Cost-Benefit Analysis and Business Ethics

For my undergraduate thesis in economics, I chose to write about cost-benefit analysis and its discontents. Cost-benefit analysis, or CBA, refers to any process whereby the monetary costs of pursuing some particular course of action are weighed against the monetary benefits in order to decide whether that course of action is "worth" pursuing. In my thesis I argued that, for one thing, many public goods such as clean air and safe working environments are not monetizable and that to value these things in terms of money is unjustifiable, since the value of not being killed on the job or being able to breathe the air is more than just monetary. Not everyone agrees with the assertion that not all things can be valued in terms of money. In fact, most of the important policy makers in this country would seem to disagree. I'll leave aside that aspect of CBA though, and focus on a less controviersial application of cost-benefit accounting.

So let's say we have a firm. Like all firms, the management in dedicated to maximizing share-holder value, which translates as maximizing revenue and profits. Now, let's say that a regulation is passed requiring the firm to reduce it's toxic waste output, since the pollution is causing cancer and birth-defects in a nearby town. The question for the firm is whether or not to comply with the regulation. Both complying and not complying might entail monetary costs and minimizing these costs is the job of the CBA analyst.

The costs of complying with the reg might include things like new equipment to filter discharge and increased labor costs to install and maintain the filters. The costs of not complying with the reg would include fines from the regulatory agency and lawsuits and/or settlements with injured residents. Cost-benefit analysis tells us that if the costs of complying are more than the expected cost of non-compliance, then we should ignore the regulation. If, on the other hand, the expected costs of fines and lawsuits outweigh the costs of new equipment, etc., then the firm should go ahead and comply.

While the costs of compliance are fairly well known and can pretty much be taken for granted, the actual cost of non-compliance is not so clear. There may be a fine associated with exceeding pollution limits, but that number must be adjusted to account for the possibility of violations going unnoticed. Even a large fine will not be much of a deterrent if the chance of getting caught is low. The same goes for lawsuits against the company. An expected payment to harmed individuals can be multiplied by the probability of any individual actually suing and having a court find in their favor. So the basic calculation that the firm performs ends up looking something like this:

If F(pc) + L(ps)(pj) < C then do not comply.

If F(pc) + L(ps)(pj) > C then comply.

where F is the fine for noncompliance, pc the probability of getting caught, L the expected lawsuit costs, ps the probability of someone suing, pj the probability of an unfavorable ruling, and C is the cost of complying with the regulation).*, **

Or, put another way, if C-[F(pc)+L(ps)(pj)] > 0, then crime does pay and the firm will purposefully violate the regulation. That is, of course, so long as they are acting to maximize revenue and reduce production costs.

The firm, by itself, will probably not be able to much affect C, but it could take definite action to alter the values pc and pj. For instance, a firm might lobby in favor of bills to reduce the number of regulators or to reduce the funding of regulatory agencies. A firm would also want to lobby for self-reporting laws that limit or erase a company's liability if they turn themselves in. This is almost a best case scenario for the firm. It is then free to violate the regulations and, when it seems likely that charges are about to be filed, report the violations themselves and avoid some or all of the fine(!). Altering pj would include things like trying to make sure friendly judges get elected in areas where cases are likely to be heard, and to have cases moved if the local courts are unfriendly.

Anything that can be done by the firm to minimize pc and pj is likely to be money well-spent, since even a small change in either one could drastically alter the cost-benefit analysis. The ethical CEO, of course, is obliged to maximize share-holder value and it would therefore be unethical for the CEO to not pursue whatever tactics, so long as they don't cut into profits, that s/he thinks likely will reduce the left-hand side of our first two equations. Not to do so would be to increase the firm's overall costs which would ultimately cut into the profit-margin and dividends of share-holders. And besides, if your firm is not doing it, some other firm probably is and will be able to capture market-share from you by exploiting their better ability to economically avoid regulation. This is the market's way of punishing unethical behavior.

This is not to suggest, however, that firms might actually do anything illegal, or that some CEOs might be so callous as to purposefully violate the law if it seems profitable to do so. It is not my intent to suggest that some savvy businessperson might encourage legislation that would make it easier for persons like him/herself to disregard the law of the land. Far be it from me!

But it is the case that this is what cost-benefit analysis and contemporary business ethics recommend, and it may well explain why so many large American corporations commonly ignore laws and regulations. Sometimes it pays to break the law, even if you do get caught. And if it pays (your stockholders), says business ethics, then you have every right, even a responsibility, to do it.

*The calculation is, of course, somewhat more complex than I'm presenting here; namely there being more variables on the left-hand sides of the inequalities, but the underlying logic is the same, regardless.

** Another aspect that could be added to the C sides of the inequalities would be the forgone benefits that would have resulted from non-compliance.  For instance, a non-complying firm might be able to sell its goods cheaper than competitors who are complying with the regulation, since noncomplying firm's costs will be less.  This will likely steal away some of the competition's customer base which could prove a long-term benefit, even if the firm eventually has to comply and raise prices.  

Economic Scare Tactics and the Social Security Crisis

In light of the recent banking bailout by the Federal Reserve, to the tune of 7.7 trillion dollars or so, one thing, at least, should be perfectly clear. The Federal Reserve has as much money as it wants to have. All of the funding for the Fed's numerous bailout "facilities," which kept banks foreign and domestic solvent through the 2008 credit crunch and beyond, came not from increased taxation or borrowing, the two ways we generally think of governments (and government institutions) paying for things. The money the Fed was handing out to banks worldwide came not from any normal funding source but, as Ben Bernake put it in testimony before Congress, through the simple expedient of "keystrokes." The Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars and pumped them into the banking system by, literally, typing some numbers into a computer.

In what follows, I shall refer to the above as Point One: the Federal Reserve can create money from nothing and distribute it to whomever it pleases.

Now, we come to the scare tactics. The tactics I will refer to are a recurring trope in political debate, and there are many instances I could point to on a near daily basis. I will focus, in the interests of brevity, on just one here: the rhetoric surrounding the Social Security Trust Fund.

We are told almost continually by our politicians and the pundits on TV that the Social Security Trust Fund is insolvent, that it's going broke, that it will run out of money in 15, maybe 20 years...maybe sooner. For the sake of argument, let's assume that it runs out of money tomorrow. Let's assume that the Social Security fund balance shows $0.00 come the first of the month when the next round of checks are set to be mailed out to SSI recipients. Now let's assume that Treasury sends the checks out anyway. What would happen?

Well, the people who got their SSI check last month would get it again this month and, just like every other month, take it to the bank and deposit or cash it. The banks, of course, will take the Treasury's check and credit the amount to the depositors account. The depositor will then start spending it or leave it in the account for future use. In either case, the bank will send Treasury's check to the Federal Reserve which will then credit the bank's account at the Fed with that same amount. Now some may argue that the Fed may refuse to accept the Treasury's check and credit the bank, if the SS Trust Fund is empty. Perhaps, but this would be a purely political decision, and in no way a required one by the Fed.

