The Next Chapter: Evolution of Commerce, Dialectic of Politics, and Pathways to Planetary Revolution
Rough Transcript...
And What I was really proud of for this particular piece is the simplicity and my willingness to just, it's okay if it's really just one brush stroke and being okay with that has supposed to trying to do way too much with it and there was a strong subterranean theme in this particular painting as I was, I sort of sat there with the paint watching it dry, aligned gravity just sculpt the shape of the drop, so that drop those two drops, you see actually kinda’ stick out.
So I bring up this painting just to show that any thought that we do, it's always a working progress and anything that we create it's a combination of a certain journey but at the same time it’s just the start of a totally new chapter. Well…
So my topic is gonna be about commerce and consciousness and how these two things have evolved together to reach where we are today in the present moment.
So the first section is called "The Road To Now", so I see consciousness and commerce as a solar and lunar dialectic. You know one is at the center and the other seems to be around it, and I feel like they swapped places actually, it's not just one or the other. Is commerce the body of consciousness? or is consciousness the body of Commerce? And I don't think it's one or the other, I think it's both of them at different times. You know, if you step out a bit and look at the philosophical tradition this question comes down to...
Does consciousness create institutions? which is a very Hegelian perspective. Or do institutions create consciousness? Which is the whole marks sort of vision of how history works.
And I think connecting to PCC thinkers, psyche, and cosmos which is the title of Rick’s book. To me also captures those two fundamental forces which have to be thought about you can be too much on one side or the other or at least that's what I personally feel.
So let's take a brief walk through history, these are different faces of consciousness, we have the primal, archaic, axial, modern and post: modern. And I'm gonna compare those to barter, commodities, coinage, credit, and reserve. These are the different major commercial paradigms that have worked in concert with the evolution consciousness.
So let's look at primal and barter, so the primal era starts with homo sapiens emergence about 200,000 years ago and you can call that a paleolithic era that's you know one way that people talk about it. And if you think in terms of Rick Tarnas's diagram of consciousness, he'll show how the numinous realm is diluted in the primal era because it pervades all things, you know. Everything has significance and meaning. But if you look at the type of a commerce that was there it was barter, so the transaction format is very concentrated because each transaction is determined by the individual in the moment, so that's what the locust of power resides.
If you look at the archaic era and commodities, archaic era can roughly said to be started with the admin of farming about 10,000 years ago or structure farming. And this encapsulates not perfect but roughly the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras. If you look at consciousness, the numinous realm this time is concentrated in the political leadership, right? If you are the king or the prince or the monarch, then you are believed to have divine served power over the rest of society. It's concentrated in a political rulers but the transaction format is diluted because it's commodities like salt or golds or wheat or cattle. And it's a general sort of understanding that this it what we consider to be valued.
We go to the axial era which starts with the axial profits like Confucius and Buddha and many others around the world. Around 800 BC, that's just the roughly times that were looking at, that covers through the bronze, iron and classical era, right this paradigm on the slide. So in this time period, I'm gonna argue that the numinous realm is diluted because anybody is able to access it, right? You don't have to be a king to have access to God if you follow a path, you can access it and it can be distributed each person is able to access it. I'm gonna argue that the transaction format was concentrated because of the political ruler was choosing the currency, no longer is okay to just have a shell or bar of gold you have to have a coin that stands with a certain rulers, model or whatever it might be.
Then we move to the modern era, which takes us from around the Renaissance period, around the 14th century and this is medieval and renaissance era, the numinous realm is concentrated. This is like enlightenment thinking where the human being is at the center of everything nothing else has meaning, only the human has divinity at all. I'm gonna argue that the transaction format was diluted because the major innovation this time was credit, right? so if you think about credit card today is a result of that kind of thinking where you have financing on writing sort of determined of the different banks. And you know, it was up to different banks to determine whether you were credit, whether you're not. You know, if you're trying to sail the ship from Spain to America, is this a captain who's done it or what the pedigree or whatever it might be, right?
So now we look at the Post Modern Era starting with the Copernican Revolution, that's kind of the era that were in right now, I think people are shifting from Modern to Post-Modern, someone like PCC trying to move beyond the Post Modern. And this is the Colonial Industrial and Digital Paradigms or Industrial Paradigms, and the Numinous Realm here is diluted it's everywhere and nowhere, right? Money is everything to some people, you know power is everything to some people. Everyone has their own kind of religion, it could be a movie star. So it's everywhere and it's nowhere, I'm gonna argue that the transaction format is extremely concentrated in American Fiat, which is the US reserve currency, which the entire world system is kind of base on what the American Central Bank determines and it's completely arbitrary actually.
