselves. Prodigal techniques that control our inner and outer environments. But what do we know about the art of living. Instead we have chartered away from this integrated center of cooperation in chase of the false promise of material accumulation and the gadgetry of our desires. Giving up this trap will be the most traumatic phase step into the more benign socially empathic but fully technological and free society of the future. Our comfort zones will contract some yes, and this need be exciting and challenging. The limitless inner technology of human consciousness, based on love, creative insight and intuitive development will explode in sympathy, or have we forgot we are truly formidable creatures at a unique time.
The promise that technology will resolve all our problems and reduce work and generate an effortless paradise of leisure and youthful longevity has not been resolved but rather we find ourselves having to work longer hours derailed in the tread mill of productivity plagued by degenerative disease. Productivity for what? Do you call this life? We all work endlessly to assure that the privileged money families keep a grip on societies. Technocrats and their control of technologies assure themselves powerful behind closed secrecy. They also fail to recognize the finite resources of our natural habitat. Since the renaissance, humanity has operated on the view that the Earth was put here for us to divide and conquer the spoils, claiming property over natural resources that are finite and belong to the natural system, not to us. This assumption suggests that we are separate from the resources on Earth and not incorporated to this finite system, more so we grow out of this world, like a flower sprouts outwardly from the plant ground. When mankind situates itself separate from this world, disintegrated from the grid of nature we evolve into technological idolatry and transhumanisim. The resources of technology must be deployed for local humanitarian benefit of all and not in the pursuit of technology for domination. Who gave the power profiteers the right to exploit very limited external resources?
When you can corrupt and buy the minds of our most creative scientist to generate the technology that will flood the market with gadgets and planned obsolescence. The rest of us become reduced to a technophile colonial slave system. The custodians of the money powers have taken us for a dangerous ride and they control our lives. Instead what if we used the instruments of finance to furnace a motor of creativity for all of humanity in a renaissance of art, beauty and responsible science. In wise community with mother Earth, with sympathy for others, where goods and services have a range of values. It’s not about renouncing the materialistic advances of humanity. But rather, now that we know how to manage its effects responsibly, let’s rectify the growth concept of a capitalist economy with its development of things and not of people. I am not saying we must eliminate the market place either, however these trading grounds must be reformed truly and be free, eco-friendly, multilevel, local and diverse, and more importantly with very well informed and responsible consumers. Fully awake, aware of the fine boundaries of this earthly experience. Making the most sympathetic choices on a finite planet. When we are able to do this we will transition from a patriarchal system of rapacious economics, to a matriarchal society in ecological cooperation. Experiencing the nurturing mother, exploring the full creative reservoirs of our inner technologies, heart and soul, sharing liberating innovations openly in sympathy. The art of living consists in knowing our limits so very well.
Capitalism has completed its cycle. It is also an exclusive system, for if you don't have money you can’t participate in this casino. Money is the obstacle to progress; money is not the solution but has become a hurdle or an obstacle for development, for one it’s created out of debt. In healthy societies markets are created as a result of satisfying basic necessities in excellence and not by creating needs for profit and then conditioning a market of zombies to desire such products. The monetization of this relationship has become a tool of enslavement and has devalued the human soul. It distracts us from the things that come naturally, effortlessly and free. More benign and natural forms of exchange are cropping everywhere, local currencies, time shares, time banks, social credit, credit unions, local financial cooperatives, raw food markets, organic farming, community swap’s, permaculture; these innovations will pave the way for a better society. The basic needs of Food, Shelter, Health, Education, Security, Arts and Culture are the pillars of this renaissance. Our exquisite techniques and know how must farm and fuel these areas within the finite sphere of resources, aware of the infinite freedom and potential within. This change will resonate sympathy in the greater human family and bring down the walls that separate our interests. The division of labor will become labor independence in equal opportunities embracing the entrepreneur spirit and expanding technologies that empower local communities, satisfying regional needs and autonomy, but also on a larger scope in liberty, sharing free sourcing technologies and innovation in sympathy for Earth systems and each other. Sympathy will ignite the motor of the future and it will facilitate the act of giving.
Carlos Cuellar Brown