Profits First— Preface
Communities and Societies are built on trust.
Trust can be inspired in very different ways. Think of “In God We Trust” on the dollar bill, or an International Financial Consultant’s business card that might say, “A & M Investments, a business built on trust.”
A “Profits First” ethos is unsustainable for many reasons. Many books have been written across many thought domains, if not explicitly then implicitly on this very subject.
At the scale of our 21st-century science and technology-driven world, we can't avoid prosocial considerations or global resource management and sustainability questions. We all live in a networked, global culture. There are cultural differences across nation-states, of course, but no one who understands our world would deny that our economy is global.
careful management of available resources.
(It would be best to understand the origins of words, how words evolve, and their significance to various cultures and societies at any given time. The same goes for concepts, ideas, and theories.)
Suppose we desire to go back to a period where we live in traditional communities and cultures of a much smaller scale, say, communities that thrived over nine thousand years ago. In that case, we don't need to worry much about sustainability or prosocial issues. Back then, we would most probably possess an animistic reverence for nature and our environment that, even though it would not have been scientific, would have helped us understand and care for our ecosystem in the hope that it would sustain our children in the future. Our community culture would help to reinforce norms and best practices that were good for the community and its environment.
Communities are groups of people where everyone is easily recognizable and where everyone has a stake in everyone else's success. We all work together to thrive.
a particular area or place considered together with its inhabitants.
Jordon Hall has an interesting way of articulate areas surrounding community and society.
At our present scale, this kind of community exists in a limited sense with layer upon layer of organizational and ideological structures that must exist to drive society's tremendously creative and productive power. These are societies governed by abstractions that serve the machine, the greater good. Religion, philosophy, ideology, and later physics, and science were all used to varying degrees to structure and systematize extremely complex institutions needed to achieve greater and greater leverage of various forms of power.
Suppose we are going to solve the many challenging problems of today. In that case, we will need to understand how science, technology, education, and wisdom traditions might combine to assist in the mindful development of cultures that place greater value on natural services, our environment, our resources, and general health.
We need a genuinely pro-life world order. We cannot rely solely on competition to achieve success; we must work harder at diplomacy, cooperation, and collaboration.
Although we may be in some sense winning, if we can't approach the development of power more wisely (wisdom is a big, amorphous bucket, I know), the world we know can only, ultimately, be a death machine.
The changes required to ensure a future for Homo Sapiens requires us to have faith and a rich imagination. We must re-engineer, restructure, and redesign everything having to do with society while maintaining the best elements of what we have created and developed to this point. We need nothing short of a new calendar. Instead of thinking of all the days to come as being A.D. (After Death), we need to know that from this day forward, from day one, we are living in a Pro-Life world.
We don't progress so much as continue, and it would be hard to argue against continuing to make things a bit better.
Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future. —William Wordsworth
If you allow me to indulge my curation habit, I suggest you listen to this Pitchfork Economics podcast episode.
Do wealthy Americans have too much power—with Thom Hartmann.
Is the U.S. an oligarchy, or does it just have a bunch of super-rich people living in it? Is there a difference? Author Thom Hartmann joins Nick and Paul to explain the relationship between wealth and American political power and share some of the research that went into his latest book, ‘The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.’
Thom Hartmann is the #1 progressive radio talk show host in the US and a New York Times bestselling author.
Twitter: @Thom_Hartmann