So I'm sort of bringing up this left-right dialectic but also arguing that it's a spiral that through history is winding tighter and tighter so it's not just left-right - left-right but it's a spiral. And this diagram from Shaun Kelly's Coming Home where he's showing conservative and liberal movements throughout history and how they're kind of tightening up into our era.
Alright, so that's the end of the first section and here you'll see just to steam of things and progress, right' it's not perfect the first moment so that very first painting I had a collecture in New York expressing interest and supporting my practice. And they wanted to commission of peace just like that except three four times larger. Which to me was a bit tricky because that first painting had shown up at the end of Anela's D-Trip. You know, towards the tail end of it and I wasn't fully sure how I had created it, so there was, you know I wasn't sure how I exactly had gotten that drip in that way, so I had to create a lot of different mock-ups and you can see here like one of the paintings I tried to do where I was trying to get some of that dynamic but there's no drip, I just couldn't know where they figured out, how do you create that drip so took awhile to get that.
So it takes us to now, where we today in terms of these questions, we can think about an Integral Era, that we are, were trying to figure out what was that about, what was that mean, how can you implement these. And I look at this diagram as a way of just two different sides trying to always reconnect, reconnect, reconnect and continuously moving forward.
So I think economy is the residue of activity and vice versa, it's not just one way or the other, you know' however you act that's what economist try to describe and captures, so you can be doing whatever it is and that's basically the economy.
So questions are: What should I do? What am I allowed to do? How much I receive from what I'm doing? Who's responsible for my retirement? How much economic variability in terms of like net worth variability is ethical. Like what's the right thing, like if you work much harder or have more talent, should you have that much more money or not? And how much is sustainable, so ethical and sustainable are. I don't think always exactly congruent.
Socialism and Capitalism, I think in some ways can be described as dilution vs. the concentration of economic responsibility. So in socialism, the state manages economic affairs, right? it's like, it's up to the state to determine what should be done? how much of it should be done? and how much if somebody received for it? And this is not like I'm not being so specific but in a very general sense where is capitalism where each individual manages their own economic affairs right? it's up to you to just have what you wanna do, how hard you're gonna work and that's one way that I see this discussion about, where should be the responsibility be? Of an economic life, what feature should the platform of government provide? So should everybody in this room, for example, be learning how to create products or making them, marketing them, either weighting them, doing personal budgeting and accounting and investing for your retirement and for your future, right? Should everybody be learning these things? or should that just be integrated into the government platform? I think that's a question, a meaningful question. That the answer is not always clear. I see even the Democratic and Republican debate, right? so I'm not American but I was spent a fair amount of time in this country and just looking at the discussion happening. And I think that the Democratic position is on the dignity if giving each person's security, right? That's the dignity, that's the nobility of the Democratic or Liberal perspective that each person deserves to have their food, you know, when they have the health care, they have some kind of job, right? versus the dignity of the republic inside which I think can be difficult sometimes in a very progressive community is ours to see the nobility of the republic inside, is the dignity of giving each person the responsibility, that you know what? you've been put here just as anybody else and you can tie up your shoelaces and try to make it, right? I'm not saying one is better that the other but this is just what I've observed.
So which one supports greater individuation? That's a question, which is epically superior and which one is economically efficient, these are all open questions.
I think the shadow of capitalism is people left behind economically, right' people can just be like... you're not relevant, you're not productive, and go and die or do whatever, just get out of my area.
There's unchecked ecological appropriation. There's passing the buck on externalities. There are mechanistic tendencies from the Newtonian-Cartesian worldview, so these are holdovers. There are monopolies. There's minimal focus on holistic wellbeing, so everyone is just looking at how productive and how efficient something is. And it's difficult to prioritize individuation that's unrelated to financial growth. So if you're a young bohemian person and your parents might pressure you into a certain career path, because they don't perceive the value of individuating in a way that's not connected to financial reward.
So how does capitalism benefit a society? I think the private owner should procreate of destruction is a really big thing that people don't really think about, right? so In the past, you have a certain way of doing things and if you wanted to change that way, you had to... Army had to come and destroy the city and remove the leader and put a new leader. Now you can break down civilization to different ecologies that can be overcome by competition and improve. And I think that's one of the good things about capitalism compare to the past.
There's a dynamic hierarchy so nothing is forever, right? if you know, you have people who become very wealthy within one lifetime, you have families who lose their wealth as well, right to that?