Refer to Point One. There is nothing stopping the Fed from simply adding the necessary amount of funds to the SS Trust Fund to cover the next round of checks, and then transferring those funds to the banks' accounts, using nothing more complex than keystrokes. Just as the Fed created money for the banking interests, it could easily create money for the common interest. There is nothing to stop the Fed from continuing to honor Social Security checks presented to it, regardless of the trust fund, no financial constraint at all.

But wait, won't creating money like this be adding to the amount of it in circulation and thus lead to devaluation of the dollar and price inflation, which everyone knows is the worst possible thing that could happen? The answer, as is often the case in economics, is: it depends.

But before tackling that issue, I would like to point out that the question is not can we keep making Social Security payments after the trust fund runs out, but whether or not doing so would be a good idea. This is not what we hear coming from either side of the aisle though, in the present discourse surrounding Social Security. We are told, misleadingly, that it is "going broke." That claim, though it may be earnestly believed by some of those proclaiming it, amounts to nothing more than an empty scare tactic. The lesson that we should have gotten from the bailouts is that the Fed can decide what goes broke and what doesn't, and that's just as true for the Social Security Trust fund as it is for Goldman Sachs or Lehman.

Now, on to the question of inflation. To really illustrate what I'm saying, let us not only assume that the Treasury has continued to send out Social Security checks after the trust fund balance has reached zero and that the Fed has continued to honor those checks, but let us also assume that, realizing that the trust fund no longer needs to be funded by taxpayers, the Government stops collecting Social Security taxes. According to the economic punditocracy, this should be even more inflationary. Not only is there more money available due to the Fed's creation of new money to cover SSI checks, now there is also additional money available to consumers in the form of higher paychecks due to reduced taxes. So, would this scenario lead to inflation? The answer, of course, is it depends.

Inflation occurs when all of the goods and services an economy produces are being purchased and there is still money available that people want to spend. In such a situation, prices are bid up as consumers are willing to offer more money for (relatively) scarce goods and services. If the output of the economy is growing so that every year there are more goods and services available than the year before, then the supply of money must be increasing at an even faster rate for inflation to occur.

If, however, we find ourselves, like today, in a situation in which our economy has goods and services that are not being bought and with resources that are under- or un-utilized, then an increasing supply of money will not create inflation. The new money will only allow the market to clear, in the sense of all goods and services being able to find someone with the finances and willingness to purchase them at current prices.

It might also be the case that even in the face of an increasing supply of money, an economy might still not be able to sell it's entire produce. In that case producers might be forced to lower prices to clear inventories and/or scale back production to match the new lower level of demand.

So, whether or not actions like funding Social Security by simply "creating" the money to do so, will end up being inflationary, has mostly to do with the state of the economy. An increasing (relative) supply of money in an economy where everyone who wants a job has one, where people have the amount of work they desire, and where demand is sufficient to purchase economic output, will create inflation as more and more money chases around the same number of goods and services, driving up prices. But this is a scenario far removed from the one we find ourselves in today, with high unemployment, even higher underemployment and skill-mismatch, and massive amounts of idle productive equipment, vacant factories and mills, and millions of vacant homes. Without any increase in the money supply, in this scenario we would expect prices to decrease not increase, as too many goods and too much labor chase around too little money, driving prices down and leading to deflation, not inflation. Money creation and "unfunded" government spending might offset this dynamic, or stop it altogether, but fears about inflation seem rather out of place at the moment.

But again, the debate we hear over Social Security revolves not around inflationary concerns, but over a fictional, politically created, solvency issue. In the brave new world of modern central banking, there are no solvency issues that cannot be addressed with a few keystrokes, as the Federal Reserve demonstrated so ably during the financial crisis. The question is who should these keystrokes be used to benefit? Right now there's nothing stopping Congress from directing the Federal Reserve to honor all SSI checks, regardless of the balance in the trust fund account, thus solving the Social Security "crisis" without cutting benefits or increasing taxes, yet we are never told this by our political "representatives." Year after year we are fed the same lines of B.S. about how Social Security will go broke unless we cut benefits and raise the retirement age again, or else increase all our taxes to pay for those spoiled, entitlement-grubbing seniors.

But the Federal Reserve tipped it's hand too much when it created 7.7 trillion dollars out of nothing. The cat is out of the bag and we should all now be well aware that Ben Bernake can create money from keystrokes. There is nothing new in this power, just in most people's awareness of it. The question is, will we be content to let the Federal Reserve Chairman be the one who gets to decide how to use this power, or will the people of the United States actually seek to gain control over the currency of the United States? Will we demand that those seeking to represent us distinguish between economic necessity and political policy, or will we continue to be cowed by their economic scare tactics?

A Love Letter to Wells Fargo (an Immodest Proposal)

My Dearest Wells Fargo,

There is something I have to admit to you. It's a little embarrassing and I hope you won't think I'm a big dork after I tell you this. Wells Fargo, I think I love you.

I've been obsessed with you for quite awhile now. I've scoured your facebook page and your website, stared longingly into your big, beautiful plate-glass windows and dreamed of your stagecoach sweeping us both away to some distant tropical isle, perhaps the Cayman Islands where 19 of your foreign subsidiaries are located. I even looked up your by-laws on the internet (I know, that stuff is personal and I probably shouldn't have, but like I said, I'm obsessed...I can't help it).

I have to admit, some of my obsession has to do with your money. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a gold-digger or anything, but how could I not be impressed when I saw that, despite making $37 billion in profits in 2009 and 2010, you still managed to finagle a $2.5 billion tax refund! Rich and clever too, how could I not be impressed? And then, after taking over $166 billion in bail-out money from Congress and the Federal Reserve, you still had the nerve to pay your CEO $5.6 million in cash and $13 million in stock! You've obviously got some huge balls to go along with that giant wad you're sitting on. Be still my heart!

Now, I know there's been a lot of talk about how you've been screwing people left and right (taxpayers, your customers) but I don't believe a word of it. Such a distinguished and upstanding corporation like yourself (not to mention handsome) couldn't possibly be involved in such impropriety. And that's why I'm going to just go ahead and do it...Wells Fargo, I'm asking you to marry me!

After all, you're 160 years old, don't you think it's time you finally settled down? Granted, I'm quite a bit younger, but who says a May-December romance can't work? Just look at Ashton and Demi or Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I know what you're probably thinking, "Occupy Bozeman isn't even a corporate person, how can we possibly get married?" Well, I'm filing my articles of incorporation on Tuesday and paying extra to have the Secretary of State expedite them, so no worries! Soon I'll be a corporate-person just like you and then we can get corporate-married! I can hardly wait!

I look forward to hearing your response. We've had our differences in the past, but you know what they say: "opposites attract!" I can almost hear the Justice of the Peace now, pronouncing us "Corporate Husband and Limited-Liability Wife." What a blissful day it shall be!

Love and Kisses,

Occupy Bozeman

Stories We Tell Ourselves

One widely known, brief Hasidic tale ends with a catechetical savor as told by Elie Wiesel: "God made man because he loves stories." But who loves stories? Man? If so, why is that a sufficient reason for God to make him? Or is it God who loves stories? If so, did He create man in order to have someone to tell Him stories, or is man himself God's story?

