Sympathy involves at least two entities in a relationship. It can be said that when two bodies resonate at the same frequency they are in sympathy. Since prehistory sympathy has ignited basic human communications. Sympathy is an empathic concern that is triggered in the presence of inequality or distress, usually related to the pain felt by someone else. It awakens our need to share. Over time moral codes have assembled contractual laws that bind relationships in sympathy. In equity and grace, sympathy is an essential part of a functional society. Economic laws have become unsympathetic to society and privilege the wealthy few. Even our civil laws and rights are disappearing to financial monopolies. Let’s not forget that sympathy belongs to the heart while laws are mind abstractions looking out for personal interests.
These laws become the prison walls that sustain economic power structures. The rest of us on the other side are alienated in consumerism camps. Justice and sympathy run on another rail. The real function of justice is to maintain the equilibrium of the social fabric. We could say that never before have we had so many laws and regulations; by the same token never before has there been so much injustice. Who is responsible for this? Perhaps the corruptible self-interest and greedy nature that resides in all of us. It’s time to grow up. The capitalist age of hedonistic individualism is out of bounds. The social instruments that exchanged land for money and aristocracy for the bourgeoisie, has completed its historic function.
Novelty changed the feudal structure into a postindustrial civilization. Novelty too will pull us out of this historic cocoon. The industrial revolution and the eighteenth century “invisible hand” economics grew unprecedented surplus and market shares. This capital has energized the fantastic growth of modernity. This system has been crucial in the development of ideas, science, art and creativity. However, with the growth of capital grew the usufruct of financial instruments. Eventually, the civilizing motor of modernity, otherwise known as money, became restricted in the hands of few. These powerful hands have deliberately obliterated creativity and authenticity, suppressing the freedom to think for ourselves. At this point, the system becomes authoritarian and tyrannical. When money is used for profit and not to create a bountiful and beautiful world with everyone on it living in sympathy, it’s degraded and used to enslave and sheep the marketplace, we become psychologically inoculated by the gadgets of our desire. Because of our addictive nature, we can easily be seduced. This knowledge has been deployed against the human family.
Sympathy for the other is tied to fraternity and equality. Even Adam Smith wrote about communication and sympathy as essential in functional societies. Social responsibility implies sympathy for others, for us, tied directly to all relationships and the social fabric. The whole organism of humanity is the new self, the greater I am that we long and truly desire. We must be sympathetic to this realization. The economic model of individualistic barbarism based on self-interest and maximizing return has to give way to an ecological model of symbiosis and equilibrium. This model must not be because of last minute measures resulting from catastrophic warnings; it will develop because we are of this world, ingrained and not separated from it. We are not ravaging creatures running aimlessly over the land with no sense of boundaries. The experience that we have generated over the last 200+ years, will allow us to empower this shift.
The economic views of powerful mafias, working to better themselves with no regard for the common good, evolve into predatory economics. This perverted relationship has to be exchanged for ecological economies that use monetization as an instrument for sustainable practices and resources of their people. Past the historic money motor moment that created the materialistic market of things and false values. A new form of doing business is emerging.
First, we must object to this stuff forced upon us in the modern supermarkets of the world. Billions of people sacrifice their right to be alive in the pursuit of illusionary objects and false promises. Happiness and health are sold to us in the form of goods and services. Innovation and beauty, knowledge and passion do not require any artifacts; they emerge out of you, providing priceless endeavors for humanity. This needs to be cultivated responsibly with sympathy for each other, creating social and individual responsibility, exercising our freedoms. Freedom is not bought at the corner store. Instead, it needs to be exercised on every corner, along with freedom of speech to voice our opinions, responsibly acknowledging our limits and choices we make. We must exchange the predatory idea of competition, so ingrained in the marketplace, for the nourishing flow of cooperation. What are we competing for anyway? Our habits of consumption have been imposed by the head edifices of the market economy. This market has derogated human value and has persuaded us to find value in things and professionals. It’s time for a shift to an economy of cooperation, responsibly in sympathy with each and every one of us, based on justice, liberty, and limited resources. All this can develop in the context of the possibilities and abundance of our universal situation. It’s hard to imagine such a system in the complex compartmentalized society of the twenty-first century Western economic model.