There's a lot of shifting that happens, it's a non-political arena for aggression. So you have this instinct there is an archetype to wanna, dominate to compete and you know, I think capitalism and commerce gives one avenue for this part of human nature to be express, in a way that's not so damaging for everybody else.
There's minimal restriction on how an individual wants to contribute to society. So no one is gonna tell you what you can or cannot do, it's up to you, you know... you're free to say, this is what I am, this is what I love, let me go and do it, and let me spend my whole life for finding this practice.
There's a diversity of psychological priorities so it's not just one group of people deciding gardens are important, swimming pools are not, right? It's more distributed.
There's efficient orchestration of complex supply chains in a global economy, and that is something that communism feel horribly at, they could just not figure out how many jeans should I make, right? how many jeans? what style? what cut? where the source the materials from?
There's a distributed process optimization, so capitalistic society is getting better all the time, in many different parts simultaneously as suppose to, some induration of communism where you know, they had to come up 10-year plan, it's just more rigid.
And I'm gonna say that the powerful economic base is the foundation of military success, so the more money you have, the more you're able to maintain a force, replenish a force, manufacture these force and research stronger ways. And if we look at world war II and the civil war and many wars, I'm sure if, which I haven't done extensive research, but this is a starting point of my thought process, that a strong economic base eventually leads to military success.
And military power ensures cultural security and propagation, right? So if you don't have a strong subterranean structure to contains your culture. There's a high chance that it might get absorbed into another entity.15:45
Alright, so that brings us to of the third section and here is a more advanced prototype I have made for this collector, I mean it's still a prototype and I added a few elements, but you can see that after a lot of experimentation, I refigured out how to get that sweep and you know, there's like a drip now that showing off and a few different kinds of drips and this is I think two and a half times larger than the first painting you saw. So I had to actually go into a home supplies stores and get cleaning. Like the stuff use to clean the floors and use those as brushes trying to capture the effect that I was looking for.
So now we look at the next chapter or just some thoughts on what I imagine could happen next. So I think about after the carbon crisis, right? obviously, there's a major problem happening today, the force being cut down. And global warming do not wanna minimize that at all, but I'm just thinking about, what happens after that, right? I think there's a lot of people who are working very hard and political and technological arena just solved that. So that's where I'm coming from, I'm just thinking about planet earth after the carbon crisis.
So what's the next big crisis? I imagine it to be alien contact after carbon, right? If we survived carbon crisis, alien contact is the next major subterranean event that I can imagine or just one of them that I can imagine. And these alien contact could be like, these people, right? these are like three fingers, they can't really carry too many things, and they are not very frightening cause they got ice cream on it's head, right? Or it could be a colonization event, right? and as someone who's grown up in two colonial countries, India and Singapore. I wouldn't say that it's impossible out of the realm of impossible that this could be at some point in time, in the future, a possibility.
So I used that as just a reminder that it's really important to not get too complacent as a civilization that we.. at the end, I don't think we wanna put our future completely in faith. And I think it's important to have structure, that's just my personal take on it. So if I look at civilization development guidelines, for the planet, I think these are 5 important areas:
Universal basic income
Meaningful narrative
Sustainable industry
Family choices
Weapons control
So I'm gonna go more deeply into these... so universal basic income, I see this as the air to breath, right? livelihood is impossible without income in a capitalist society, if you don't have money, you can't really do anything at all. Humans, many humans are not able to participate in the marketplace, as it stands today. In an age of robotics and a.i and renewables, I think market disruption will be massive. This is probably gonna happen in the next 2, 3 decades, but the same time the cost of living might go down dramatically because you have very cost effective energy and maybe a lot of systems that human used to be involved in are no longer needed. So potentially the cost of living goes down, so that's the double edge sword. I feel that income should be a basic right of every human if for choosing a capitalist model, which I'm not saying is the best but if we are that would be the case.
Meaningful narrative, I think if we become a whole earth civilization or you gonna start going to another planet which is also like in the next 2-3 decades. It's really important to have a lot of narrative power to build to sustain diversity without having that system break apart. So stories like many of the people in our program are developing, I think are extremely crucial for this civilization. So I wonder how can we foster and deepen meaningful participation in the universe? And what kind of stories unlock human motivation, courage, and sincerity?
Sustainable industry is crucial if we don't wanna destroy our planet. I'm gonna say that consumerism is one way that humanity creates and distributes its inputs and outputs. There's a lot of creativity involved even in the snuggie or whatever, right? There's a lot of real humans with real stories who connect with these things, but ecological destruction is unethical and myopic. It's foolish to just destroy the cell of you're living within for short term.