                   ~Theodore M. Hesburg, from the introduction to Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle Against Melancholy

The invention of the steam engine produced a revolution, not merely in industrial techniques, but also and much more significantly in philosophy.  Because machines could be made progressively more and more efficient, western man came to believe that men and societies would automatically register a corresponding moral and spiritual improvement.   Attention and allegiance came to be paid, not to Eternity, but to the Utopian future.  External circumstances came to be regarded as more important than states of mind about external circumstances, and the end of human life was held to be action, with contemplation as a means to that end.  These false and, historically, aberrant and heretical doctrines are now systematically taught in our schools and repeated, day in, day out, by those anonymous writers of advertising copy who, more than any other teachers, provide European and American adults with their current philosophy of life.   And so effective has been the propaganda that even professing Christians accept the heresy unquestioningly and are quite unconscious of its complete incompatibility with their own or anybody else's religion.

          ~Aldous Huxley, from the introduction to The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood

Stories are important. Whether we realize it or not, we all tell ourselves stories. We tell ourselves stories about the world and how it works, about our lives and what we are doing with them. We tell ourselves stories in order to explain to ourselves and to make intelligible the seemingly random and chaotic nature of the cosmos in which we exist. We tell ourselves stories to give ourselves the strength to go on when all our strength is gone. Without stories we are lost, adrift.

There was a time in human history when most of us received the stories around which we built our lives from religion. We told ourselves stories of Gods and Goddesses and their relations with humanity. We told ourselves stories of Heaven and Hell, of Karma and Rebirth and of final escape from the wheel of becoming. We told ourselves stories of a benevolent Deity watching over us, noting down our triumphs and our failures of spirit.

But at some point these stories began to lose their power over us. The old stories began to seem irrelevant at best, detrimental at worst. We began to reject the stories of our forebears; but stories are important. We could not live without them and so, without even realizing it, we began to create new stories, though we were unaware that stories were what we were creating.

We gave to these new stories the name of Science. We found that these stories had power, that we could use them to remake our world, to explain it to us in ways that seemed true in a manner that the old stories did not. For a time they existed together, the old stories and the new (as they still do, to some extent), but eventually the new stories of the scientists gained the upper hand, and more and more they came to replace the old stories of the priests and the saints. The intelligent among us, it came to be believed, placed no credence in the old stories and subscribed only to the new, to the scientific story of our world.

This overthrowing of the old stories of religion by the new stories of science created a spiritual crisis in the heart of humanity, a crisis from which we have not yet emerged. What we failed to recognize was that the stories were not describing the same things, that they were descriptions of different territories, of different worlds, and that in rejecting the stories of religion and replacing them with the stories of science we had lost a truth that could find no means of expression in the new narrative. At first, this loss was not apparent. In the beginning the new stories concerned only the operation of the natural world, and while there was a de-sacrelizing of the material universe, "God's Law" being replaced by "Natural Law," the miraculous by the mechanical, it seemed but a small matter and more than compensated for by the new-found control over our existence that resulted from this usurpation. But soon the enthusiasm for new stories sought other environments, other landscapes in which to find expression.

Perhaps the most harmful were the new stories that emerged concerning the organization of human societies and the goal and purpose of individual human lives. The story-tellers who called themselves economists rejected the stories of religion that told us to be charitable and forgiving and replaced them with stories that urged each person to care only for themselves, to think only of their own benefit. The story-tellers who were called advertisers rejected the stories of human fulfillment through self-abnegation and universal good-will and replaced them with stories of fulfillment through the purchase and consumption of many unnecessary products. These stories, we were told, were superior to the old religious ones, in the same way that the scientific stories were superior to the religious in describing the operation of the natural world. Enthralled by the novelty, many of us paid heed.

However, it should be clear to us now that the stories about society and about human life provided us by our new "scientific" story-tellers have not lived up to their promises. We have built our lives and our communities around them, have had them endlessly recited to us, and have recited them to ourselves and to our children. We have given our lives over to them and we have found them wanting. These stories of economics and of consumerism, unlike the old stories of religion which they have replaced, have no end to them; they are stories empty of meaning and import; they have created entire generations of spiritual paupers.

The new story goes like this: try to obtain as much money as you can for as little work as possible; use this money to buy many things for yourself; repeat this process until you die. The story is simply, "he who dies with the most toys wins." But this story does not ennoble us, does not open to us our higher potentialities. This story tells us that we are nothing but empty stomachs, no more than hungry ghosts. But humanity does not live by bread alone and cannot find fulfillment in a new car or television set, or in second house or a dress or a dishwasher. We require more, but the stories we now live by have no more to offer.

The story of religion, that we need desperately to remember, to incorporate into our lives, is this: do whatever work comes to hand, for all work is necessary; use the money you get from this work to care for as many of your fellow creatures as you can, for all are children of one family; do your best to turn yourself into a being of pure Love, for that is the highest that a human being can attain. This is a story with meaning, an ennobling story, and a story that needs to be told over and over again.

Stories are important; we know ourselves and our world only through the stories that we tell. The tales that modern society has provided us have shown themselves empty. Let us remember now the older tales, let us dress them in the garb of modernity, but let us reclaim their truth and once again make it our own; for our sake and for that of the world.  

The Paradox of Profit-Pt. 2

We have already seen how from the individual perspective the absolute profits of the capitalist (i.e. profits beyond those necessary to repay the capitalist's investment plus some necessary return to stimulate the investment in the first place) represent unearned returns from the productive process which is maintained solely by the input of labor power. Now let us turn and consider the paradox of profit from the perspective of the firm; from the institutional side.

Here we are viewing the productive enterprise, the business firm, as an autonomous entity whose goal is to maximize revenue and ensure continued operation into the future. Let us say that we have a firm that needs to raise money to update its facilities or expand its operations. There are two ways that the firm can raise this money: either it can take a loan from a bank, or it can sell shares of stock to private investors. In the first case the firm takes the money from the loan, invests it in increasing productivity, and then repays the loan plus interest from the returns of that investment. Once the loan has been repaid, the firm itself retains the continuing benefits of its increased revenue.

In the second case, that of selling stock, what the firm is doing is creating a continuing ownership right for the sake of gaining access to a fixed amount of capital input. In this case, the firm sells shares of stock in the company (either newly created shares or old shares held by the company), uses the additional capital to invest in increased productivity, then over time repays the stockholders for their investment. This repayment takes the form of dividends, which, from the firm's perspective, differ from loan payments to a bank in that shares of stock can never be "payed off." That is, after the stockholders have received back, in the form of dividends, the full amount of their initial stock purchase, plus the amount that a bank would have charged for a loan of the same size, the stockholders continue to demand and receive dividends.

Herein lies the paradox. In exchange for a fixed amount of capital, the firm consigns itself to a conceivably never-ending stream of resource expenditure in the form of dividends. And what is more, these expenditures by the firm are totally unproductive, since they drain the company's balance sheet while adding nothing to production. If a firm sells one million dollars worth of stock and pays dividends on that stock such that the buyer receives his full purchase price back in ten years time, after twenty years time the stockholder will have received two million dollars in return for his initial investment of one million (other things being equal, of course). It is obvious that no firm would ever consider taking a twenty year loan from a bank at one hundred percent interest, but this is just what happens in the case of stocks. Also quite apparent is the fact that the actual cost to the firm of the capital gained by selling stock continues to increase over time.

