We Are The Economy

I would like to recommend to you one of the books that I've written about in an earlier post: "The Four-Gated City" a novel by the Late Great Doris Lessing and the fifth and final tome of her "Children of Violence " series, published in 1969.  I will not go into detail about the plot as I have already covered this but I would like to mention and endorse a statement made by the protagonist, Martha Hesse, who protested in her quest to live genuinely and authentically her insistence that she live from a sense of wholeness and integrity, that she not have to suffer her life being splintered into fragments, having to endure working in soul-destroying occupations that maybe put food on the table but offer absolutely nothing to nourish her soul and spirit.

When the right-wing conservative and neoliberal think tanks began to overtake and control our national policy-making in the eighties and nineties this to me signified just that kind of splintering of the self, macrocosm and microcosm.  We were no longer citizens but had been turned into consumers and customers.  Having and spending money became our symbolic members card to living in our countries, our cities, our communities.  It was all about generating and exchanging capital.  Our humanity became sidelined by greed and the exigencies of the marketplace, of the global market.  Attending university no longer had anything to do with improving our minds and expanding our world view, and everything to do with developing and promoting our career and professional credentials.  By fiat of unfettered global capitalism, as human beings, we ceased to matter.  All the inspired and inspiring rhetoric of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights suddenly lost its impact, its meaning, its power as the tsunami of global market greed ripped to shreds thousands of pages of UN ratified documents.

I have just finished calculating my taxes for last year.  My fourth day.  Apparently I owe the government nothing but I could be mistaken and I will be waiting to be surprised with plenty in my slush fund to cover the demands of the tax(man, woman, person, transgendered person or whomever).  I likely will not be happy about it but I still count it an honour to contribute, especially when I think of how much I have benefitted from the government largesse.  I was eating an orange while finishing my tax forms today, one very large, very sweet, juicy and deliciously messy orange.

Paying income tax should be seen as a starting point for realizing that we really are all in this together and of how interdependent we all are.  Paying taxes is a metaphor of the essential need that we share, that sharing is something that makes us uniquely and unmistakably human.  The neoliberals and Bill Clinton really have had it all wrong:  It is not the economy, stupid.  We ARE the economy, stupid.  And we all need to learn to become recklessly and joyously generous with what we have.  It isn't really ours to begin with.  We don't really own anything, but anything can own us.  We are the economy.  It is not a matter of deficits or surpluses.  It is our wealth of humanity, our gifts, our potential that makes the economy.  It isn't a matter of making fat greedy pigs rich through our underpaid labour.  It is giving ourselves and our gifts to share for the common good.  We need so much to change our thinking about money and the economy.  It isn't about promoting our individual agendas.  On top of having our needs met we are obligated to share.  This is a universal principal and not all the right wing think tanks and greedy capitalist swine are going to change this.  We are the economy and we are all in this together.

Let us all dare, Gentle Reader, to be recklessly and joyously generous.

Please share this article with as many people as you can possibly think of.