The same sacred norms of the dominant civil religion renamed with a critical spin:\u00a0 My favorite is \u00a0Theodor Adorno\u00b4s one word: Tauschprinzip.\u00a0 <\/em>(the principle of exchange). \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I take Tauschprinzip <\/em>to be equivalent to Andr\u00e9 Orl\u00e9an\u00b4s s\u00e9paration marchande. <\/em>Both describe what Karl Polanyi called market society.<\/em><\/p>\n As a critical realist, I am not surprised to find that the governing principles of the same objectively existing social reality are described with different vocabularies by different analysts.\u00a0 Von Hayek, Adorno, Orl\u00e9an, Polanyi \u00a0and many others offer diverse ways to talk about, and to see, the global economy. \u00a0From \u00a0Immanuel Wallerstein we learn something else we already knew: today everything social science studies is in the global economy.\u00a0 Every social fact is inside it.\u00a0\u00a0 No social fact is outside it.<\/p>\n To bring today\u00b4s war into focus:\u00a0 Its background, the fond <\/em>of its forme, <\/em>is an \u00a0existential crisis is that is physical<\/em>.\u00a0 Surviving humanity\u00b4s existential \u00a0crisis by creating sustainable relationships to physical reality requires that humanity rethink and reinvent complex social<\/em> institutions. Their core \u2013the core of the constitutive rules that constitute the global economy– is the \u00a0Tauschprinzip.\u00a0 <\/em>It was Adorno\u00b4s co-author Max Horkheimer who first named people aware that there are no solutions to humanity\u00b4s main problems within the confines of the dominant system \u00a0\u201ccritical thinkers.\u201d<\/p>\n Physically, human use of the earth\u00b4s resources must decline to a point where, as J.C. Kumarappa wrote, \u00a0human consumption in\u00a0 year does not exceed what the earth replenishes in a year.\u00a0 \u00a0The human population must stabilize or decline, at least until if and when technological and social breakthroughs make it possible to be sustainable with a larger population.<\/p>\n A \u00a0presenting symptom of humanity\u00b4s\u00a0 plight is the diabolical double crisis.\u00a0 The solution to economic downturns is to resume economic growth.\u00a0 The solution to poverty is higher incomes for the poor.\u00a0 \u00a0More growth and fewer poor people mean more sales and more consumption.\u00a0 But when the poor achieve the present living standards of the prosperous it will be game over for life on planet earth.<\/p>\n For most of history humans have been so few and so poor that nothing humans did could kill the biosphere.\u00a0 Those days are gone.\u00a0 Today success equals failure.<\/p>\n Social structures defined by the Tauschprinzip<\/em>, and consequently by the stylized ideal-type of human being Marcel Mauss called \u00e9changiste<\/em>, imply that economic success leads to ecological failure.\u00a0 History confirms logic.\u00a0 Historically, larger numbers of people producing more and buying more, damage the environment more.\u00a0\u00a0 The causal link is \u00a0robust \u00a0in spite of competitive markets bringing down the price of social panels, in spite of major corporations like Mercedes Benz and Tesla being leaders in creating green technologies designed to save us, and in spite of many other nuances and \u00a0counter currents.<\/p>\n An argument connecting everyday life (as Gandhi put it, connecting what we do in our neighbourhood with all the other neighbourhoods in the world) goes like this:\u00a0 When you start with \u201cisolated egos\u201d (Roy Bhaskar\u00b4s phrase for what Orl\u00e9an calls s\u00e9paration marchande<\/em>) doing simple commodity exchange,then as a matter of what is logically to be expected, and as a matter of what has actually happened in history, sooner or later you get societies where the general welfare depends on investor confidence.\u00a0 Everybody\u00b4s welfare \u2013not just corporate profits– depends on the confidence of investors that their investments will be safe and profitable.\u00a0 You get \u201cregimes of accumulation,\u201d that is to say you get societies where every Institution is molded to favor capital accumulation.\u00a0\u00a0 You get warfare states as a consequence of\u00a0 the chronic weakness of effective demand.\u00a0 You get empires because demand at home is never enough.\u00a0 You get astronomical sums of unpayable debt because cash sales without credit sales are never enough.\u00a0 Some combination of \u00a0massive balloonings of spending \u00a0has to happen.\u00a0 It has to happen \u00a0because if investors do not find it credible to believe that they can successfully turn money into more money, then \u201cthe economy\u201d stops and everybody suffers.\u00a0 It has to happen and it has to crash.<\/p>\n (\u201cThe economy\u201d named \u00a0here is the\u00a0 one that gets virtually all the attention in economics textbooks, and indeed shutting it down, as happened in Chile in 1973,\u00a0 does bring life to a standstill.