Align: Subchapter III.
With the coming generation, education will become more closely aligned with cultivating intuitive decision- making. By incorporating a wide range of sources of knowledge and perspectives, a more holistic approach to education will synthesize old traditions with new capabilities to instill a greater sense of integrity and possibility into public and private institutions.
We need an alternative to our current economic system that’s based on self-interest and exploitation. Restructuring our economic interests and exchanges around wellbeing will guide us in an advantageous direction.
To weather uncertainty, we can become more agile by ditching the assumption that more is always better. We can learn to more deftly navigate our needs for each present moment by adopting a more context-specific decision-making process in place of dogmatically-rigid interests. Wise, economic decision-making ultimately has much to do with selecting various factors that contribute to wellbeing in real-time and for the long- term.
Ergodicity Economics refers to a more evenly-distributed form of economic protocol. An ergodic process honors a whole-systems approach, in that any sample within a process, represents the process in its entirety. The significance of this dynamic form of economic framework is that it prioritizes how collective benefit increases over time when risk is mitigated by a greater engagement in shared resources and corresponding diminishment in self-interested priorities.33
The New Economy movement has grown largely out of various individuals and organizations in North America striving to prioritize human wellbeing over economic growth. This alternative to the current economy arose in response to the financial crisis and recession of 2008–2010. The primary goal of this movement is to overcome the widening disparities between rich and poor within capitalistic societies. Food co-ops and state-owned banks are a couple of examples of how this movement looks to create more altruistic alternatives to the models we currently have. Collective ownership creates a greater sense of shared destiny and promotes greater responsibility among participants. The more that stakeholders are involved and prioritized instead of shareholders, the more that resource depletion is mitigated and wealth is shared. We believe in the importance of scaling this idea from small collectives to large corporate entities as a means of repositioning business as a proponent of positive change.
Before humans created our current economy, they engaged in a gift economy. In a gift economy, goods, services, and experiences are exchanged without any money or expectation of return. Environmentalist Charles Eisenstein has written extensively about the history of economics, citing early examples of the gift economy in his book Sacred Economics:
“While gifts can be reciprocal, just as often they flow in circles. I give to you, you give to someone else…and eventually someone gives back to me. A famous example is the kula system of the Trobriand Islanders, in which precious necklaces circulate in one direction from island to island, and bracelets in the other direction.” — Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, Chapter 1, The Gift World 34
Eisenstein himself practices the message he advocates in his writing. When he’s invited to speaking engagements he receives a form of payment for travel and expenses yet does not demand a specific monetary fee. Organizers are encouraged to pay him what they feel is fair, as a means of practicing generosity and what he calls “living in the gift”.
Every day presents opportunities to practice thinking about what you might want to give to someone else, or to your community. We can reclaim what worked in our past for the purposes of community building and collective wealth. Aided by this wisdom, we can remake economies for a more generous future and an all-around more robust existence.
