Agenda for a New Economy

by David C Korten

  Many trace the origin of the modern environmental movement to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962. It, too, stimulated countless conversations about the human relationship to nature that began to challenge the old stories and build the foundation of a new social consensus. The challenge spread through media and academic programs.

  The modern voluntary simplicity movement, which presents a frontal challenge to the story that material consumption is the key to personal happiness, represents an important thread in the emerging New Economy movement. It received early impetus from Duane Elgin’s influential book, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich, first published in 1981. His ideas struck an immediate chord with people who shared their stories in countless conversations that affirmed the ancient religious teaching that we truly come alive as we moderate material consumption and gain control of our time to devote more of our lives to the things that bring true happiness, like nurturing the relationships of caring families and communities. Millions of people were liberated from the trance induced by corporate advertisers and were inspired to restructure their lives.

  Our New Economy messages and conversations challenge a number of defining cultural stories, including those that would have us believe:

  • The myth that it is our inherent human nature to be individualistic, materialistic, greedy, competitive, and violent

  • The illusion that we live on an open frontier of endless resources that are free for the taking to grow the economy

  • The belief that money is wealth, money defines the value of life, making money is our highest human calling, and everything related to money is best left to the market

  Previous chapters have pointed out that in fact:

  • The human brain is wired to support creativity, cooperation, and life in community. That is our nature. The prevalence of materialism, greed, competition, and violence common in modern society is a symptom of severe cultural and institutional dysfunction

  • We humans inhabit a wondrous but finite living planet with a self-organizing biosphere to which we must adapt our lives and economies

  • Money, unrelated to the creation of anything of real value, is phantom wealth, an accounting chit that has no intrinsic value, indeed no existence outside the human mind. In a mature belief system, life is the true measure of value and money’s only legitimate use is in life’s service. An obsession with making money is a sign of psychological and social dysfunction. With proper rules, the market is an essential and beneficial partner of an active civil society and democratic government — each in its appropriate role. Absent proper rules it becomes a capitalist weapon of mass destruction

  The human brain processes the massive flow of data from our senses through an interpretive lens by which it distinguishes the significant from the inconsequential and draws out its meaning, which in turn shapes our behavioral response. “This plant will kill you. That one is food.”

  The lens reflects both the individual learning of personal experience and the shared learning of the tribe communicated through its framing cultural stories. These stories, which the tribe’s storytellers pass from generation to generation, shape our collective identity and allow us to act coherently as a group in the interest of all. “This is who we are, what we value, and how we behave.”

  The work of professional propagandists and advertisers is to use the mass media to displace the tribe’s authentic cultural stories with fabricated stories that support behavior that serves the interests of their clients, whether it be to vote for a particular political candidate or to buy a particular product. They succeed by playing to raw, animal emotions of fear and anger that activate our brain’s primitive reptilian core, unhampered by the conscious mind. This is the source of the demagogue’s power.

  The power of civil society is the power of authentic stories that appeal to the higher-order emotions of love and caring. These stories awaken our capacity for conscious, reasoned choice and are the basis of our human capacity for responsibility and cooperation in the interest of the whole. Authentic stories liberate the human consciousness, build immunity to cultural manipulation, and give us the courage and insight to see the future that is the objective of our voyage in search of ecological balance, equitable distribution, and living democracy.

  CHAPTER 19

  LEARNING TO LIVE, LIVING TO LEARN

  Once an emergent phenomenon has appeared, it can’t be changed by working backwards, by changing the local parts that gave birth to it. You can only change an emergent phenomenon by creating a countervailing force of greater strength. This means that the work of change is to start over, to organize new local efforts, connect them to each other, and know that their values and practices can emerge as something even stronger.

  MARGARET J. WHEATLEY

  Midway in my international development career I had a defining learning experience. I was engaging the question of what makes the difference between development initiatives that achieve sustained positive changes in people’s lives and those that produce only fleeting, or even negative, changes. As I examined the experience of a number of successful interventions in different countries of Asia, the answer revealed itself.

  In the unsuccessful initiatives, outside experts were brought in to prepare a detailed blueprint with clear rules, budgets, timelines, and benchmarks. A public or private bureaucracy then attempted to implement those plans through a top-down process of command and control. This was the practice for most official development projects, which have an impressive record of failure.

  Successful initiatives, by contrast, arose from the bottom up through a thoughtful process of trial-and-error learning through doing, which gradually created a system of organized support through which the learning could be shared and others could be guided in replications. I learned later that others who had made similar discoveries called the process social learning: the process by which groups of people, and even whole societies, learn new ways of being and relating through a shared learning experience.