\u00a0 But a majority of the work of the world is carried on outside it.)<\/p>\n Physical disaster becomes a social imperative; due to a complex historical chain of causes set in motion by a simple beginning constituted by a simple principle, \u00a0the Tauschprinzip.<\/em><\/p>\n The\u00a0 incompatibility of endless growth\u00a0 with the health of mother earth, is far from being the only fatal flaw in profit-from-exchange ways of life.\u00a0\u00a0 Writing in mid twentieth-century, Adorno and Horkheimer do not even mention it.\u00a0 Back then they already \u00a0found many other reasons to be critical thinkers.<\/p>\n Although the general flourishing of all human beings in harmony with nature is physically possible, it is now socially impossible.<\/p>\n Hence two general questions: \u00a0How can the absurdity of humans fighting humans while the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology have our whole species slated for extinction, become a growth point leading to solutions that will really work in practice because they transform not just the \u00a0symptoms but the deep causes of cultural and structural violence?\u00a0 How can we contribute to rethinking and reinventing a species, our own species, which is now programmed to self-destruct?<\/p>\n Here is an idea starting \u00a0to answer these two questions: \u00a0\u00a0a Pedagogy\u00a0 of the Rich<\/em>, conceived as a companion volume to Paulo Freire\u00b4s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.\u00a0 <\/em>It could also be called The Pedagogy of the Unoppressed.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n The unoppressed are those of us who enjoy having \u00a0a surplus that we could share, and often do share.\u00a0 We are the \u201cwe\u201d to whom Martin Luther King Jr. referred when he said that today \u201cwe\u201d have the resources and the techniques to end poverty, and added that the question is whether we have the will.\u00a0\u00a0 We could, if we had the will, comply voluntarily with sharing and caring \u00a0norms regarding property that have existed and continue to exist in many cultures. \u00a0Saint Thomas Aquinas articulated a caring and sharing norm\u00a0 when\u00a0 he wrote that our property belongs not to us alone, but also to those whom we are able to help with our surplus.<\/p>\n Ending poverty is not the only objective \u2013indeed a key objective is more voluntary frugal green living enhanced by green technologies.<\/em> The overall goal is better stated as aligning across sectors to serve the common good inclusively and sustainably.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u201d who are able to share, in most cases, have achieved basic security.\u00a0 Our physiological and safety needs are met.\u00a0 In Abraham Maslow\u00b4s terms, we are able to move forward to focus on our needs for love and belonging, esteem and self-realization.\u00a0 Many others have expressed similar ideas in different words.\u00a0 For Victor Frankl, the decisive\u00a0 factor determining whether a human life is a success or a failure is the search for meaning.\u00a0 For Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gassett, humans invariably want to feel that their actions are justified, at the very least justified in their own minds even if others misunderstand them.\u00a0 Gandhi remarked that for a hungry person God appears in the form of a piece of bread; as for himself,\u00a0 he defined his own aim in life as Moksha, <\/em>seeing God face to face. Erik Erikson makes a case\u00a0 for identity driving action, including cultural identity.\u00a0 \u00a0Some say \u201cidentity is motivation.\u201d<\/p>\n To use a single name, I will name the motivations that remain after physiological and safety needs are met as \u201cpersonal development.\u201d\u00a0 This one \u00a0phrase lumps together\u00a0 Maslow\u00b4s three or four: love and belonging, \u00a0esteem (self esteem and enjoying the esteem of others) and self-realization; and it also lumps in words others have used to name motivations driving human action \u00a0above and beyond physiological needs and safety needs, \u00a0including Frankl\u00b4s meaning,\u00a0 Ortega\u00b4s self-justification, \u00a0Gandhi\u00b4s Moksha, <\/em>and Erikson\u00b4s identity.<\/p>\n Remember that Maslow\u00b4s seminal paper is called \u201cA Theory of Motivation.\u201d\u00a0 It turns out that what motivates people is what satisfies their needs.\u00a0 Motivations and needs are two sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n My working hypotheses for a Pedagogy of the Unoppressed <\/em>are that personal development, consciously pursued,<\/p>\n A combination of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed<\/em> and a Pedagogy of the Unoppressed<\/em> \u00a0sublates\u00a0 the Tauschprinzip.\u00a0 <\/em>It nurtures\u00a0 ethics of care (feminism); \u00a0while regarding serving the common good as a virtue (Aristotle) and as a duty (Kant).