Yet cooperation among smaller groups in smaller communities exists already. These groups are radiant islands lighting up this point of reference.
Competition is based on the law of the jungle and the brute forces that adapt the contours of survival in the crudest nature. Mindless competition in a potentially rich and abundant world is a hernia that is strangulating our present stasis. Consider all the marvels of modern society; they were invented by less than 1% of the minds of the last 200+ years. Imagine the potential for innovation after proper nourishing of all the minds on Earth in cooperation and in sympathy. The untapped geniuses inside all of us are the reservoirs of infinite abundance that can move us forward. We all have the right to harvest this potential in sympathy with each other, in liberty. This is the only viable solution. Freedom and justice exist only when it is truly the same for all and not when they only favor a technocratic few.
The cheerleaders who champion the cartels that protect these elites are resisting the newly emergent social behavior that will change our civilization. In spite of the monolithic laws and manifestos, social systems will always be evolving. Ultimately liberty, like economics, only happens in society. A single person is not an economic system. A society needs of at least of two people in order to exist.
As a society moves into industrialization, it becomes complex in methodology and technique. Division of labor and specialization generate an explosion of technique and innovation. This activity results in the great supermarket of goods and professional services. This method of subdivisions multiplies exponentially as more and more compartments, regulations, bureaucracies, and laws are drafted to control this activity. As in a factory assembly line, where high productivity is achieved through mechanized specialized labor, method, and technique provide society with tremendous efficiency. Money has become the sole engine and absolute purveyor of these efficient exchanges. Money has allowed capitalism to ignite potential relationships. Capitalism, along with the money engine, has created the magnificent crescent of modernity. We have learned to embody this idea and we call it progress. Capitalism has also dehumanized the soul of humanity, reducing our innermost gifts and treasures to printed paper notes on a sliding scale. Try putting a price on your mother, daughters, sons, father, love, art, health, pension plan, insight, friends, and beautiful sunsets. Money fails to quantify the value in these relationships and experiences. Money also has a tendency to end up accumulated in the hands of a gluttonous few. Giant money lenders corrupt benefactors and we end up in the tyrannies of capitalist wealth. Historically in the past 500 years, we have gone from mercantilist economies, through the industrial revolution, to the modern economy of financial markets and mob “bankster” debt-based economies. They all took us to economic globalism and then to financially bankrupt tyrannies. This mentality has to stop, from top down actions and by many influential actors.
What if the division of labor was based on collaboration, in sympathy for our fellow beings instead? We can now send people to the moon and we can clone ourselves. Prodigal techniques that manipulate our inner and outer environments. But what do we know about the art of living? Instead, we have chartered away from this integrated center of cooperation, lured by the false promise of material accumulation and the gadgetry of our desires. Giving up this trap will be the most traumatic step leading to the more benign socially empathic but fully technological and free society of the future. Our comfort zones may contract some, but this could be exciting and challenging. The limitless inner technology of human consciousness, based on love, creative insight, and intuitive development will explode in sympathy. Have we forgotten we are truly formidable creatures at a unique time?
The promise that technology will resolve all our problems, reduce work and generate an effortless paradise of leisure and youthful longevity has not been realized. Rather we find ourselves working longer hours, derailed on the treadmill of productivity and plagued by degenerative disease. Productivity for what? Do you call this life? We all work endless hours to ensure that the privileged monied families keep a grip on societies. Technocrats and their control of technologies assure themselves powerful behind closed secrecy.
