If you want an image of post–American Empire collapse, there is at least one contemporary portrait to draw upon. It looks a bit like a nuclear war circa 1958, which is akin to what I witnessed in Havana after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent “special period” that followed. By the mid-’90s Havana’s massive deep port harbor was empty and there was little gas to drive the scant, duct-taped cars that still existed there, yet it amazed me how music and culture remained such a resilient tool of empowerment and happiness. People still played baseball, made love, wrote books, painted paintings, and jammed. In fact, in a postfinancial world, jamming might be a good skill to cultivate. Improvisation requires openness, creativity, and ingenuity, which certainly are the hallmarks of survival and evolution (both cultural and natural)—which helps explain why during this period Cuba emerged as a world innovator in organic agriculture. No doubt, it was also hard to walk down Havana’s streets without being solicited by prostitutes and drug dealers, but when I visited there over a dozen years ago it was a veritable hub of African and Caribbean students who were there to take advantage of an innovative educational system focused on provisioning without industrial resources. And unlike the polluted and dangerous streets of modern capitalist cities, Havana’s avenues were quiet, with the exception of the clanging bells of Chinese bicycles and the breezy music wafting through the air.
What is amazing about culture is how it persists in the face of cataclysmic adversity. Consider jazz, flamenco, reggae, and hip-hop as examples of high art forms that have absorbed and digested the oppression and destruction of so many lost lives. In the case of the Mexica (the tribal name for the Aztecs), their culture transcended the “conquest” because of an underlying philosophy, flor y canto—“flower and song.” I put conquest in quotation marks because many of my Native American friends remind me that it’s a transient state; consider the fate of Spain in the Americas. After five hundred years, who remains standing? Even in California, as urban historian Mike Davis argues, “USA” is a temporary identity. In the surviving poetry of preconquest culture, Mexica verse speaks of life’s temporality, and how each of us is on loan to each other during our short lives on earth. Mexica poets were wise to know that empires come and go, but flower and song remain. Thus, an open, compassionate cultural architecture, though rare, is absolutely necessary. As the Dalai Lama has warned regarding the Chinese occupation of Tibet, to commit to violence in response to history is to go to war with oneself, because the heart and mind can never be united in such a quest. Flower and song will die, however, if we let civilization destroy our spirit.
In contrast to the survivors of Tibetan occupation or the Spanish invasion of the Americas, affluent Americans should count their blessings. Life has been prosperous and relatively safe by comparison to what so many have endured; we have benefited greatly by other people’s misery, as the Situationists once pontificated. The world’s “social majorities,” whom our system has condemned mostly to death, war, exploitation, and malnutrition, may end up being our biggest teachers. Let us listen with open hearts to what they can teach us about survival in harsh economic times. One such teacher is the only artist I have heard everywhere I have traveled in the world: Bob Marley. That kind of wisdom doesn’t come easily.
As it stands we will need lots of new allies. Due to the unfolding financial crisis, we Americans are likely on our way to joining the majority of the world in terms of economic resources, or the lack thereof. With deindustrialization, decapitalization, deconsumerism and all the other d’s that accompany Depression, this is a good wake-up call for a minority of the world’s population with the highest per capita ecological footprint. Still, it goes without saying that economic decline is not happening without considerable pain and difficulty for many people. I don’t mean to trivialize suffering, but we can survive. Ask an Aztec. Reflect on how the majority of the world manages while living with considerably less; in many cases the “poor” are significantly happier than rich Americans who consistently rank lowest in the world’s happiness index (Indonesians, for example, are ranked as the happiest people in the world, despite their considerably lower standard of living than Europeans or Americans). We all know by this point that consumer goods don’t equate with contentment. Having a refrigerator and dishwasher make life simpler, so we’re told; yet when the final bill comes due, maybe that perceived comfort comes at a terrible cost of unmanageable economic and ecological complexity.
