The Cellular Economy

Thanks for visiting! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Or, leave your name and email below to receive Jim Dreaver's simple and profound 3 page PDF, The Shift That Frees Us.

As many readers know, in chaos theory, there is a point of systemic chaos before a reorganization at a higher level. Perhaps this is how we might hold current events so as not to become overwhelmed. The following excellent piece by Steve Behrman, aka, Swami Beyondananda is a new paradigm perspective on the economy from a cellular point of view that resonates with me. You can receive Steve’s Notes From the Trail by visiting his site and signing up for a free subscription.

“With the new bailout plan, the U.S. dollar will be worth slightly less than a dollar in Monopoly money. And the good news? Finally energy medicine is being used to heal the financial world — we have homeopathic currency, diluted down to a mere trace of real value.”

— Swami Beyondananda

A funny thing happened on the way to the election. The house of credit cards economy collapsed. Interestingly but not surprisingly, neither of the two major candidates were able to get out of the box of conventional economics enough to do any more than invite their fellow Americans aboard the bailout express to financial train wreck.

Interestingly and more surprisingly, Americans from all political perspectives have risen up with such outrage and awareness that the railroaded bill is now off on a siding. Curious indeed to see Michael Moore and very conservative Republican congressfolk on the same side, but this economic collapse may be the thing that puts the “unum” back in “e pluribus unum.”

Through the fog and hype, somehow the average American is able to understand what the neoconservative and neoliberal leaders of our two political parties are trying to conveniently avoid: The money supply must be based on some intrinsic value, and the wild speculation that has occurred over the past (de)generation has created “wealth” without value. A parasitic entity has attached itself to the commonwealth, has just about sucked us dry, and now will be given a bail out plan so it can continue to feed off of real wealth and produce nothing of value in return.

And here’s another interesting synchronous occurrence. This happens to be the week that I am doing the final rewrite of the Healthy Commonwealth chapter in the Spontaneous Evolution book I’m writing with Bruce Lipton. This is the chapter where we imagine what it would be like if our economic system had the intelligence that our cells do.

To review for those who aren’t yet familiar with the book’s key thesis, evolution is always a process that involves expanded awareness and expanded community. Therefore, just as single cells combined some 700 million years ago into multicellular communities, and just as multicellular communities formed into bigger communities to create the likes of you and me, the next level of human evolution will be the realization that we are each and all cells in the body of an organism called humanity.

This evolutionary transformation will be even more of a “leveraged choice” than this current pressure to bail out our financial institutions. There are enough scientific markers to indicate that we cannot continue our so-called “civilization” using our resources the way we are using them today — to dominate and kill one another. Consider for a moment what it would be like if you used a large part of your internal resource to destroy your own cells. That is exactly what is happening on a macro level, and our species is standing on the brink of what could be a fatal case of autoimmune disorder.

So what’s the good news?

It’s Official: Our Cells Are Smarter Than We Are

The good news is, our own bodies are modeling for us a healthy economy where there is universal health care, full employment, and truly no cell left behind. Huge conglomerates like the heart and the liver cooperate for the health of the whole system, and only “compete” in the original Greek sense of the term which meant “to strive together.” They, and every other organ and system in the body, “strive together” to insure a healthy organism.

Not to anthropomorphize cells (they hate it when we do that), but the cells seem to have an “understanding” that their survival depends on the survival of the organism. Applied to our human society, this means that without a healthy biosphere, it doesn’t matter how big your bank account, or how much gold you’ve hoarded. And that Hummer or Beamer? Just a curious relic to be examined by some future ET intergalactic explorers.

Our cells have a very basic understanding of economics. Economics is the generation, storage, distribution and use of energy.

In the body, the coin of the realm is ATP (adenosine triphosphate) which is used by the body to transfer and store energy. While each cell gets what it needs to function (and that includes food delivery, garbage pick up, climate control, security, and even “internet service”), the greatest ATP resource flows to those organs, systems and cells that do the most to insure the organism’s survival and thrival.

Thus, a skin cell can have a pretty good life doing its part as the body’s first line of defense. However, a heart cell will very likely be “paid” more, and even be given an entourage of support cells to help it do its work. And while cells may each have individual ATP “bank accounts” to store their excess energy internally, the biggest bank accounts belong not to individual cells, but to the entire system. It is the healthy “central voice” of the organism — processing all relevant information — that decides where how this extra resource best serves the organism.

From time to time, certain rogue cells in the body decide to hoard resource for themselves, to the detriment of the entire system. This is called cancer.

In the body, energy cannot be artificially coined as Federal Reserve Notes, nor can it be put on one’s Ascended Mastercard and paid for in another lifetime. Available energy can only come from surplus stored. As an example, imagine a young woman suffering from anorexia, slowly starving herself. At some point, her menstruation will stop. Why? It’s her own system telling her, sorry you don’t have enough energy in the bank to start a new “business.” Once normal eating patterns resume, so do her periods.

Another thing about the body is, it’s a whole system. Economics, politics, health, safety, personal growth and even spirituality, it’s all integrated. The body “understands” that health care is a basic necessity, because the energetic costs of lack of health will “kill” the system down the line. In the world as in the body, the “real” economy is not in the money or stocks or credit, but in the energy — the ability to “do” — the money represents.

If you’re doubtful that money is derivative and not primal, try this simple experiment. Eat your money. While high in fiber, paper money has very little nutritional value. And here is something more amazing. $100 bills have no more nutritional value than dollar bills do.

The point is this. In the whole-system world we are living into, we must understand the economy as the way energy is generated, stored, distributed and spent. The money game as it’s come to be played — a big time lottery that has become a big time “lootery” — is merely a side show. Unfortunately, we have allowed this side show to determine how our resources are distributed, what gets made, and who gets what.