So how do we create a life-affirming, sustainable, participatory human base? I feel like technology is part of it, I feel like culture is part of it. But kind of what Isan Stance where saying about complete deep recycling, right? you create something and then you can reuse it for a long time with cheap energy, you can keep repurposing it. So what kind of material and processes allows to be creative while minimizing irreversible destruction?
Family choice, and education. So these feels little Orwellian but I do feel that universal basic income is impossible without some kind of population, management or conversation around that topic right? It's impossible to give everybody the same standard of living if you haven't the exponential amount of people. So I just wonder, it's a question, family should have the resources and education to support a high quality of life. And what is the best way to help family's make these decisions that's a tricky shadow, you know' like you don't wanna be like posterization at all or like one child policy like China. I don't know, I'm not saying it was right or wrong but I do feel if you gonna have UBI you cannot have any conversation around population size. And weapons control, right? So we have a tremendous destructive power that we've cultivated around nuclear weapons. We live in an era where weapons can destroy the entire planet, you know... really it could happen. It's in the realm of possibility. And what's the best way to promote safety while acknowledging the role of a complicit plate of the evolution, right? So we don't want people to just tear each other apart but complicit places are role and evolution. So that's just the question that comes to mind.
So what are ways that we can implement these ideals and I would not say that these are the only ideals, these are just some that I brought up and I wonder like a, or we can have more or there can be more, but this is just too way that I'm thinking, it's not like this is exactly it. So if you think about passive global mobilization of a certain ideology or culture or vision of how society should be there is a few options, I see virtual mobilization where you have a community that's not in the same place but they're connective through culture or a membership, it's easy to begin but it's hard create depth right? because you have people joining on websites and dropping out of websites.
The other choices to mobilize in multiple countries simultaneously and to do that, you're gonna be dealing with a lot of different political arenas, cultures, and infrastructure. So that's those are the pros and cons of that approach.
And if you're a mobilizing through a single nation then you become a nation actually. And you can be in forums like the United Nation and other international groups where you have an opportunity to talk at this higher level, rather, so that's just another option.
So I think about all of these and one example comes to mind is from a virtual community of physical countries, Israel. I'm not gonna say that Israel was just some website before it was country. Obviously, it's a culture that is thousand of years old. But the point is that, it was a distributed community and then they found the geographical place and then it became a physical entity that now has membership of United Nations.
In fact, over the past 50 years, they've been over 50 countries created. So it's not such new thing for a country to be created. You have countries that are well known Bangladesh, Jamaica, South Korea, United States is you know' 200 or so years old or whatever. But my main point here is that new countries are being created all the time. And I'm defining these countries as physical space back by military assets, that's in some in one way in looking at it, that's what a country is. And it's not say that own country is military, but often times they have an alliance with the United States or the USS or Russia. So that what keeps that physical space intact.
I was thinking about the GDP of different countries, right' so China is like 21 trillion dollars economy is largest in the world. Germany is around 4 trillion, South Africa is the 30th largest GDP in the world it's .7 trillion. And you look at number 40, Singapore is about half a trillion dollar economy, right' So that's a larger economy than Greece or New Zealand and Lebanon, right' just to give a sense that you can have a place like Singapore, which is actually just one city being more economically powerful or anchored, than many larger sized countries. It's been around for about 50 years, it has about major geographical blessing because the currency here but it's right at the tip of Malaysia so it's a great in between China and India. It's like a major trade shipping hub, but it's also have been really well managed because there's a lot of option where to have a port, right? So both of these have come in.
Now we look at global nations and cities GDP, right? So we look at Singapore with about half a trillion dollars size GDP, you look at Tokyo is one and a half a trillion dollars, would make Tokyo the 18th most powerful countries in the world, if you just look at Tokyo. Newyork is about 1.2 trillion and on the left and side you have different countries, right' you can see Australia is about 1 trillion dollar economy, right'
Also look at from a population perspective, Tokyo has about 40 million people, Canada has about 35 million people. So it's just this conversation around, cities versus countries. And how you can have a city that has just as much influence if not more than many well-known countries.
So I imagine one where to start a country, what would be the benefit? right' you would have an opportunity to reimagine the political social contract, you would have a chance to try out things that because of the United States, they reach to a certain point but it's that impasse. You have an opportunity to try out some of these ideas. You can have open immigration from war-torn regions who no other countries want to take them, you can say here's a place for you to come and to work and to live. I imagine kind of a third way, which they talk about in Europe. Where you have right wing economics which is very open and liberal at the same time with the very strong wealth first state. Those two together is what I imagine could be meaningful things to try. And I think citizenship should be connected with through in dialog with the means of production. I don't know exactly what that means, but I think being able to make a livelihood and being a citizen should somehow be connected.