  It all seemed so obvious once I saw it. Blueprints are useful for designing and constructing buildings and machines based on established mechanical principles in static settings. Social systems are living, complex, dynamic, and constantly evolving as they learn from shared experience. They self-organize around ideas and relationships. The organism, not the machine, provides the appropriate metaphor. The relevant knowledge resides not in the heads of outside experts but in the people who populate the system. The challenge is to help them recognize, organize, and use that knowledge in ever more effective ways.

  A THREEFOLD SOCIAL LEARNING STRATEGY

  Stories alone do not, of course, bring down the institutions of Empire or put in place the rules, relationships, and institutions of a New Economy. These must be lived into being from the bottom up through dynamic self-organizing social learning processes. Lessons from this experience then inform specific initiatives that demand changes in the rules that determine whose rights and interests the power of the state will protect and advance.

  Through these social learning processes, people innovate, create, learn to relate in new ways, and share the lessons of their experience. Individual learning translates into community learning that translates into species learning.

  The overall process has three primary elements. Through their varied initiatives, participants:

  1. CHANGE THE DEFINING STORIES OF THE MAINSTREAM CULTURE. As was already discussed, every great transformational social movement begins with new ideas and conversations that challenge and ultimately change a prevailing cultural story. In the case of the New Economy, we must change the prevailing stories by which we understand the nature of wealth, the purpose of the economy, our relationship to a living Earth, and the possibilities of our human nature. Through public presentations, books, magazines, talk shows, and the Internet’s many communications tools, millions of people are spreading stories of New Economy possibilities, in part through acti
on, which inspires further discussion and new personal choices.

  2. CREATE A NEW ECONOMIC REALITY FROM THE BOTTOM UP. Many of those who have been inspired by some aspect of the New Economy story are already engaged in initiatives that are building the foundation of strong local living economies. They are establishing and supporting locally owned human-scale businesses and family farms that create regional self-reliance in food, energy, and other basic essentials. They are moving their money to local banks and credit unions, retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency, and changing land-use policies to favor compact communities, reduce auto dependence, and reclaim agricultural and forest lands.

  3. CHANGE THE RULES TO SUPPORT THE VALUES AND INSTITUTIONS OF THE EMERGENT NEW REALITY. The rules put in place by Wall Street lobbyists put the economic rights of global financiers and corporations ahead of the economic rights of ordinary people, place-based communities, and even nations. As we change the story and build appropriate institutions from the bottom up, we gain the political traction needed to change the rules to support democratic self-determination at the lowest feasible level of systems organization.

  Work on each of these elements is complementary and simultaneous. It necessarily begins with a story of unrealized possibility that serves as a guiding beacon for those who are working to create a new reality, which in turn creates practical new experience to guide those who are changing the rules.

  Nothing communicates the new story as powerfully as successful on-the-ground demonstrations, particularly when they are on the scale of a town, city, or region. New stories and practical demonstrations build a political constituency to support rule changes that in turn accelerate the emergence of new demonstrations and further spread the story — leading ultimately to national- and global-scale change.

  Recall that chapter 13 identified seven critical system interventions. Think of these as natural clusters of activity, each focused on a key system-change leverage point. In each instance, success requires the cooperative effort of many groups, some working on changing a defining story, others creating new on-the-ground realities, and others working to change relevant rules.

  Take the Living Indicators cluster as an example. Change starts with changing the story about the purpose of the economy. Instead of growing GDP and inflating share prices, the economy’s proper purpose is to support the healthy development and function of people, families, communities, and nature. Economic performance is properly assessed against these outcomes.

  Many groups are engaged in communicating the new story by promoting living-indicator projects in their communities or by carrying out studies that compare the performance of regional and national economies against a variety of living indicators. Others are mobilizing political support for rules that direct national statistical bureaus to develop and report on new indicators and that require other government agencies to use them as the basis for assessing program performance and policy options.

  Successful social movements are emergent, evolving, radically self-organizing, and involve the dedicated efforts of many people, each finding the role that best uses his or her gifts and passions. Social movements grow and evolve around framing ideas and mutually supportive relationships instead of through top-down direction. New ideas gain traction or not depending on their inherent appeal and utility. As individual groups find one another, new alliances may emerge or not, depending on what works for those involved in the moment. Some alliance are fleeting; others endure.

