Money and Spiritual Values: Escaping Doomsday Economics

Let’s face it—the news is a bummer. As far as we can tell, bad things are happening to good people and planets all over the galaxy. And if our planet is any indicator, money lurks at the root of it. At least, it’s hard to think of a problem that isn’t economic. Drugs, crime, earth-fouling, hunger, homelessness, mega-debts, wars over who controls what, day-to-day stress over bills and job security—stop reading when money isn’t the culprit.

To make matters worse, experts on the news tell us that there’s not a thing we can do about all this—at least economically, which is where it counts. We’re simply witnessing the action of impersonal market forces. If the market forces favor us and we hit the jackpot, we think blind market forces are great. If they give us a bad deal and we wind up on the street, we grumble. But that’s just what our free market system is all about.

It’s a good thing classical economists from Adam Smith to Henry Carey aren’t around to hear this. Trained as social philosophers, they published works on economics precisely to challenge this view. They’d seen greedy merchants dominating European and American business in the name of impersonal economic forces. But they didn’t buy it. Treating economies this way destroys them, they replied, because it drives all but a few out of business.

In our contemporary world, we’re left with bullies in pin stripes and corporate offices. The best example of this is the game of Monopoly (invented in the 1930’s as a primer in what causes depressions). Monopoly, contrary to a popular view, isn’t a model of how economies work but an analysis of how they fail. One player wins by causing everyone else to go bankrupt—no more game.

That’s not a free market. It’s a free-for-all. A free market exists when players can go in and out of the game as they choose, when no one group controls a market, and when the possibilities for development aren’t artificially shut down. How to achieve such an economy is another story. As Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Samuelson quips, "We don’t know whether or not ‘pure’ capitalism would work, because—like ‘pure’ Christianity—it’s never been tried."

Whatever a free market economy is or isn’t, it’s more than "impersonal market forces." What’s missing from this "official" view of the economy is "we the people." Economies aren’t out there happening to us; they are us, because without us, they don’t exist. People make economies what they are. There’s more to economies than stuff—land, resources, energy, VCRs, and sun-dried tomatoes. Economies are the story of how we manage our stuff—what we do with what we have.

There’s no impersonal market force telling us how to manage things, either; we decide. People decide whether to put research money into new solar cells or new oil fields, alternative engines or alternative color tints. Moreover, we decide according to our philosophies—what we think economies are all about. Philosophies tell us, for example, whether economies are about cooperating or competing, preserving or exploiting, stewarding or owning, nurturing or dominating.

If our economies reflect us—if in fact they’re our philosophies gone public—then we have the power to change our economies by evolving our philosophies. We’re not stuck with one brand of philosophy, which means we’re not stuck with one form of economy, either. Bringing the two together and seeing how they’re linked empowers us to take hold of our worlds and to turn them in different, more productive directions.

In fact, this is the direction that economies are already going.

Historically speaking, economies start by taking stock of material things: land and resources. Whoever controls land and resources has the power.

But before long, energy enters the scene. What’s the use of owning land and resources if we don’t have the energy (the muscle, wind, wood, or oil power) to do things with them? In the Industrial Age, whoever controls the energy wields the power.

Yet using energy to manipulate matter takes knowledge—the more the better. Mind-power replaces muscle-power. As knowledge increases, we use matter and energy more efficiently. We do more with less. That’s what made the Information Age so popular: with information, we can do almost anything. At this stage, "knowledge is power" (Francis Bacon). And it’s not scarce. Knowledge tends to breed more knowledge.

Today, however, the big question is what kind of power knowledge gives us. With the same information, we can turn the Earth into a peaceful paradise or a radioactive dump, an equitable global community or an Orwellian slave colony. What’s the use of all our information if we lack the inward growth to use it wisely?

Suddenly, the evening litany of bummers lifts the mundane world of economics into the heady world of consciousness: What kinds of economic worlds are our philosophies giving us? And can we develop philosophies that give us something else?

These are just the questions that would make the old spiritual teachers and economic philosophers leap for joy. That’s not because such questions open the door for dogma dealers, but because the questions put consciousness in motion. By challenging us to look beyond any one philosophy, they spur us to seek methods for evolving our philosophies continually. This process of evolving, as far as we can tell, is what spiritual teachers cared most about.

It’s also what our economies need. Who knows which economic steps are necessary to turn things around? Where should we start? What should each one of us do? There are many books available now that suggest important courses for individual and collective action. Given the state of our world, the more options the better.

But to make these efforts most effective, we need to rethink the philosophies that cause the bummers in the first place. If, for example, a philosophy claims that the way to make a profit is to fragment and destroy—whether by corporate raiding, strip mining, drug-peddling or chemical dumping—then the best efforts to offset the evils produced are as bandaids on broken bones. The philosophical structure has to be reset before real healing can begin.

That’s not all bad news. Sure, it’s depressing to think what our philosophies must be, given the world as it is. But it’s also hopeful and downright empowering to realize that the power to change things—even economically—lies with us. According to the Roman Stoic Epictetus, evolving our philosophies lies within our power. In fact, he said, it’s our first and greatest power. It’s where creative action starts. Because we all have philosophies, we can all take part in changing them. As we do, our economies will follow. Being our creations, they have no choice.