These technocrats fail to recognize the finite resources of our natural habitat. Since the Renaissance, humanity has operated on the view that Earth was put here to divide and conquer the spoils. We believe we have the right to claim property over natural resources that are finite and belong to the biosphere, not to us. This assumption suggests that we are separate from Earth and not part of its life cycles, ignoring moreover that we grow out of this world, like a flower sprouts outwardly from the plant ground.
When humankind positions itself separate from its environment, separated from the flexible grid of mother nature, we evolve into technological idolatry and “transhumanism.”
The service of technology must be deployed for the humane benefit of land and life, not for the pursuit of technological domination.
Who gave the power profiteers the right to exploit very limited external resources?
When our most creative scientists can be bought and corrupted to generate technologies that will flood the market with gadgets and planned obsolescence, the rest of us become reduced to a “technophile” colonial slave system. The custodians of the money powers have taken us for a dangerous ride and they control our lives. Instead, what if we used the instruments of finance to furnace a motor of creativity for all of humanity, in a renaissance of art, beauty, and responsible science. Such renascence will take place in community with mother Earth, with sympathy for others, and where goods and services have a range of values. We will not renounce to the material advances of humanity, but rather learn how to manage their effects responsibly, rectifying the growth concept of a capitalist economy with its development of things and not of people. It’s not about eliminating the marketplace either, however, these trading grounds would be reformed completely to become real free markets. Trade must function with closed loops, be Eco-friendly, multilevel, local and diverse, and more importantly with very well informed and responsible consumers. Fully awake, aware of the fine boundaries of this earthly experience, we will make sympathetic choices on a finite planet. When we are able to do this we will transition from a patriarchal system of rapacious economics to a matrilineal society of biophysical cooperation. Experiencing the nurturing mother, exploring the full creative reservoirs of our inner technologies, heart, and soul, we will share liberating innovations openly and in sympathy.
The art of living consists in knowing our limits so very well.
Capitalism has completed its cycle. It’s an exclusive system, for if you don’t have money you can’t participate in this casino. Money is an obstacle to progress; money is not the solution. It has become a hurdle or an obstacle to development. This money is created out of debt. In healthy societies markets are created as a result of satisfying basic necessities in excellence and not by creating needs to gain profit and then conditioning a market of zombies to desire such products. The monetization of this relationship has become a tool of enslavement and has devalued the human soul. It distracts us from the things that come naturally, effortlessly and freely.
More benign and natural forms of exchange are cropping everywhere: local currencies, time shares, time banks, social credit, credit unions, local financial cooperatives, raw food markets, organic farms, community swaps and permaculture. These innovations will pave the way for a better society. The basic needs of food, shelter, health, education, security, arts and culture are the pillars of this renaissance. Our exquisite techniques and know how must farm and fuel these areas within the finite sphere of resources aware of the infinite freedom and potential within. This change will resonate sympathy in the greater human family and bring down the walls that separate our interests. The division of labor will become labor independence in equal opportunities embracing the entrepreneur spirit and expanding technologies that empower local communities, satisfying regional needs and autonomy, but also on a larger scope in liberty, sharing free sourcing technologies and innovation in sympathy for Earth systems and each other. Sympathy will ignite the motor of the future and it will facilitate the act of giving.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlos Cuellar Brown is a New York City media artist and essayist who has written on new media, social theory and metaphysics. His essays have been posted online by Opendemocracy, The Global Dispatches, The Pelican Web, Kosmos Journal, and STARDRIVE.
In 2013 his essay “Intermedial Being” was published by A Journal of Performance and Art PAJ #106 MIT Press Journals. In 2015 Mr. Brown was nominated for the TWOTY awards out of the Netherlands for his essay “Blueprint for Change”. He has been a regular columnist for Second Sight Magazine and Fullinsight.
His book, In Search of Singularity: Reflections and Chronicles from the End of Time, published 29 January 2017, is a series of reflections on the current cultural evolution from competition to cooperation, from patriarchy to reciprocity between humanity and the human habitat.
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