  As a social movement develops, multiple sources of leadership are essential. Any individual or group that presumes to be the leader of the whole or aspires to organize a central coordinating body to impose order on the chaos does not understand the process.

  A SUPPORTIVE INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

  Four professional fields bring specialized expertise to the work of defining and propagating the cultural stories by which we understand our nature and possibilities: the media, education, religion, and the arts. Call these the cultural worker professions. Collectively they shape and disseminate the framing cultural stories of the society, including those by which we collectively define the economy’s proper purpose and structure.

  Each of these fields is subject to co-optation by Wall Street in the service of money. Each can choose to contribute to our collective liberation by helping to shape and communicate the new stories, encourage participation in initiatives that are creating the new reality, facilitate the sharing of lessons, and build political support for changing the rules.

  In many instances, the institutions that employ the majority of the members of each of these professional fields are structured and managed in the service of money. Professionals thus encumbered who make the choice to serve life must decide whether to stay with their institutions and work for transformation from within or leave to join those on the outside who are creating the institutions of the future.

  Here are some of the issues and possibilities.

  Media

  The profit-driven, advertising-dependent communications model of the corporate media is ideally suited to serving Wall Street interests. The consolidation of the mass print and broadcast media under the control of corporate conglomerates has reduced much of the mainstream news reporting to inane, politically slanted commentary limited to the market fundamentalist economic frame favorable to Wall Street interests.

  The other end of the media spectrum is anchored by the service-driven communications model of nonprofit independent media outlets that democratize media control and create a vast potential to hasten a global embrace of the life-affirming cultural values of Earth Community.

  YES! Magazine, a nonprofit independent communications organization for which I serve as board chair, is an example of the potential of this model. The fact that YES!is thriving even at this time when many conventional media outlets are failing suggests that this is a viable model responding to an important felt need.

  We all live in the midst of a communications revolution that is linking the world in a seamless web of communication and information. This capability can be used to strengthen elite control or to provide an open-access information commons in support of the social learning processes that are building the New Economy.

  Advancing a turning from the autocratic corporate media model to the democratic independent media model is an essential priority for citizen initiatives and policy advocacy. Many civil society initiatives are already demonstrating the possibilities in community newspapers and radio stations, independent media centers, blogs, and podcasts.

  Other citizen initiatives are working to reverse corporate media concentration, reclaim the communications frequency spectrum, and maintain the Internet as an open-access resource. Some of these initiatives are opening political deliberation to diverse voices and lively debate. Others are exposing the bias and banality of corporate media and demanding accountability.

  Education

  As Wall Street has rewritten the tax laws to absolve corporations of their civic responsibility to pay their fair share of taxes, cash-strapped public schools and universities have turned to corporations for sponsorships, curriculum materials, and research grants. This has given corporations undue influence over the underlying academic culture to the detriment of the critical intellectual inquiry and teaching we so badly need.

  This is one of the many reasons why reinstating a progressive tax system for both individuals and corporations is a high priority for a New Economy policy agenda. Corporations are properly required to support our educational institutions through taxes rather than through gifts that compromise the integrity of those institutions and their ability to produce creative, innovative citizens with critical minds.

  The capacity and desire to learn are inherent in our human nature. Subjecting our children and young adults to test-driven regimentation isolated from the life of community suppresses this capacity and desire and is a poor substitute for real learning experience. We need education that prepares our young people for life a
nd leadership in the vibrant human communities of the new human era that it falls to them to live into being.

  The narrow discipline-oriented institutions of higher learning face a particular challenge. To become relevant they must take the following steps:

  • Take down the walls that separate them from the community and engage in helping communities build local economies that function in harmony with their local ecosystems

  • Organize faculty and students into interdisciplinary teams to engage in the study and design of critical institutional systems

  • Teach history as an examination of the large forces that have shaped our past in search of insights into how large-scale social change happens and how it may be shaped by organized human intervention to put ourselves on a positive path

  • Replace departments of economics with departments of applied ecology that incorporate economics as a sub-discipline and bring institutional and ecological frameworks to the fore

  • Feature human developmental psychology courses that explore how cultural and institutional experiences shape or impede our individual progress to a fully mature human consciousness

  • Replace the machine metaphor with the living-organism metaphor as the defining intellectual frame

  • Assure that the perspective of the new biologists who strive to understand life on its own terms has a strong presence in biology departments

  Such innovations are most likely to come one faculty member, one department, one school or university at a time at the beginning, but they will quickly grow to critical mass as the relevance of the New Economy system frame becomes more evident.