Politics and business, it's not such a clear difference. Or it is a clear difference but they have a lot of things and similarity, where you have a way of revenue generation, you have a certain balance of power, you have a way where resources are allocated. Then you have an ability to evolve and you have a membership. So membership and a political body is total, where is in a business it's partial, right' you can be shopping at Target while as well shopping at Costco.
I see in the world already just a kind of gradient between private enterprise and government, where you have state-owned enterprises and you have social enterprises. These are organizations that are doing things like energy, roads, medicines, security, education, so it's already happening. This kind of blend between politics and business, what is the difference, really?
So I'm gonna fib it a little bit and just think about some people who have created a lot of money and apply it to developing civilization. Like a powerful person who are for a big inspiration for me is the Medici family, which play the very important role in the renaissance in just sort of funding a lot of important artists, over multiple generations. But you also have the Gates Foundation and what they're doing with you know' eradicating different diseases. Rockafeller eradicated hookworm diseases not by himself, of course, it was a work of a lot of scientists and medical professions, but he was a catalyst because he have that concentrated wealth.
So here's a project that I'm working at the moment, this is a campia' registered called Numinous Realm. You can see that the logo is pretty much inspired by gross basic _________ which I think a lot about business development theory connected with the death-rebirth mystery. And those two together, I have this idea right' it's not like this where I'm gonna do or this is what's happening but it's just an idea where I'm thinking of, diverting of percentage of profits to a global defense fund, right' so this entity is generating revenue from something that is doing, some amount of that global defense fund and that's invested into a diverse fight index fund. So that's growing at 7% a year, every dollar that you put in this growing at 7% average per year forever. And you can have a certain percentage of that directed towards, whatever goals of activism that you're interested it, right' wether it some of the ones I mentioned around UBI industry or whatever or adding other ones like universal education entrepreneurship training. The point is, it's a way of having sustained activism that's completely integrated between the revenue generation as well as the ideas and the implementation over long period of time.
So if you look at this idea, about over 100 years, right' if you're putting a dollar into this fund, for a hundred years, every year putting a dollar in. You have 7% stock market growth, you take 2% for inflation, you take half percent for administration, you donate 1% of the balance every year. By the year 2117, you would have put a 100 dollars into this fund, that's how much you would have put in from your pocket. The size of this fund now is $763. The first year, you donated 1 cent and the hundredth year you donated $7 and over $7.71. And over a hundred years, you've given almost $500 to a cause, to a group of causes. And if you look at these in terms of 500 years you would have put, so by the year of 2517 you would have put in $500 the size of your fund is now 300 million dollars and the hundredth year you gave $7.7 and then the 500th year you had 3 million dollars in a sustainable system that's gonna keep generating that cash for the next year as well. You have 3 million dollars to give to whatever it is that you think is important for civilization, over 500 years you've given around a hundred million dollars and that's $1 per year over an extended period of time, leveraging global growth.
So I just wanted to have a slide for the shadow, because I know I've talked about some pretty crazy things and some pretty big ideas. And I just wanna admit completely that this is not totally fully big, it's not just here saying that this is exactly what it should be. I acknowledged that there are deep flaws and probably a lot of misgivings that people have around some of the things that I've discussed. I wanna honor that, I just wanted to have a slide to honor that.
I think you know in conclusions, focused wealth can be a powerful catalyst social transformation, I don't believe contemporary capitalism is ideal. You know, I don't believe that it's the best thing that's ever made but my personal interest, the way I operate it. Is just to look at what is possible given with the available terrain?
You know, in summary. I hope to become a better business person. For various emotional, philosophical reason I I've had a very hard time. Going out in the market and just making money, it's been very hard for me as an undergrad, I studied a business school, but I had problems. I think learning philosophy, learning art has helped me reorient toward what commerce what actually means. And I hope to integrate that skill set and potential revenue generation with thoughtful philosophies worldviews and activities that will lead to this vibrant yet pragmatic future. Were not just trusting that everything will work out but we realize that we have to be competitive because I just wanna make sure that my kid's kid's kids are safe.
And here is the final painting, this was created for the collector, so it's gonna be ship in New York once I had back and this is about 3 feet by 2 feet it went through a lot prototypes to get that kind of shape, get that kind of drip, started using hair dryer because the physics of the paint changes when it's larger, so when using a hair dryer to dry it and adding a few different elements that I'm very influenced of different archetypes.
And here you see a just a bit of that process, so thta's my presentation, again' thank you so much for taking the time.