Were we to view economics as a system of regulating actual resources instead of merely the manufactured commodity of money, we may have a chance of utilizing the science in a way that would meet the needs of the entirety of the population. However, as we have used it so inadequately to measure a resource created by a infinitesimal percentage of the population for the ultimate benefit of that miniscule minority, we find ourselves in the throws of imbalance where our resources are largely squandered in a perpetual game of slight of hand. Should the people of earth engage their ability to sincerely measure economics, the “rules of the house” established by the Greek “oikonomia,” then perhaps we can save ourselves from this seemingly unyielding instability and establish a more adequate means of meeting human needs while simultaneously serving as the caretakers of the planet we have so greatly ignored due to our obsession with the myopic system which has offered us such great disservice throughout the course of our civilizational evolution.
It is most likely no coincidence that the Greeks, who coined the phrase for our estimation of value in the world around us, were the first to fall from the ungracious grace offered by modern economics to revert to the simplicity of barter and local currencies. Although their transition into a more meager version of economics was largely forced, the struggles to find balance in their new operating system need not be so catastrophic for the rest of the watching world. It may very well be, as with all trailblazers, that the suffering endured by Greece during their emancipation from the fallibility of the world’s monetary economy may just be the sacrifice that the rest of us have been longing for as we seek the way to our own freedom.
Economics, in its most perfect sense, should not be the means through which disparity is cultivated as it is in our modern understanding of the commodity based world view and the competition that it thrives upon. If we are to look at the breadth of humanity as the brotherhood that it is, economics should be used to ensure that the needs of the entirety of humanity are met, instead of being used as a constant call toward competition culminating in the relentless outcome of “winners and losers,” “haves and have-nots.” The “rules of the house,” the true “oikonomia” that will provide for the human race, cannot be sustainably based on endless gladatorialism and the misconstrued Darwinian concept of “survival of the fittest,” for the truly fittest among us are not the strongest, but the most flexible. It will ultimately be our ability to change from what which no longer serves us that will be our greatest wealth.
InkenSoul 