Oikos, the Greek root for ecology and economics, means “household.” Like in Cuba, our financial home environment can be “disturbed,” to borrow a term from ecology, but our reaction depends on the level of diversity maintained in our state of being. The lesson from ecology is that disturbances have less impact when there is greater biodiversity to absorb the change in an ecological system. Just like the tightrope walker’s balance pole, the shorter it is, the less ability to absorb shock to the system. Like the Buddha said, add a touch of salt to a glass of water, and it will taste salty. But throw the same amount of salt into a lake, and you won’t taste the difference.
Consider, then, that your attitude is potentially the most diverse asset at your disposal, because it is the one thing you have control over (that is, unless you let it control you, as is the case with most unconscious beings). We suffer from mechanistic interpretations of the world and act out of addictive behavior. It’s not just about the collapse of the petroleum economy or the disintegration of the finance pyramid, but the implosion of the guiding paradigm of Western civilization. If you think the global elites have a grip on the situation, you are very wrong, because grip is the opposite of what we need. We are badly in need of an expansion of consciousness, and again, it is something you have access to: given an average baseline mental state, no amount of economic despair will prevent your mind from functioning as evolution intended.
Still, Marx was right when he argued that material conditions produce consciousness (we make history but not in the environment of our choosing). Let’s not lose site of the fact that hunger and withdrawal can lead to desperation and confusion, while at the same time acknowledging that if you do have food in your stomach and a roof over your head, be thankful and continue to work on the big picture in little ways, both internally and externally.
George Bush Sr. once said that the American way of life is not negotiable. This kind of mentality will not handle the disturbance of crashing markets very well. That’s why Americans, who are accustomed to a certain lifestyle, should reconsider what it means to be “wealthy.” Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, argues that “abundance” is the wrong material goal, both personally and socially. She says it’s better to be “sufficient.” I find this an aspiration that is in keeping with the justice and equity equation of ecological sustainability. It’s in line with Gandhi’s notion that the world has enough for our needs, but not for our greed. Sufficiency suggests that we live within our means, that we only consume that which is available in real time. The ecologically disembedded financial system has brought the world economy to its knees, reminding us that we have to stop borrowing against the planet’s resource bank through our extraction of ancient solar energy, and return to using the solar energy that is available to us on a daily basis, such as from local agriculture and our labor. This is how our ancestors lived, and this is how the surviving humans of this age will carry on. Labor, especially with our hands, has been a dirty word since antiquity. It’s time to reintroduce craft (work with our hands) as an asset and value. As such, DIY may be one of the best cultural attributes that Americans have for surviving this phase. But let’s unify the “handiness” of DIY with spirituality as well. To paraphrase a Sufi saying, talk to God but tether your camel.
Sufficiency is a spiritual issue; a sufficient consciousness is in a state of gratitude. Many of us are blaming the capitalist bankers and system for the demise of our society, but haven’t we as consumers also collectively bought into the hallucinatory orgy of the market? How many of us have harbored secret fantasies to be like the crazy guy in the infomercials with his yachts, beautiful women, and real estate Ponzi schemes? How many of my deepest spiritual allies have bought into those sleazy pyramid schemes or network marketing plots to sell new age happiness that turn friendships into marketing opportunities? Like the ideology of the capitalist system, are we always aspiring to a better, utopian future rather than being grateful for what we have?
I once participated in a “prosperity group,” which was a weekly gathering of friends (mostly folks from my yoga class) who wanted to read a “channeled” book, Creating Money, and to do the chapter exercises together (it’s a great book, by the way). I realized rather quickly that most people in the group would never transcend their state of “poverty,” because they were mentally impoverished. That is, they believed that their lives lacked sufficient resources in that moment; they would always be trapped on the treadmill of negative thinking about their present state of being, postponing happiness to the future. I don’t mean this in The Secret kind of way, in which positive thinking is the panacea for all of life’s inner conflicts, but in the sense that we are constantly projecting into the world like a waking dream the innermost challenges at the core of our being. We relentlessly seek healing, and oftentimes we externalize from our inner depths that which cannot be articulated by the egocentric (and protective) mind. Consider how we attract substitutes for our parental figures in both our work and romantic relationships. Is money any different? Maybe some would consider Secrets of the Millionaire Mind a silly and exploitative airport self-help book, but I believe T. Harv Eker is onto something when he can detect whether or not someone has the capacity for “wealth.” “We’ve confused attention with love,” he argues. Joseph Jaworski in Synchronicity puts the problem this way: we mistake “having” with “being.” Are we always putting the cart before the horse?