Let us suppose that our imaginary investor decides to sell his stock in the company after twenty years. Unless the investor sells his stock back to the company, the obligation to pay dividends to the new owner of the stock remains, despite the fact that this time the firm has received no additional capital input and despite the fact that the initial investment represented by the stock has already been re-payed, and that at a large premium. The only way for the firm to finally extinguish the debt of continual dividend obligations is to buy back the stock itself. But in this case the scenario is no better for the firm. Assuming the stock price has remained the same, they must now pay one million dollars to recover the ownership interest which has already cost the firm one million dollars (dividends during the second ten year period during which the stock was privately held). Here the paradox becomes explicit; the firm has, in essence, paid three million dollars for the use of one million: a net loss of two million dollars.

The unresolved question now is, given this situation, why would any firm opt raise money through the sale of stock rather than through a bank loan? The simple answer is that, in reality, a firm's purpose is not to produce useful goods and services, or to provide jobs for its employees, or to improve and develop its local community; but rather to create a continual stream of unearned revenue that can be captured by those with the wherewithal to purchase the ownership rights. The solution to this mystery lies in the internal make up of the firm itself and the ways in which relations between the different participants are structured. For, despite what we have assumed here, firms are not autonomous entities trying to maximize their own revenue and ensure their own continued existence. They are an amalgam of different groups of individuals, with different, and often opposing, interests. The havoc and irrationality created by this system will be the topic of a future post.

The Paradox of Profit-Pt. 1

From time to time I take up my old vice of economics (U.M. '04) and dork out on it for awhile.  Here's the first installment of what's been going through my head recently is this regards.  

 We start off broadly, by asking what exactly we mean when we use the word “economy?” We might define an economy as a system of producing and distributing goods and services within and between groups of people. There are, of course, many ways in which such a system might be designed, as we can see from studies of history and anthropology. From an ethical, normative standpoint, we might distinguish between just and unjust economic systems. We could define a just economic system as one in which there is a high positive correlation between effort expended in the production process and the ability to consume the fruits of that process. An unjust system, then, would be one in which there is no correlation, or a negative correlation, between effort expended and the consumption potential realized by any given individual.

To demonstrate this we can consider the economic system of slavery as practiced in the United States prior to 1865. Using our simple guidelines above, we conclude that the slavery system is unjust, since those expending the greatest amount of effort in the productive process (the slaves) receive the least amount of remuneration and vice versa; those whose exertions in the productive process are minimal (the plantation owners) receive the greatest reward from the process. There is an obvious negative correlation between effort and gain within the system and we are therefore justified in criticizing such a system as economically unjust¹.

In discussing contemporary “capitalist” economics, the standard explanation breaks down the production process into three major areas of input along with the individuals who provide each of the inputs. These inputs are typically listed as land, labor, and capital; owned, respectively, by the landlord, the worker, and the capitalist. For allowing his/her land to be used in production the landlord receives rent, for contributing his/her labor the worker receives a wage, and for supplying the necessary real and financial capital (i.e. tools, factories, money) the capitalist receives profit. Thus each contributor to the process of production receives their repayment. Without considering any deeper than this we might conclude that the modern capitalist economy is, in fact, a just one.

That would, however, be a premature conclusion, for in examining this system we see that there is something different, something special and unique about the capitalist's profits. This unique aspect of capitalist profit-making, different from either the rent of the landlord or the wages of the worker, is that in exchange for a temporally-limited contribution to production the capitalist is able to realize temporally unlimited returns. Whereas for the landlord and the laborer their incomes cease the moment they remove their factors of production from the economic process, the capitalist is able to make a one-time contribution to the process in exchange for a (conceivably) never-ending income.

To clarify this point, we can consider a simplified case involving only labor and capital. Let us suppose we have a capitalist who puts up the money to build a factory and purchase initial inputs and pay wages during the first production-cycle. The revenue realized from sale of the product must, necessarily, be enough to cover the cost of the material and labor inputs (variable costs) as well as some amount to off-set the capitalist's initial investment in the factory (fixed costs). As the production-cycle continues the revenue generated by the factory must continue to cover the variable costs of production as well as pay down the capitalist's fixed cost in the factory². After some period of time the capitalist will have been fully repaid for his/her initial financial investment in the productive enterprise, i.e. all fixed costs will have been fully covered by returns to the enterprise. From this point on any gains realized by the capitalist are what we can consider actual profits.

Since the revenues created by the factory must continue to cover all variable costs, and since the fixed costs have been fully repaid, the returns to the capitalist from this point on represent not remuneration for contributing to the process of production, but rather returns to the legally-defined right of ownership. While the laborers must continue to supply their labor-power to the production process in order to continue receiving their returns in the form of wages, the capitalist need now contribute nothing further to the production process to continue receiving his/her returns in the form of profits. While it is true that without some actual profit, above and beyond simple repayment of the initial financial outlays, the capitalist could not be convinced to contribute his/her resources to the production process, it should be apparent that the potential gains to ownership of a productive enterprise far outstrip the minimum return on investment that would be sufficient incentive for the capitalist to engage their resources.

Given our above minimal definition of just and unjust economic systems, we now see that capitalism must be placed, at least on the prima facie evidence, into the latter category. For the workers³ in the system, a fixed amount of time and effort engaged in production yields a fixed amount of return, i.e. consumption potential. Whereas, for the capitalist, a fixed amount invested in production can yield, at least theoretically, unlimited returns. For certain actors in the economic process a one-time effort leads to a one-time reward, while for other actors a one-time effort can lead to endless rewards; thus effort expended does not positively correlate with consumption potential realized; thus the system is open to criticism on grounds of basic injustice.

1Besides considerations of simple “fairness,” unjust economic systems, as we have defined them here, also create divergent and conflicting incentives between different actors in the production process which lead inevitably to decreased efficiency in production. This aspect will be discussed in greater detail later.

2In this simplified treatment I am not taking additional costs of production (namely capital depreciation) into account, however the analysis can be easily expanded to cover these, as it is apparent that any firm whose revenue does not cover all costs, from whatever source, can not long remain a going concern.

3For simplicity we will continue with a basic labor/capital dichotomy. How the question of land ownership fits in will be examined later.

The Best Description of God I Can Come Up With (with thanks to a noted Athiest)

In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Dead Eye Dick, the main character describes his birth in terms of the place and time when his “peephole opened.” When we are born, our peephole on the world opens and when we die it closes. All over the Planet and all over the Cosmos there are peepholes being opened up and there are peepholes closing. Some peepholes are shaped like people, some like grasshoppers, some like dogs, some like marmosets, some like bacteria, some like rhododendrons, and on and on. Gazillions of them and probably more: opening, looking around for a time, and then closing. But behind all the peepholes, looking through each one of them, is but one, gigantic eye. The eye that lies behind all peepholes: this is the best I can do to explain my understanding of what is meant by the word God (not that anyone is asking...)