Raising the Bar on the Bottom Line

So here’s the real bottom line. In any living system — and the earth is a living system — the total energy spent cannot exceed the energy generated. Thanks to technology, we are spending old energy (that is, what Thom Hartmann has called “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight” in the form of fossil fuels) without replenishing it. We have been able to do this because in the paper world of imaginary wealth, we have the “money.” In reality, our fuel tank — and by definition, our wealth tank — is running dangerously low.

That means that regardless of what kind of bookkeeping sleight of hand we use to extract ourselves from the current crisis, we need to adopt some real bottom line principles to insure a truly healthy commonwealth:

1. Wealth Is Energy. What this means here on earth is that the only wealth we have is what we get from the sun, what we grow on the earth that is renewable, and how we use our intelligence to multiply this wealth. So … while we’re contemplating which financial instruments to use to make it all come out right on paper, we’d better be focusing on two things: Food self-sufficiency and energy self-sufficiency. We have been given the amazing perpetual energy generator called the sun. Our job? Use our imagination and ingenuity to figure out how to magnify the sun’s energy so that we can generate what we need now, and “bank” some for the future.

2. The Purpose of Wealth is Health. The entire purpose of energy in any system is to enable that system to “be fruitful and multiply” — to not just survive, but thrive. When an organism “accumulates” wealth, what it is really accumulating is the potential for ongoing well-being. Consequently, the issue of whether we can “afford” health care is patently absurd, even from the linear and monetary standpoint. Consider how the cost of neglected health — not to mention environmental pollutants, and the stewing toxins generated by a “dog eat dog” system — impact the well being of all of us? Who hasn’t been touched by crime, pollution, or preventable health conditions? What this means is that foundationally the purpose of our economy is a healthy, happy planet where every “cell” can thrive. Anything less than that misses the point of the coming “spontaneous evolution.”

3. Economic Growth = Growth In Happiness. While our material resources seem finite, there are two “multipliers” that are not. These are the underused human resources of love and imagination. It’s clear to see how imagination and inventive awareness can literally magnify the power of the sun. But love can magnify happiness. Think of it this way. One individual can enter a room projecting love, peace, joy and coherence — and a hundred or a thousand can leave with that love, with none of the original love diminished. If that ain’t loaves and fishes, I don’t know what is. If love magnifies happiness, and happiness magnifies health, and health is wealth … then love has more potential than we might imagine.

Meanwhile, we in America have learned that we pursue happiness through all the things we buy. But what if we could cut right to the chase, and go right for happiness? What if our new definition of economic growth was more happiness bang for the energy buck? If you visit the Happy Planet Index website, you will see that America uses four times the resources that Costa Rica does to attain a similar level of happiness. No wonder so many folks work 70 hours a week and still suffer from “happiness envy.”

So … how do we create a healthy caring system for planetary thrival, and how on earth do we get there from here? How do we apply the theoretical ideal to the practical real deal? What are our short-term tactics, and long-term strategies for creating a “natural economy” before the unnatural one destroys itself and takes us with it?

A Modest Proposal for Left and Right to Come Front and Center

Interestingly but not surprisingly, the left and the right, the conservatives and the progressives, each have an important piece of the puzzle. The conservatives — not the neocons, but the ones who believe in fiscal fitness — understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Borrowing can only lead to more borrowing. Debt tends to metastasize into insurmountable debt, and the real value of money diminishes. Everything we have has a price, and it makes the most sense to pay as you go.

The progressives have another part of the understanding. They realize that “we’re all in this together” is a principle at the root of just about every ethical and religious system, and is now being proved by science. They recognize that life is the real bottom line, and that money must serve life instead of the other way around. Consequently, they figure our health care dollar should be used to provide health care, not deny it. They recognize the toxic absurdity of the insurance company spending millions to keep people from collecting on their health care benefits.

Meanwhile, in real communities like Reno, Nevada, self-described progressives and self-described conservatives have been quietly working together to enhance the quality of their lives locally, through healthy food, healthy businesses and healthy neighborhoods. These kinds of endeavors are still under the radar. However, the “up-wising” around our financial crisis offers perhaps the greatest opportunity of our lifetime for left and right to come front and center to face the music and dance together.

Long-term, every community and region must create a mini Manhattan Project (it can be called the Manhelpin Project) to bring together all necessary resources to create food and energy self-sufficiency. From there, a true surplus of wealth can be built that will guarantee the health and potential happiness of every human.

Short-term, my friend Thom Hartmann offered a clue over the weekend suggesting that instead of a bailout — which has been proven not to work — we create an an agency to fund the bail out, and pay for it with a Securities Turnover Excise Tax. Says Hartmann, “For example, if we were to instate a .25 percent STET (tax) on every stock, swap, derivative, or other trade today, it would produce — in its first year — around $150 billion in revenue. Wall Street would be generating the money to fund its own bailout.”

In other words, why not tax the very thing that produces nothing and has caused the economy to spin out of control? Nothing wrong with gambling, as long as the gamblers don’t control the economy. Let’s make “we the people” the “house” so that we get a piece of each transaction. Once we’ve taken this step, we might consider an even more radical step that would bring together left and right: Replacing the income tax with a STET tax. And an even more radical step beyond that: Abolishing the Federal Reserve and granting the powers to create money back to the government, as Jefferson and Madison would have wished.

But that’s a whole other conversation.

Meanwhile, the body politic has been awakened. We have a great opportunity now to speak outside the box of economics as usual, across party and ideological lines. Everybody hates the bail out. Now the challenge is to come together in functionality to determine what we do instead.