Tipperary Live Column: A capacity for choice but we need a reason to engage this function

Last week on  Tipperary Live I talked about co-operative capitalism and it’s possible benefits for us as a replacement for the current unsustainable model. That was the first part of the puzzle and so here follows the second part (by Karl Clancy).

If it were a panacea to all our imbalanced flow of money and the obsession with maximising profit, why hasn't it been adopted? Why are we doubling down on making more, squeezing harder, rising costs and diminishing spending power?

It would be easy to say it’s because of human greed and history tells us this is largely true. In any society where it’s been tried, where a more equitable division of wealth is mooted by a governing regime, that regime ultimately comes to a sticky end because it tries to get people to give up something central to our biological and psychological programming. It tries to tell us that other people having as much as we do is a good thing, which it is. However, humans love of self means that we eye someone having as much as us as being wrong. It means we don’t stand out as a better choice in the herd.

It would also be easy if this were the sole cause of greed, but it’s not. This is a layered phenomenon stretching to antiquity. Every time we are confronted with a new ideology to replace one that has gone before it presupposes that if everyone adopts the new idea all will be well with the world. Ideologies are boats which rely on everyone rowing it. They never factor human nature in their naivety and that is why they are inevitably holed below the waterline.

The ideology metamorphises into something else because it gets distorted by individuals who take advangage of its mechanisms to further their own ends. Each new ‘ism’ kills its parent only to devour itself and eventually give rise to its replacement and so the cycle continues.

Humans are basically anarchists in the truest sense of the word. We want to be left alone to live as we want without outside rules to constrain us. The very nature of tribes, cities, and societies, is to gather a large number of people together and to impose order on them so that they can live in relative harmony in the same space. The rules imposed are constraints against doing things that we probably would do if the rules weren’t present. Or would we?

The very fact that we have the word altruism in our language tells us that we have the capacity for more, that we are not just slaves to the more basic programming in our nature. We have a capacity for choice but we need a reason to engage this function.

The reason for millennia was religious practice and precepts. We had a moral authority handed down from a higher power than any king. It was an incontrovertible authority that brooked no argument and its edicts were followed on peril of losing one’s immortal soul. There was a personal and direct cost to be paid for transgression.

In dethroning the gods we have replaced those belief systems with knowledge, with scientific advancement and with a surety that we know what’s best without having to read it in an outmoded tome. The problem with this becomes apparent in the context of personal responsibility. There are no obvious direct personal consequences to our advancements. We can exploit the far flung reaches of the planet without bringing home the wrath of a deity and without having to look on the results of our exploitation. So we have replaced belief in higher power, killing those ‘isms’ and have created a system that is slowly turning on itself with nothing to control its excesses.

Nothing that is, except the lessons of history. We are in the unique position that we know what happens every time. We know how ideologies, empires, countries and societies rise and fall. We have all the information we need to do better at our fingertips. All we have to do is use it wisely. This is the crux. Do we watch our current model implode and watch the rise of a new technological feudalism where corporate megaliths control the world like the robber barons of old? Or do we evolve our thinking?

There is a dawning realisation that we can’t keep going as we have been. We are starting to see the results of our exploitation come home to roost. Our very planet is trying to tell us to change. Our consciences as individuals are being prodded too as we see other humans suffer in so many ways.
The biggest realisation is that what’s happening to them could happen to us. The world us shrinking and it’s becoming apparent that we’re all in the same leaky boat. We can use human self interest against itself to change how we treat each other but it’s going to take the rise of a new breed to do it. A people who realise we are stewards of the land and dependent on it too.

People who see human progress as meaning more than figures in a bank account. Corporations can’t be our gods, they must be our servants. We must look to changing our basic natures to see us all as cells of one organism. You are not my brother or sister, you are me in another form. Learning to care for one another in this way will create the universal morality we need to survive ourselves. Nietzsche once declared that God was dead meaning that without belief in God there was no basis for the morality which belief in God gave us. We can put that right by creating a morality that acknowledges the intrinsic value of everyone as part of the whole, and all it takes is to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, because you realise that neighbour is yourself.