And, of course, the "fabric" through which this universal eye peers is Nature, the material world. It is within the material world that these apertures of vision open, and it is the material world which these apertures observe while they remain. This material world, of course, is also what obscures the truth that all peepholes are, in reality, looking with one eye; it is the material world which creates the illusion of multiplicity. Veryily, we are peepholes of the Divine, looking out on the world and all the other Divine peepholes and wondering, where is God in all this? This is why, in Vedantic thought, Nature is also Illusion, Maya, the obscuring veil of matter.

As a further side note, I would add that, at least for Earth-life, keeping one's peephole open usually involves the forcible closing of other peepholes in one form or another. Many a baby rabbit has met its demise at the blade of a plow to provide the vegetarian with cauliflower and spinach, not to mention the tarsands that are pumping right now to bring us bananas and kiwis and tomatoes out of season (food for thought, certainly...)

Lies We Tell Ourselves

Lies have an interesting quality. Repeated often enough, lies become accepted as truth, and it must be said that our lives and our minds are filled with them. Filled with half-truths that are also half-lies, credulously accepted though unfounded rumors, filled with the lies of advertisers sowing insecurity and selling false satisfaction. But not all lies are created equal, some lies are useful, even necessary .

Our physical perception of the world is a kind of lie. Where science tells us there are swarms of swirling electrons, protons and neutrons we see a table or a dog. Our eyes lie to us by omission, registering only a narrow spectrum of all the light streaming into them. These are what we might call necessary and useful lies, simplifications of the truth that allow us to make sense of and interact with the world around us.

But many lies are not so benign. Consider the lies that most of us accept about personal success and happiness. We could sum these up with a catch-phrase from 1980's pop culture: “Greed is good.”

This is a succinct summation of economic thought in its current, mainstream variety. Economists assume that the world would work best if everyone tried to maximize their individual utility, where “utility” means, essentially, money and stuff. If everyone tries to accumulate as much wealth as they can, competing with everyone else for scarce resources, then everything will automatically work out for the best, as if guided by “an invisible hand.”

In reality, greed leads to unnatural shortages, as some people capture and hoard vast amounts of wealth, while many more are left to scratch out an existence from the ever-dwindling remains. Greed leads to ill will among people: callousness in those who are successful in their hoarding and resentment in those left out. Greed is not good, as pretty much every religion has been telling us for millennia. It's a little embarrassing that they have to tell us at all, and even more so that we so often refuse to listen.

Some lies are more subtle, like the lies we tell ourselves about our own powerlessness. We see the news filled with natural disasters and human suffering, wars, corruption, and social and environmental devastation, and we think we can do nothing, or at least not very much. We give a little bit to the Red Cross or United Way and think that we've done all we can. But this is a lie.

We live in a rich country where many of us have much more than we need, but rather than use our personal resources to improve the world, we buy an iPad and have discussions about what the government should do or what some corporation should do. We rely on those “in power” to fix things, denying that we ourselves have power. We undermine our power by squandering it on mindless indulgences and we deny having it because we are frightened of the responsibility that having it implies. We all remember what Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

We have the power, much more than we like to admit, to make the world a profoundly better place. But if we are to exercise this power we will need to re-evaluate our lives, reconsider what it is that truly leads to happiness, recognize the oft-repeated lies of our culture for what they are: lies. The truth is inevitably more complex than the lie, and this can be frightening, but we must be courageous if we are indeed concerned for the fate of our fellow humans, for our brother and sister creatures and for the planet that we all share. If we are concerned with freedom, with recognizing and reclaiming our own power, we must be relentless in exposing and rejecting lies wherever they may be, whether plastered across a billboard or hidden in the recesses of our own hearts.

The Right Tool

This first appeared in OutWords magazine, March, 2011.

A parable:
Once there was a man who wanted to build a house. Being a novice, he
decided to inquire with his friends what sort of tools he would need
for the job. The first friend he asked said to him, “Surely you will
need a hammer.” This seemed reasonable, and so the man bought a hammer
and set out to build his house.

But he quickly discovered that the hammer was useless for many of the
required tasks. Tossing it aside and muttering and cursing under his
breathe that his friend was no-good liar, he proceeded to the home of
a second friend. Again he asked what sort of tools he needed to build
a house. The second friend replied, “Surely you will need a saw.” The
man thought that sounded reasonable and so he purchased a saw and set
out once more to build his house.

The saw seemed a better idea, as the man could now cut his logs to
size with ease, a task that had proved impossible with the hammer.
Soon, however, the man was once again muttering and cursing as he
tried in vain to drive home a nail with the handle of the saw.

 ____________________________________________________

It was once widely accepted that the Church held a monopoly on
legitimate knowledge. The pursuers of science felt the constraints and
pushed against them, finally bursting them asunder. The Church was
overthrown as the possessor and distributor of knowledge, its place
taken by the Academy. But the Academy tossed out more than it could
replace. Gone was the faulty astronomy, gone the inscrutable god of
Abraham, but gone too was the wisdom, gone was the comfort.

Now we feel the constraints of the Academy, of the modern outlook. We
push up against them. We consume ever more and newer products, yet
remain unsatisfied. We accept the big-bang theory and evolution, yet
fail to find comfort in them. We find that the material sciences,
which were so useful in freeing us from the bonds of the Church, have
now fashioned for us a materialist cage. There is food and water
aplenty in the cage, but of meaning we find none. And so the human
soul revolts, it looks for an exit from this prison of cold, dead,
uncaring matter.

Having rejected the Church of our forebears along with its wisdom and
comfort, we seek these things in other churches, far away; churches we
did not grow up in, churches that never shamed us or forced us to
conform or to do violence to our intellect. We find what we look for.
We look at Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Taoism, and take from them the
wisdom and comfort that we need. We don't look to the rest, to their
faulty astronomy, their inscrutable deities. For some reason, for some
of us, it seems easier to distinguish the baby from the bath-water at
a distance.

Some in the Church will still cry "heresy!" and some in the Academy
will cry "superstition!" but the soul of humanity will go on building
itself a home. It must and it will, using whatever tools it can find.

Reflections on Discontentment

This article first appeared in OutWords magazine, February, 2011.

I cannot remember a time when I felt totally at peace with myself, totally whole, complete. If there has been one constant throughout my life it would seem to be this, the constant feeling of discontentment.

Initially, this feeling revolved almost entirely around myself. It had not yet occurred to me to blame my feelings on a disturbed and disturbing world. The only explanation I could find was that there was something wrong with me, something missing.

I'm not sure where this feeling came from. Whether it is the residue of psychological belittlement by my parents and peers, or whether it stems from something deeper I cannot say. In truth, I had to endure relatively little of the first, and though I did get my share of teasing as a child, I was not subject to the emotional and psychological abuse that many of my friends have undergone. No, it seems to be something deeper than just negative conditioning, some more fundamental emotion.

Part of this seems to stem from an acute awareness of sin, of knowingly doing wrong. I remember distinctly the first time I told a lie, and the majority of my early memories seem to be of my various trespasses as a child. I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an overly disobedient or willful child, and my hours of conformity in youth greatly outweighed my hours of revolt. And yet it is the sin that sticks. Even now, those violations of my earlier years come back to haunt me. “That,” they whisper to me, “that too you are capable of.”