\u00a0\u00a0 The rich can and sometimes do embrace ethics that define paths to green sustainability and social inclusion \u2013not because ethics are imposed from outside, but because ethics are understood from inside.<\/p>\n These are not untested hypotheses.\u00a0 They describe the personal development programs (PDPs) of the EMBA program at \u00a0University of Cape Town.\u00a0 Details are given in Sounding the Depths of Leadership <\/em>by Kosheek Sewchurran.<\/p>\n At the level of economics, the concientizaci\u00f3n<\/em> of everybody, both the oppressed and the unoppressed, \u00a0is a proposal for and a path toward making the impossible possible.\u00a0 It is a proposal made in the light of recent historical experience. \u00a0Social democracy did not work essentially because globalization \u2013and even more so today\u00b4s financialized global value chains\u2014destroyed the state\u00b4s capacity to\u00a0 intervene to correct market failure.\u00a0 But the empirical finding that social democracy does not work has been made assuming as constant the constitutive rules of the modern world-system, <\/em>in one\u00a0 word assuming the Tauschprinzip. \u00a0\u00a0Concientizaci\u00f3n, <\/em>in contrast, implies that organizing and organizations can and should be unbounded, aligning across sectors for the common good, doing what works to save\u00a0 people and planet with no a priori <\/em>prejudices for or against any available option. \u00a0Concientizaci\u00f3n <\/em>\u00a0does not mean that liberty, property, businesses, governments, schools, markets,\u00a0 plans and so on cease to exist.\u00a0 It means\u00a0 they are reinvented.\u00a0 Human cultures mutate to survive. \u00a0Critical thinkers morph into cultural creatives , social entrepreneurs and social innovators.\u00a0 Their mental models frame the modern world-system \u00a0as a social and historical construction.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u00a0 can be\u00a0 deconstructed and reconstructed.<\/p>\n Mindful consciousness \u00a0channels surplus to where it is needed.\u00a0 It \u00a0is needed to help to create dignified employment that serves human self-realization and nurses mother earth back to vibrant health.\u00a0\u00a0 A social analogue of supersonic jets: \u00a0Unbounded employment\u00a0 does not necessarily and always depend\u00a0 on investment for profit generating sales to pay wages with; it can tap existing surpluses and harness multiple motivations.\u00a0\u00a0 In Adam Smith\u00b4s terms, mindful consciousness hires servants<\/em>, to do useful<\/em> work — not just \u00a0workers <\/em>to do profitable<\/em> work.\u00a0 In Peter Drucker\u00b4s terms there is a sea-change in\u00a0 what is done with profits after they are made. Humans wake up from the nightmares of declared and undeclared wars to focus deliberately on reinventing society to save homo sapiens <\/em>and its habitat.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n How can the absurdity of humans fighting humans lead to solutions while physics, chemistry and biology have us slated for extinction?\u00a0 How can we contribute to rethinking and reinventing ourselves? An idea: a Pedagogy\u00a0 of the Rich, conceived as a companion volume to Paulo Freire\u00b4s ‘The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.’\u00a0 It could also be called ‘The Pedagogy of the Unoppressed.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1778,1175,2830,1496,307,2129,2130,380],"class_list":["post-208781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-conflict-analysis","tag-extinction","tag-homo-sapiens","tag-humanism","tag-humanity","tag-paulo-freire","tag-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed","tag-solutions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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<\/a> <\/em>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. He <\/em>is a philosopher\u00a0of social science <\/em>and<\/em> Research Professor of Philosophy at <\/em>Earlham College, Richmond<\/em>, Indiana<\/em>, USA<\/em>.\u00a0He was educated at Redlands High School in California, Yale, Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Toronto, Harvard and Oxford. He currently teaches in the University of Cape Town`s EMBA programme.\u00a0His books include:\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action, a study of an application of Paulo Freire\u00b4s pedagogical\u00a0philosophy in rural Chile<\/em> (London Macmillan 1985); <\/em>Letters from Quebec; Understanding the Global Economy; The Dilemmas of Social Democracies; Gandhi and the Future of Economics; Rethinking Thinking; Unbounded Organizing in Community;\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0The Nurturing of Time Future.\u00a0His new book, written with the assistance of Gavin Andersson, <\/em>Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential for Survival, is now available from the publisher, Dignity Press, and from Amazon and other major booksellers, as a print book and as an eBook<\/em>. <\/em>howardri@earlham.edu<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"