Fractional Reserve Banking: How to describe a Paradox.

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I experience this particular paradox as a nightmare. Hubris sealed into derivatives; the seed of each our unrest, leveraged so far we can now barely name it or claim it... The 'fraction' of this fractional-reserve system has grown thin to the point of transparency: it simply no longer exists. We are not a free culture, but one adept at Insolvency Management. 

Our current understanding of Wealth is now a fiction we drink, a bitter decoction soaking up the human spirit, and with it our sense of truth, coagulating into a seeming and eternal slow-motion clot, winding its way into the heart of our one ecology… Constant Growth, on a finite planet…. We long to escape from the bonds which we ourselves designed - we, our victim - and cannot do anything other than continue submitting to it. We are not just spent: we are over-spent, and spent for years to come.

At the heart of such a philosophy - one which dates back to a time when the Earth by all rational measurement was flat - Fractional Reserve Banking now strikes me as the most bitter refusal to accept that Life is temporary and gentle. A bubble. This age'd business ethic is diamond for its inability to accept the seasonality of things, believing never-ending growth is the cause of happiness, singling out one thrust in human thought amongst a panoply of choice and consideration. This way of bringing forward human-motivation may have been very useful during more tribal times, but no longer holds relevance for an actuated global civility. Its catalyst and follow-through appears more and more of the fallen angel who had grand ideas; who felt the intense and blinding love of this creation - this universe - and desired so greatly to share its power, and to know it by its completeness. A shared demon - a potential, posing inert - who in perfect and unceasing detail has now surrounded the soul of humanity, making slow a silicon museum of something once covered with lush green.

Prohibit once, and double enmity... It is the natural psychological response to a situation which catalyses scarcity. Right at the heart of our currency system - constant growth on a finite planet - resides the key to the problems we mislabel innate to human nature.

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This voice within our psyche - this constant-growth impulse - understands something can be created from the thing which prefers a steady-state, and then offers no Return. Constant Growth economics is arrogant, flying only toward the light, hooked on the idea of the infinite. Such perpetual one-way motion, such youthful and happy-blind thinking, inevitably forces all things toward an ever grand reconcilliation to recognize how amateur we handle Choice. Is this a punishment from above or from the past?.. Mentally ill - manic - forcing the rapture into the face of all grand wishes for peace and unity, muddying the sentiment of a brighter tomorrow, any hope for human social values becomes slave to constant-growth instead: it is the dark heart of a vast  - and-so-then-an-ever-vast -  Shadow.

Such is Our Situation, and not each our personage. It is how Che Guevara winds up on a t-shirt. It is the monetization of yoga. It is deforestation. It is shooting John Lennon. Or Kennedy. Or Ghandi. And then Lee Harvey Oswald. Or barely noticing the Mother Theresa passing in the shadow of a Diana. It is the acidification of the oceans. It is species extinction. It is shitty food served quickly. It IS poison. It is the loss of top-soil. It is GDP versus Happiness. It is the picture of a golden time, and only a picture.

It is a surface, underneath which fall only dead echoes, haunting us in unison 'That was Yesterday, and of course, it didn't matter...'

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Knowing this - feeling the unrest pulsing within our psyche - we stick to a certainly-uncertain future like fly-paper, lamenting the Present in lieu of thriving by the rules of a glorious and BLUE bio-sphere.

It is not something we can take personally. We were born into it, and such rules shape our Psyche. But it is something we can address - reshape -  and purge - if we direct our attention onto the centre of the conundrum. 

The study of metaphysics may make your neurology feel good, but the study of Wealth will allow those feelings to last. Both reveal the physicality of our psyche. One symptom of Our Conundrum lies with Gold. Such a proposition may seem ludicrous, but the feeling of ludicrousness can only come to you from a blind-spot: the fallacy of normalcy. A bias. Today the COMEX and the LIBOR are being systematically killed. The very elements which have always conjoined human energy to that of the planet, are being herded and hoarded, manipulated, discredited, and seemingly drained of that inherently nebulous possession, Wealth. Psychically, it is no less epic than Darth Vader slaying Obi Wan; dreamer of that profound and deliberately-thin diplomacy… Wealth today is being concentrated as the means for future population control.