I have allowed myself to be persuaded, by both myself and others, to engage in things which now, with a better understanding of the world and the human psyche, I know may well have led to lasting psychological damage. Should I track these people down, apologize for my trespasses, beg their forgiveness? Probably. But even if I did and received full pardon from each, the knowledge of my sins and past actions would still hang heavy over my heart.

And they continue, of course, the sins. Mostly small, now, and unlikely to lead to any lasting damage, other than to my own psyche. Sins mostly of resentment and hostility towards others and of laziness leading to resentment and hostility toward myself. But the feeling is the same, and just as intense now as when I was a child. I have leavened it a little by turning some of my feelings of inadequacy outwards, by placing them on the world. For some of my discontentment I blame others, though the attribution may well be specious, but a good deal of it is still about me, no matter how much I try to project it onto externals.

I wonder, does everyone feel this way? Does everyone feel like there is something continually awry in their soul, something missing whose absence leaves a void that constantly sucks at their mind, drawing their thoughts again and again to that which is lacking? Wherefore this discontentment? Why do I feel this way? Why does Anybody?

Surely, the world is not ideal as humanity conceives the ideal. But it is ideal in it's imperfection, ideal in it's readiness to nurture life and growth, to provide the necessary materials for a quest for the ideal. And just as surely, we are imperfect beings, who have failed many times to live up to our highest potentials, who have slipped many times from the path of perfection that each of us, I think, feels that we should be following. But we are perfect in our ability to grow, to change. Our perfection lies not in our perfection, so to speak, but in our perpetual perfectibility.

It is always possible to change and to grow. To deny this to another is a sign of encroaching bigotry, to deny this to oneself is the grossest of self-slanders. To deny the ability to change is to deny free-will, to claim that oneself and everyone else are nothing but robots, enslaved by the whip of nature, chained by instinct and destiny.

Perhaps the discontent I feel is not about the world and not about who or what I actually am at any given moment of discontentment, but rather about a feeling that I am not growing fast enough. For life, as for all pursuits, there is a learning curve and the making of mistakes, both large and small, is not only a part of that curve, but indeed what it is composed of. Personal sin and an imperfect world are not reasons for discontentment in and of themselves: it is stasis and regression that we grind ourselves against.

Perhaps it's something like the sapling, knowing that it is a tree and is meant to be a tree, but grinding up against the reality of its sapling self. Growing so slowly, day after day, in the constant knowledge of its own inherent tree-ness. Perhaps this discontentment is merely the impatience of saplings.

The Bottomless Vessel

First appeared in the Missoulian, Christmas 2010.

There is a Jewish saying that, “in a man who is full of himself there is no room for God.”  Surely, this is true, but it is not just oneself that a person may become full of. One may become full with learning, with scholarship, or with some political ideology or other, or even with religious dogma and teaching. Countless are the things with which a person may become full, which may crowd out all inner space for compassion and patience, for forbearance and understanding; in short, for those qualities of spirit which are the flowering of the divine in humanity.

A person is akin to a vessel, a jug or perhaps a wineskin. In our natural state we are as bottomless vessels, which take in all and yet always have room for more. There is no problem with learning, ideology or dogma per se, but the problem arises when we take our personal understanding of one of these things as the end-all and be-all of existence. That which has been called God, Brahman, Wakan Tanka, Allah, Tao, among other things, is the mysterious, the inconceivable, the spirit of all life and consciousness in the cosmos.

It is said that, “with God all things are possible,” but with one who is full of herself, only that which she already contains is possible; she will admit nothing else. She turns away from new aspects of existence and so seals her vessel, as it were, at the mouth. How can God add to one who has thus sealed themselves up? How can God teach one who is so convinced of their own learning, their own understanding?

There is a Zen Buddhist saying, “in the expert's mind there are few possibilities, in the beginner's mind there are many.” The expert has sealed himself up, has turned away from the infinite possibilities of reality in favor of the finite possibilities of his own understanding. For the expert, for the one full of themselves and their own understanding, there can be no compromise, and thus no dialogue or community, with another whose understanding is different, or even just differently phrased.

The expert says that our enemy must be hated and destroyed, but Jesus says that our enemy must be loved and prayed for, befriended if possible, and the Buddhist sage Shantideva agrees with him, along with many others down the ages. They are all calling us to the remembrance and realization of our higher possibilities, possibilities denied by the experts.

The requirement, then, is simply to remain open. Open to others and their understandings, open to all possibilities, especially the possibility (nay, certainty) that our own current understanding is incomplete and relative. Let us not seal off our vessels, but rather let us be vigilant in making room for the higher here in the lower.

Many are they today who claim that the possibilities are few, that the enemy must be despised and vanquished, not loved or befriended. May we not pay heed to those voices, but rather to the small, quiet voice of the divine that still whispers in every soul where there is room, calling us to love and to compassion and to all the wondrous possibilities of our highest, divinely-human nature

Remember Unity

First appeared in the Missoulian, Fall 2010 sometime.

 

We live in a culture of debate. “Either-or”, “all-or-nothing”, “us versus them”, seem to be the major sentiments of our cultural discourse. Watching the nightly news or reading the daily paper, every issue is shown bi-chromatically as the struggle between two possible solutions, two diametrically opposed viewpoints. As if there were only two sides to any story, only two perspectives on any issue! We have a politics of encampment, of red states and blue states, democrats and republicans, conservatives and liberals.

Whether through the nature of our two party political system, or because of some perverse blindness in our collective psyches, all of life in modern American society seems characterized by this dualism. On the individual level, this type of crude “either-or” thinking is typical of small children and schizophrenics. Unsurprisingly, the level of social discourse that emerges from such thinking often resembles that of [mentally un-hinged] children, with name calling and threats of violence predominating.

This is important (and troubling) because our social discourse is the way in which our society, as a whole, thinks. The political processes of social decision-making are our communal thought processes. If we take it as a given that “we are all in this together,” the dysfunction of our current collective thought process becomes abundantly clear. How is it possible to live together in peace and harmony when we are constantly demonizing the other, whoever that other may be? We seem to have contracted a social variant of multiple-personality disorder, with different personalities vying for full control of the communal body. But if we seek any sort of social unity, cooperation, not control, must be our highest ideal.

A more sane method of social discourse would take discussion, not debate, as its guiding metaphor. We might imagine a different world in which the job of the politician is not to be the human incarnation of some particular ideology, but rather someone who solicits ideas from the populace-at-large and puts together the most interesting for popular appraisal. We might imagine a media that tries to present as many viewpoints as possible and seeks out those with innovative, outside-the-box solutions to our social ills, rather than frame every issue as a struggle between two absolute and opposing camps. We are one nation, one people, whether we willingly admit it or not, and a house divided against itself cannot stand, as has been known for at least two millennia.

Social discourse worthy of adults demands that everyone respect, and show respect for, everyone else. This requires an understanding and a reverence for the various viewpoints and perspectives on reality, that do not contradict but rather compliment one another, each illuminating a particular piece of the divine milieu. Creation is not black and white nor, thankfully, is it endless shades of gray. It is teeming with colors or every shade and hue. “Either-or”, black-and-white thinking denies the truth of reality and fails to do justice to the splendor of sacred creation. May we all recover this truth some day; may we remember our unity and put away this divisiveness.

