The first, serious error that Westerners make in looking at, specifically, Native American cultures: the assumption that their own base number of One is the base number of all cultures.8 It certainly is not. Native American cultures use a base number of Two. Western cultures use linear math; Native American cultures use binary math. In Native American math, the base unit consists of two equal halves, which are immediately replicated (so that the first unit has a twin), resulting in what looks like a base four to users of Western linear math. In fact, it is just a binary set.
This accounts for the very common “plus sign” symbol so common to Native American iconography. It connects with the cardinal directions of Breath (Sky) and Blood (Earth). When Breath, they are the Four Winds; when Blood, they become the Four Serpents or the Four Mothers. Just to keep life interesting, Native groups tilt the plus sign ╬ into an X, so that it is the interstices, not the lines, that matter. We are big on in-between spaces. When everything is a middling, nothing can be an outlier. Figure 1 shows the standard colors and cardinal conceptions of the Iroquois. Note the traditional, tilted concept of the Twinned Direction of the Sky (E↔W) and Split Sky (N↔S). White (E↔S) wampum and purple (N↔W) wampum are referenced by the background colors.
Figure 1. The Breath and Blood of the cardinal directions.
Translating all of this into an economic system requires something beyond basic math, however. Human interaction is much more involved than simplistic linear probabilities suggest, which is usually what Westerners try to slap over economics as predictors. Yes, diagrams of probabilities look complex at first blush (see figure 2), but they are really just accreted, either-or propositions, following the standard Manichean list of choices: good or bad, light or dark, yes or no, up or down, as though such a list really covered all possibilities. (Figure 2 represents the line of a happy simplist, walking cheerfully along, until confronted with a yes-no proposition. Each answer follows its own potential direction, with more yes-no choices at intervals. The circles represent the nodes where the either- or choices live.) Worse, we are assured that none of the previous outcomes affect future outcomes. I remember arguing in my college math class the improbability of the first decision not affecting the second, whereas my professor categorically refused to accept my proposition, replying that it represented fuzzy thinking. It was not fuzzy thinking, however, but just Native American thinking.
Figure 2. Standard probability chart.
What is needed to describe gift economies is a complex form of representation that takes into account interactive binaries as mass in motion. This is because, in the world of the gift economy, everything influences the outcome of everything else, a primary implication of the Native American commonplace reference to “All My Relatives.” Nothing Native is a freestanding, once-and-for-all, over-and-done-with proposition, as each transaction is represented as being in exchange economics. Instead, there is a constant motion, in which every action is implicated in every other action.
Figure 3. A binary fractal. Image courtesy of Mark Dow.
I have seen this idea represented in spiderweb format, which is not bad for a two-dimensional impression of what All My Relatives are doing. The underlying mechanism of this spiderweb image is fractal geometry, which offers representations much more complex and fitting than a two-dimensional spiderweb.9 The idea of fractals is a set of images, repeating endlessly, each repetition, no matter how large or small, a perfect replica of the original impetus.
At this point, the limitations of paper, not to mention my own inadequacies in computer graphics, prevent any three-dimensional, let alone, moving mass of imagery, but the reader should try to imagine just that. Neither do fractals have to go binary, but the most convincing ones do. The limitation of fractal representations is that each is a perfectly measured increment, so that the only distinction is in the largeness or smallness of any given detail. The irregular regularities, such as compose nature, do not come through. Nevertheless, the basic idea does get across. See, for instance, figure 3, which is a nice fractal vision of the nearly seventy groups (the six nations plus the sixty-some affiliated nations) of the Iroquois League. Notice the plus sign ╬ rotated into an X, with the fractal repetitions mimicking chaos. The figure even includes the light-dark contrast so common to League conceptions, for instance, white and “black” (blue purple) wampum.
Gift economics start with the Mother, herself the initial gift of the cosmos. She gives to her child, who remains attached, setting up the prototype of gifting. Traditional gift economies focus on communities, not individuals, though, while needs are defined both materially and spiritually. The idea is to jump into a self-replicating process that is already in motion. The size of the gift is immaterial, since the process, itself, is repeated. Any gift expresses a need. Thus, all of our prayers give thanks, without asking for anything, yet the output of energy in the gift of thanks creates a vacuum that sucks in new energy, the two halves completing one repetition (which, naturally, needs a twin). Since the action is no good unless communal, gifting happenings multiply, among All My Relatives, human and nonhuman alike. Energy is constantly in motion, so that no one can hoard, constipating the works.
Gift economics tend to confuse and surprise Westerners, who keep trying to interpret them in terms of their One-base culture with its exchange-based economics. The sheer idea of giving away one’s goods and energy as a means of replenishing one’s store of goods and energy seems counterintuitive to Europeans, who give only on pain of death or, maybe, on threat of IRS audit. Consequently, extensions of gifting, such as gambling, just look bizarre to Europeans.