Again, returning to the metaphor of the glass of water with salt, can we really contain our true desires, or more to the point, our self-destructive thoughts? It’s important to distinguish desire—something Buddhists say inevitably leads to suffering—from nourishment. Along these lines, after closely reading Creating Money I discovered something quite useful. The book asks us to imagine what our life would be like if we suddenly received a million dollars (or any large lump sum)—not to visualize the material goods we would accumulate, but to focus on the feeling. What emotion or sensation would it be? What state of consciousness am I aspiring to? At the time I was a struggling freelance writer, so my simple goal was that I wanted to be able to write without the stress of having to query editors and to pen BS articles to pay the rent. The exercise forced me to deconstruct my yearning and to discover why I wanted to write in the first place. I realized that it was because it allowed me to connect with a higher, creative force than what I normally experience in the routines of daily life; that I like to solve puzzles and explore ideas; and that I love to lose myself in the process of discovery. To put it in more intangible, esoteric terms, writing allows me to connect with the cosmos, which is this expansive architecture of creativity I keep alluding to. By the end of Creating Money’s visualization I learned something very important: I didn’t need a million dollars to achieve my wish. All I had to do was to sit down and write. Problem solved. The money would come later. Or not. But at least I would be happy doing what I love.
In retrospect, I was probably also grasping for something precious that we adults tend to lose when we “grow up.” For a countercultural type like myself it will probably sound funny to say that my most precious moments in childhood involved building model airplanes and listening to Dodgers baseball games on the radio. In many ways we have not integrated these childhood experiences of exploration into our adult lives because we suffer from so much pressure, either from the material economy itself (let us remember that the recent stock market and financial crisis was not news to most of us who have been two paychecks from homelessness most of our lives), or from our wounded psyches still trying to prove our worth to disapproving parents. When I write, I feel like that kid solving problems while roaming a dream world.
All of this has to be put into some context. I’m well aware that everything I believe and say is benefited by my “cultural capital.” That is, I’m the product of an investment of both my family and society in terms of education and opportunity. I’m self-conscious that what I say reeks of privilege. I have lived in a relatively affluent capitalist setting in which these experiences of inner exploration are permitted and encouraged. Still, I think it’s OK to talk about achieving happiness within the realm of my given reality, even though I empathize with the person running from rockets and take a certain responsibility for being part of the problem (as my taxes paid for the missiles being fired at innocent civilians who live in the periphery of our walled electronic castle). In my world travels, I’ve been lucky to do so from the vantage of exploration and personal growth rather than as a migrant worker. But in the process I have encountered economically disadvantaged people who still maintain positive feelings about their reality because they have strong relationships with their community, family, and nature. Many have not been spiritually colonized by Western ideology. For example, I recall a story I heard while living with a Hopi family. They reminisced about a time when government officials had come to tell them they were poor and that they needed help. In recalling the story, they laughed about the reaction of government agents when they said no thanks. To this day there is a brand new tractor sitting in the yard that was given to the family by well-meaning German philanthropists. It remains unused, and will do little good when the oil dries up, anyway. Many Hopi still plant corn with a stick and finger, and can harvest with the desert’s morning dew. There is something highly advanced about that kind of simplicity.
The truth is that we all operate from the means that are available us. I just want to give thanks that I have lived a “sufficient” life and I hope that I can share whatever wisdom this life has afforded me. As it stands, by blogging I write for fun and generosity. I am fulfilled by the reciprocal relationship that media and communications of the Web 2.0 offer. Meanwhile, I can make money for my “services,” which is teaching. For those of us with the means, the internet uniquely positions us to engage in service leadership, which means we help solve each other’s problems. After all, we are just on loan to each other. In the midst of this richly unfolding economic crisis we can discover how the power of flower and song will sustain anyone with an alternate vision of our place in the world.