Rabbi and Materialist

First appeared in Outwords, Dec. 2010

I read somewhere in Martin Buber, though I search now in vain for the quote, of an Hasidic rabbi who said, “in my old age I have reached such a state that when I pass a bundle of straw laying crosswise on the road, I take it as a sign that it does not lay there lengthwise.” What we have here is a personal expression of a conviction that shows up in many spiritual traditions. Native American medicine people and Hindu sages agree with the Rabbi, there is no such thing as coincidence; everything is synchronicity.

For the Rabbi, every aspect of being is meaningful. Every object, every thought, every sound, every occurrence, is, as it were, a sign pointing to his heart. Perhaps when he sees the bundle of straw he thinks “what is it in me that is crossed up?” or, “what is it that tries to block my way?” And as he considers thus, his heart will reveal to him that which is disordered, that which bars his advancement, and he may then set about putting it right. To such a person, the highest levels of personality development surely lie open and life is indeed meaningful for him. He has filled life with meaning, as one fills a goblet with wine.

But now let us consider the opposite scenario, that of, shall we say, the Scientific Materialist. For the Materialist, there is nothing deeper to life than what can be seen under the electron microscope or glimpsed through Hubble’s lens. To him the universe is made of dead matter and blind chance. To assume that God or the Universe at Large communicates on a personal level, or any level for that matter, is sheer foolishness; his reason rejects it. To the Materialist, these notions are nothing more than the imaginings of a childish mind. When he passes a bundle straw laying crosswise in the street, he takes it as a sign of nothing, merely the outcome of the laws of gravity, inertia, friction and the like. It’s position has nothing to do with him personally, his reason assures him, it has no special meaning. And thus his life is made meaningless.

What need has the Scientific Materialist of inner searching or of deep questioning, and what catalyst? To him everything is a weight, a measure and a velocity, to be grasped with his intellect and understood. His eyes are ever focused outwardly; he does not look inward to his own becoming, and so he misses it. Indeed, it fails to happen.

Post-modern philosophers tell us that, technically speaking, there is no such thing as perception, that what we take as perceptions are actually, at least in part, conceptions. That is, how we perceive the world around us, and therefore what we perceive of the world around us, is necessarily colored by the social and cultural milieu in which we exist. Biologically, it has been shown that what our brains, and therefore our minds, can perceive is determined in large part by the stimuli received during early development. Kittens raised in a room with only vertical stripes lose the ability to perceive horizontal stripes once they have grown.

The Rabbi knows the secret of this, without recourse to psychology or post-modernism. He knows the secret of conceptual reality, and uses this knowledge to shape his reality by shaping his conception of it. He conceives of a universe that communicates, and lo, it communicates. He conceives of connections of meaning linking every atom of the universe and behold, they appear. He conceives of a perfect Self, of a Soul, and look, it arises. For the Rabbi, the whole of Creation has become an endless Tarot. In it he sees the reflection of ever deeper levels of himself, constantly unlocked and revealed to his consciousness.

The paradox is that one must first be convinced that life is meaningful before life becomes meaningful. Actually, life becomes meaningful the very moment that we become convinced of it’s meaning. The bundle of straw in the road remains what it is, but we may decide to fill it with meaning or not. The judgment we pass on the universe is also a judgment on ourselves. If the universe be nothing but meaningless coincidence, then so too are we; but if we fill the cosmos we meaning, we too shall be filled.

On Healing

First appeared in Outwords, Nov. 2010

We all need healing and need it constantly. From womb to tomb this life, this world, is injurious and harsh. Constantly we are being wounded, if not by one thing, then by two others. Wounding and healing, wounding and healing, thus do the wheels of existance go upon their eternal way.

Of the wounding, what can we say? It is there, it is real, it is not going away anytime soon. The phsyical wounding begins with the severing of our infant selves from t.he cord of life that had bound us to our mothers. Our body's first act in this world is to heal the umbilical wound; our lives begin with repairing this initial act of violent separation.

From then on life is much the same, both physically and in other, more subtle ways; injuries accruing, wounds being delivered not so much out of any malice or ill-will, but rather as a matter of course, a part of the normal functioning of the world machinery. The wounds come early and often: from the taunts of other children, from the aloof or absent parent, from the dead pet, the failed test, the internalized sex-shame of an entire society. Later we are wounded by the grim drudgery of the day-to-day, by constant anxieties over money, by the casual insensitivity of others, not to mention the betrayals of trust, the worsening health, the eroding foundation. To live is to be injured, to exist is to bleed in a thousand ways, some obvious to the eyes of others, some hidden in the deepest recesses of the heart.

And so healing is the continual occupation of the living. Healing and the search for healing drives us to all manner of things, some appropriate, some not. Where we turn for healing and whether or not we find it there, whether we find it at all, dictates much of our individual lives and our subjective experiences of them.

As the child turns to its mother for healing and comfort, we turn to drink, to entertainment, to religion, to romantic partners; nearly all of us turn to consumerism. We look for healing in a million and one places, ease our aches and salve our wounds with a thousand supposed remedies. Our problems arise when we put a band-aid where stitches are called for, “fix” the toothache with a shot of novacaine instead of a root canal.

The injuries of life are not a problem if one knows where and how to become healed, but if we only numb the pain instead of dealing with the wounds, the injuries begin to mount. The novacaine wears off, the band-aid peels away to reveal yesterday's (or last year's) laceration still raw and sore. The wounds accumulate until our entire being is nothing but cuts on top of bruises, all red and aching. If we cannot find healing, eventually we must succumb; but we can go on for a long time like this, wounded and bleeding, covered in band-aids and hopped-up on painkillers, yet still unhealed. Our world is full of these walking wounded. I imagine, gentle reader, that we are both among them; that we are all among them to one extent or another.

What is it that provides true healing and what is it that only blinds us to our problems? Are we seeking to be healed, or only to cover our wounds from the eyes of the world and from our own eyes? Where has our need for healing led us and is it where we truly wish to be? Questions, it seems, worthy of our attention, and yet questions we too seldom consider. Advertisers, politicos, and priests as well as everyone else, it seems, are hawking a healing ointment of one variety or another; if we do not consider these questions we risk ending up with the snake-oil instead of the healing balm.

There are many who trumpet their knowledge of how to get healed, get saved, get enlightened, and some may be right, but without an awareness of our own wounds and need for healing, we will never be able to know for sure which one is the healer and which the huckster.

Theodicy

First appeared in Outwords, October 2010.

I was browsing through the January, 2010 issue of the New Yorker the other day to see what I'd forgotten about. Our modern news media cycles through stories so quickly, that even truly major events are sucked down the memory-hole within a week or two, so occaisonally I read “out-dated” news, just to combat the collective amnesia a little. I noted the artwork on the cover (a couple of skeletons standing in the doorway of a building, drawn in a cartoony style that reminded me of Day of the Dead), but it didn't register until I opened the magazine: oh yeah, Haiti. What, with the oil in the gulf and the floods in Pakistan and Lindsey Lohan going to jail and all, I'd forgotten about Haiti. I wonder how they're doing?