In fact, gambling is an honorable expression of gift economics, and one that makes full use of fractals to replicate chaos, the sacred action. Gambling only appears “immoral” to Westerners because they saddle it with the consequences of their own exchange economy in its most brutal form, and then blame the loser, of course. In a gift culture, however, where it is not possible to “lose everything,” gambling becomes what it essentially is, an act of fractal spirituality, i.e., the making of the heavy medicine of chaos. The energy that compulsive gamblers so love is spread over the whole community, which then mutually enjoys it, as well as any goods involved.
Figure 4. The binary fractal of the gift economy. Image courtesy of Mark Dow.
The best, two-dimensional representation I have found for the gift economy is in figure 4. It honors the twinship principal, whereby one consists of its two halves, replicated in mirror image. The overall effect looks haphazard and unsustainable, but the gift keeps on giving, in actions writ large or small. The gift economy is a perpetual motion machine, collapsing only when the known universe collapses, or when Europeans arrive on the continent, with their raiding economy, to gut the gift and still the motion.
I do not know how to reinstate gift economics worldwide; that will take a total do-over of culture, I fear—but then again, a do-over is what the prophecies are promising. For the record, it is only the Mayas who quote the 2012 date, and it is only Europeans who turn the prospect of 2012 into their own doomsday. Among the Iroquois, prophecy gives the date as 2010, and it indicates a process, not a solitary event.10 This prophecy connects with the original Peacemaker’s prophecy from the twelfth century, in which he predicted the coming of The White Panther of Discord, when the children’s faces would be ground into the dirt and heads would roll west.11 Once the invader had taken all the land from the Indians, even ripping off the scalp of Mother Earth for the scalp bounty, then Great Grandmother Turtle, who carries us all on her back, would begin to rock the edges of her carapace, brushing off the annoyances. Finally, she would pitch, rolling over completely in the waves. When she righted herself again as Turtle Island, only the Shining People (indigenous people) would be left, to start again.12
7
THE TWILIGHT OF MONEY
JOHN MICHAEL GREER
One of the least constructive habits of contemporary thought is its insistence on the uniqueness of the
modern experience. It’s true, of course, that fossil fuels have allowed the world’s industrial societies to pursue their follies on a more grandiose scale than any past empire has managed, but the follies themselves closely parallel those of previous societies, and tracking the trajectories of these past examples is one of our few useful sources of guidance if we want to know where the current versions are headed.
The metastasis of money through every aspect of life in the modern industrial world is a good example. While no past society, as far as we know, took this process as far as we have, the replacement of wealth with its own abstract representations is no new thing. As Giambattista Vico pointed out back in the eighteenth century, complex societies move from the concrete to the abstract over their life cycles, and this influences economic life as much as anything else. Just as political power begins with raw violence and evolves toward progressively more subtle means of suasion, economic activity begins with the direct exchange of real wealth and evolves through a similar process of abstraction: first, one prized commodity becomes the standard measure for all other kinds of wealth; then, receipts that can be exchanged for some fixed sum of that commodity become a unit of exchange; finally, promises to pay some amount of these receipts on demand, or at a fixed point in the future, enter into circulation, and these may end up largely replacing the receipts themselves.
This movement toward abstraction has important advantages for complex societies, because abstractions can be deployed with a much smaller investment of resources than it takes to mobilize the concrete realities that back them up. We could have resolved the 2008 debate about who should rule the United States the old-fashioned way, by having McCain and Obama call their supporters to arms, march to war, and settle the matter in battle amid a hail of bullets and cannon shot on a fine September day on some Iowa prairie. Still, the cost in lives, money, and collateral damage would have been far in excess of those involved in an election. In much the same way, the complexities involved in paying office workers in kind, or even in cash, make an economy of abstractions much less cumbersome for all concerned.
At the same time, there’s a trap hidden in the convenience of abstractions: the further you get from the concrete realities, the larger the chance becomes that the concrete realities may not actually be there when needed. History is littered with the corpses of regimes that let their power become so abstract that they could no longer counter a challenge on the fundamental level of raw violence; it’s been said of Chinese history, and could be said of any other civilization, that its basic rhythm is the tramp of hobnailed boots going up stairs, followed by the whisper of silk slippers going back down. In the same way, economic abstractions keep functioning only so long as actual goods and services exist to be bought and sold, and it’s only in the pipe dreams of economists that the abstractions guarantee the presence of the goods and services. Vico argued that this trap is a central driving force behind the decline and fall of civilizations; the movement toward abstraction goes so far that the concrete realities are neglected. In the end the realities trickle away unnoticed, until a shock of some kind strikes the tower of abstractions built atop the void the realities once filled, and the whole structure tumbles to the ground.
We are uncomfortably close to such a possibility just now, especially in our economic affairs. Over the last century, with the assistance of the economic hypercomplexity made possible by fossil fuels, the world’s industrial nations have taken the process of economic abstraction further than any previous civilization. On top of the usual levels of abstraction—a commodity used to measure value (gold), receipts that could be exchanged for that commodity (paper money), and promises to pay the receipts (checks and other financial paper)—contemporary societies have built an extraordinary pyramid of additional abstractions. Unlike the pyramids of Egypt, furthermore, this one has its narrow end on the ground, in the realm of actual goods and services, and widens as it goes up.
