Timothy Wilken
Have we reached the bottom?
We would like to think so. This holiday weekend most of us will gather to celebrate the beginning of summer with our friends and family. Schools are letting out, some of our children have reached their milestones and are graduating, vacations are are being planned. And, so the average modern human would like to believe that soon things will return to “normal.”
Here “normal” is defined as the way things were prior to October 9th, 2007. Is this a valid belief? Is it reasonable to hope that things can return to the way they were?
Before we can answer those questions, we must first understand why the market crashed in the first place.
Why is this happening? What went wrong? What is really going on here? These are all good questions, but all have been poorly answered thus far. My answer is that our present Economic System is failing. It is obsolete. It cannot provide for the needs of 6.5 billion humans living on a finite planet with diminishing natural resources.
In synergic science our present economic system would be described as a PRODUCT Tensegrity. This is a Neutral (Money Based) Fair Market Help Exchange System. It depends on the exchange of money between buyers and sellers. This is the basis for our present Consumer Nation.
For this system to work certain conditions must exist. The population must be small compared to the available natural resources. In fact, it works best when we have relatively unlimited resources. This was the condition in America in the 1770s. The U.S. population was ~2.5 million people. Within the boundary of what is today America an enormous supply of land, water, wild animals, minerals, and petroleum existed. The PRODUCT Tensegrity is an enormously inefficient system. It creates products that no one needs, and even that no one buys. This is why 50% to 80% of new businesses fail in their first three years, even in the best of economic times.
Why have all of today’s leading business and economic gurus failed to explain what is really happening? The answer is because they are locked into the wrong
paradigm. They assume that help cannot be exchanged without money. They cannot imagine a help exchange system that does not have buyers and sellers.
For our lives to return to “normal” will require nothing less than the emergence of a radically new economy. It will be so different from our current economy that most of us will initially be startled by those differences. In 2001, I first proposed such a new mechanism for the human exchange of goods and services. This new mechanism was radically different from the way we do things today. Nothing really affects our lives more than the way we exchange goods and services. In synergic science, this new help exchange system is called a GIFT Tensegrity or GIFTegrity for short.
You might choose to take some time this weekend to read my description of an alternative economy. It will help you to understand our present dilemma, and introduce you to a positive pathway out of our current crisis.
So have we reached the bottom?
No. If we continue our obsession with money, we have only begun our descent. If we are willing to consider a synergic alternative, then we can build a new system that works for everyone.