Peak Oil, peak metals extraction, peak currency creation, peak extinctions... It is a battle contained to a nook within our thoughts, playing out the drama for the rest of our creations to live by. The opulence now available within the species will not travel well for seven billion: and yet we all want to know its taste, and fill our cupboard by it. There is a saying in some think-tank circles across Canada which arose from the universal-health-care debate several years back: 'If you kill it, it will die.' Which surely feels like the solution for an economic situation whose conclusion is invariably falling upon us. It is a terribly optimistic course of action. And I do emphasize terribly. If we look to the future with any anticipation and authenticity, we await the opportunity to forgive ourselves, smelting down every grail in hope of starting-over.

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Certainly we would all have our cake and eat it too: we would have unending riches and comfort pinned to ever-less work, but that truly involves cooperation. Even with the cosmos. And especially with the seasonality of the given things before us... Insider-Trading is a form of cooperation, but more so it is a confession of bitterness and childishness, as if Cake were not a thing for sharing - let alone gratitude. And those-without-cake(!) must have inherently never deserved to experience cake in the first place. Not a crumb. But such thinking is again Our Situation - when given a voice. Such is the inevitability of classism, which is the inevitability of constant-growth.

Which brings then four levels of confidence to mind, of which Growth Economics speak to these lower and lesser expressions: supplicant, combative, competitive, and finally, Cooperative. Each creates the next as we mature, and, given our Situation, we either progress through these stages toward the pinnacle of cooperation, or we stagnate or stalemate-ourselves within one of these steps. Those fine-and-good with this system grow comfortable into their competitions and their combats; happy to find supplicants, ridiculing the Cooperative.

The thing I find most curious about human Life is that we can observe from deep-down when we can be doing better. There is something about the inherent stubbornness tucked inside a bitter gesture which tells me so, and I believe growth-economics to be a very large, and very bitter, gesture. Hence its appeal: it does satisfy many an amazing thing - landing on Mars, say, or the will to conquer having known what it is to be divided - but again, the overall system offers no Return. Our investments offer a return (on paper), but rarely to the ecology which issues forth our current level of prosperity (not to mention the paper). It would be akin to selfish love-making, the supplanting of an exercise which might otherwise reveal much more beauty and soul. And so this way of living is condensing the pleasures we might also and otherwise find in the future.

Is such a system Creative? Quite possibly. Divine: definitely no. In spite of its architects. It is busy work, and not our Best. If we have the audacity to label our own human lives sentient and the endless black matters standing between one another and up to the planets not-so: what grants us that authority? Where does this power to self-author come from? It strikes me that matter itself is intelligent - that the light which passes through a thing, holding a thing together is where the ingredients for an idea discover themselves thriving - and our good chances are to have had us born with some fine sense to see them(!) Will we monetize this too? Moreover: have we not already..?

Courage, is simply to do the right thing then. True and authentic growth is to see that One is not alone; that any thought new-to-you came from circumstance, and from the same set of circumstances which float through the ages and the cosmos. Growth economics truly skew and dampen our inner, best, and authentic sense of what-is-right and what-is-possible. It assumes a win-loose outcome within a garden where All, thrives ever by Win-Win.

Constant growth on a finite planet pits us against anything we experience as holy: our time, firstly, our creativity, our social values, and of course Nature herself... Our basic needs, rather than moving in tandem with the natural abundance of this ripe planet, are sought out against those who surround us. We assume distrust is natural and good... How contrary to the human heart(!) Bound to the system which organizes us, we are simultaneously divided by it. By such is war made inevitable, and all the peace protests in the world spell out  m-i-s-d-i-r-e-c-t-e-d   e-n-e-r-g-y.

Our focus would serve such "lofty" goals better if focused instead on monetary policy and not the missiles… as money gets a thing done… The rules to our wealth are simply out-dated and in need of reckoning. "The Russians Love Their Children Too," so let us get on with it. Let us sharpen our focus onto the root causation of our many issues; let us learn the current set of rules to the currency which binds us, and let us play afterwards quite differently. You and I, are overdue for a Return to the Garden.

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www.thebookofgardens.com

~ A Lover's Manual for Planet Earth ~