The consequence of all this pyramid building is that there are not enough goods and services on earth to equal, at current prices, more than a small percentage of the face value of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other fiscal exotica now in circulation. The vast majority of economic activity in today’s world consists purely of exchanges among these representations of representations of representations of wealth. This is why the real economy of goods and services can go into a free fall like the one we have seen in recent years, without having more than a modest impact so far on an increasingly hallucinatory economy of fiscal abstractions.
Yet an impact it will have, if the free fall proceeds far enough. This is Vico’s point, and it’s a possibility that has been taken far too lightly both by the political classes of today’s industrial societies and by their critics on either end of the political spectrum. An economy of hallucinated wealth depends utterly on the willingness of all participants to pretend that the hallucinations have real value. When that willingness slackens, the pretense can evaporate in record time. This is how financial bubbles turn into financial panics: the collective fantasy of value that surrounds tulip bulbs, or stocks, or suburban tract housing, or any other speculative vehicle, dissolves into a mad rush for the exits. That rush has been peaceful to date; but it need not always be.
The industrial age is in some sense the ultimate speculative bubble, a three-century-long binge driven by the fantasy of infinite economic growth on a finite planet with even more finite supplies of cheap abundant energy. Still, I am coming to think that this megabubble has spawned a second bubble on nearly the same scale. The vehicle for this secondary megabubble is money—meaning here the entire contents of what I’ve called elsewhere the tertiary economy, the profusion of abstract representations of wealth that dominate our economic life and have all but smothered the real economy of goods and services, to say nothing of the primary economy of natural systems that keeps all of us alive.
Speculative bubbles are defined in various ways, but classic examples—the 1929 stock binge, say, or the 2005–2008 housing bubble—have certain standard features in common. First, the value of whatever item is at the center of the bubble shows a sustained rise in price not justified by changes in the wider economy, or in any concrete value the item might have. A speculative bubble in money functions a bit differently than other bubbles, because the speculative vehicle is also the measure of value; instead of one dollar increasing in value until it’s worth two, one dollar becomes two. Where stocks or tract houses go zooming up in price when a bubble focuses on them, then, what climbs in a money bubble is the total amount of paper wealth in circulation. That’s certainly happened in recent decades.
A second standard feature of speculative bubbles is that they absorb most of the fictive value they create, rather than spilling it back into the rest of the economy. In a stock bubble, for example, a majority of the money that comes from stock sales goes right back into the market; without this feedback loop, a bubble can’t sustain itself for long. In a money bubble, this same rule holds good; most of the paper earnings generated by the bubble end up being reinvested in some other form of paper wealth. Here again, this has certainly happened; the only reason we haven’t see 1,000 percent inflation as a result of the vast manufacture of paper wealth in recent decades is that most of it has been used solely to buy even more newly manufactured paper wealth.
A third standard feature of speculative bubbles is that the number of people involved in them climbs steadily as the bubble proceeds. In 1929, the stock market was deluged by amateur investors who had never before bought a share of anything; in 2006, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who previously thought of houses only as something to live in came to think of them as a ticket to overnight wealth, and sank their net worth in real estate as a result. The metastasis of the money economy, which I have written about as well, is another example of the same process at work.
Finally, of course, bubbles always pop. When that happens, the speculative vehicle du jour comes crashing back to earth, losing
the great majority of its assumed value, and the mass of amateur investors, having lost anything they made and usually a great deal more, trickle away from the market. This has not yet happened to the current money bubble. It might be a good idea to start thinking about what might happen if it does so.
The effects of a money panic would be focused uncomfortably close to home, I suspect, because the bulk of the hyperexpansion of money in recent decades has focused on a single currency, the U.S. dollar. That bomb might have been defused if 2008’s collapse of the housing bubble had been allowed to run its course, because this would have eliminated no small amount of the dollar-denominated abstractions generated by the excesses of recent years. Unfortunately the U.S. government chose instead to try to reinflate the bubble economy by spending money it doesn’t have through an orgy of borrowing and some very dubious fiscal gimmickry. A great many foreign governments are accordingly becoming reluctant to lend the United States more money, and at least one rising power—China—has been quietly cashing in its dollar reserves for commodities and other forms of far less abstract wealth.
Up until now, it has been in the best interests of other industrial nations to prop up the United States with a steady stream of credit, so that it can bankrupt itself filling its self-imposed role as global policeman. It’s been a very comfortable arrangement, since other nations haven’t had to shoulder more than a tiny fraction of the costs of dealing with rogue states, keeping the Middle East divided against itself, or maintaining economic hegemony over an increasingly restive third world, while receiving the benefits of all these policies. The end of the age of cheap fossil fuel, however, has thrown a wild card into the game. As world petroleum production falters, it must have occurred to the leaders of other nations that if the United States no longer consumed roughly a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel supply, there would be a great deal more for everyone else to share out. The possibility that other nations might decide that this potential gain outweighs the advantages of keeping the United States solvent may make the next decade or so interesting, in the sense of the famous Chinese curse.
What Comes After Money Page 7