It's hardly an original thought, but it occurrs to me that one positive side-effect of natural disasters and other forms of social and physical upheaval and hardship is that they bring people together in a way that the normal course of daily affairs doesn't seem to. When the excrement really hits the oscillator, so to speak, we are forced to rely on one another, to turn to one another for aid. We are compelled by circumstances into the existential understanding that we must all work together to survive; no one is an island.

Musician Greg Brown once said, “This whole idea of intentional community is baloney...You have to need each other.” In the aftermath of earthquakes and hurricanes, amidst the wreckage of tornadoes and forest fires, we are brought to need each other. It's a radical way to get community, perhaps, but in the current age of unadulterated individualism would anything less radical really be effective? Perhaps without these kinds of massive human tragedy we would become totally calloused, egoistic individuals. Our contemporary culture, sadly, seems to bear out this conclusion.

I remember hearing a piece on KUFM about the little community of Alberton. The story focused on the tight-knit character of the town, created at least in part, it seems, by the general economic hardship faced in the area. One resident was quoted as saying something to the effect of, “People talk about recession, we've been having a recession here for the last twenty-five years.” But when a new family arrives in town there's sure to be home-made baked goods delivered by at least one neighbor, and the residents of Alberton, unlike those of our own fair hamlet, are garaunteed to know their neighbor's names and probably a lot more besides. In Alberton they have community, which so many of us in the city claim to desire, but they also have hardship, which none desire. But what if hardship is necessary to build and maintain community?

It's almost a sad thought, isn't it, that we need difficulty and struggle, hardship and pain to bring us together; that during prolonged periods of peace and prosperity we all too often sink into egotistical selfishness? But it seems to be the case, so far as I can tell, that strong community bonds are best forged in the fires of crisis and general hardship.

It being the case that humans, like small children, may require a stern hand to compel them to do what is in their own best interest, namely help one another, we might actually be thankful that natural disasters continue to occur. Without them, it seems, we might well devolve into a society of totally narcissistic, self-centered consumers. Without some chaos and economic hardship we might get lost in the myth of the self-sufficient individual, forgetting that we are social creatures by our very nature, and that no one can survive unaided, at least not for long.

Skeptics have often pointed to “natural evils” like the Haitian earthquake to make the claim that an omni-Benevolent diety cannot possibly exist. While I wouldn't claim that natural disasters prove the existance of some diety or other, it would appear that what have been labeled “evils” are, perhaps, not entirely evil in their outcomes. Perhaps they are necessary; perhaps, dare I say it, even beneficial

Enough

          

  According to Hindu cosmology, we are now living in the last age of the current creation cycle, known as Kali Yug, or the Age of Kali.  This current age is, in Hindu thinking, characterized by the progressive loss of the foundations of morality, wisdom and dharma.  I have noticed lately that one thing that has been lost in our contemporary American culture in this age of Kali is the concept of “enough.”

            In a society governed by a capitalist and consumerist mindset, the idea of “enough” is not only out of place, it is anathema.  For the capitalist enterprise, constant growth is an imperative.  A corporation whose balance sheet is not showing a steady increase is viewed skeptically, no matter how profitable it may be.  A company that is not continually growing will eventually be consumed by one that is, whether through competitive means or by outright acquisition.  In a capitalist economy, to speak the word “enough” is tantamount to pronouncing one’s own death sentence. 

            Likewise, there can never be “enough” for the modern consumer.  One may own a house, a car, a television, a hot tub, and a million other things, but they are never “enough.”  The consumer desires (and is ceaselessly told to desire) a bigger house, a newer car, a better television.  There is always the re-model, the up-grade, the next best thing, always just slightly out of reach.  As the goal of capitalist enterprise is to produce ever-greater quantities of wealth, the goal of the consumer is to acquire ever-more and ever-better products.  For the capitalist, to say “enough” means economic death, for the consumer it means social death: stigmatization.  One must have nice things, and many of them, but they are never “enough.”

            It is unsurprising, perhaps, that this should be the case in the economic sphere, and it has, perhaps, always been thus: people and organizations seeking ever more and more, never saying, “enough.”  But in this age of Kali, “enough” has been lost from religion as well, all but forsaken by spirituality of all kinds.  In this age of Kali one may become a great spiritual teacher and need never say, “enough”…but it has not always been thus.

            In Practice in Christianity, Soren Kierkegaard says that everyone desires to come to Christ in his loftiness, but none desire him in his lowliness, and surely the same may be said for the Buddha, for Rumi, for the saintly tzaddiks of Jewish Hasidism.  We desire to identify ourselves with them in their loftiness, seated on a lotus, resplendent, but we forget that each one said, “enough.”  We prefer our monks to come in fine robes with leather sandals and gold watches, perhaps carrying a briefcase; we forget that Siddhartha Guatama’s garment was sewn from rags, that he carried a begging bowl and rejected worldly wealth, we forget that he said, “enough.”  We love the pretty language, the profound insights and dizzying metaphysics, but when we come to the word “enough” we pale, the mind goes defensively blank and…we move on.  “Enough” is a difficult teaching, even in the best of times and for the best of minds, for “enough” is never what you think it is, never what you’re hoping for, but always infinitely less and yet, somehow, infinitely more.

            When Jesus sent his disciples out into the world to spread the new teaching, the good news (i.e. God loves everyone and so should you), he instructed them to “…take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts…” (Mark 6:8).  He sent his disciples out into the world with nothing…and it was enough.  In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that, “pious men eat what the gods leave over, after the offering…the unrighteous cook good food for the greed of their stomachs.” (BG ch. 3, sl. 12)  You just take what is freely given…and it is enough.  Like Rabbi Pinhas, who would not keep the financial offerings of his disciples, but promptly distributed them to the poor; “I only desire what I already possess,” he remarked.  And another time, “Ever since I began giving true service to my Maker, I have not tried to get anything, but only taken what God gave me.”  He looked upon all that he had, all that he had been given…and it was enough.

            But for us, it is never enough.  We have become like the rakshasas of Hindu myth, the demons who, having obtained boons from the gods, proceed to conquer the three worlds and attempt to overthrow the very gods who gave them their power in the first place.  “More…more,” is ever our mantra, never “enough.”  But endless growth and ever-increasing consumption is the modus operandi of cancer, and we are humans.  Thus, our highest wisdom ever recalls us to our human-ness; reminds us through demonstration that we already have enough, if we could but see rightly.  But in the Age of Kali, “enough” is left out of the discourse.  The begging bowl has become a prop, if it is present at all, and not a way of life, not a call to radical action.

            David Hume and others have pointed out that wealth creates poverty, that those resources that go to satisfy the whims of the rich could easily provide bread for the many.  The masses are deprived of life so that the few may placate their boredom.  This is the way of things in a culture, in a world, that has forgotten how to say, “enough.”  Who in this, the richest of all countries, or anywhere else, will look at themselves, at their own life and ask about “enough?”  That way lies social and economic suicide, says the wisdom of the crowd, best to leave it be.  Yes, “enough” is a hard teaching, even in the best of times, even for the best of minds.