That too many people, including policy-makers and media figures “are out of their intellectual depth and easily manipulated” by the bewildering complexity of the financial-political feedback-loop is almost irrefutable, and I agree with comments in this debate it’s “a symptom of the limitations of our neural architecture”. But I don’t know if we should take the question of neural architecture in the biological sense. There’s a cultural and practical response that needs to be considered at least as strongly.
We are also dealing with the limitations of our neural architecture as a global civilization. We are just beginning to understand the implications of what it means to be fully committed members of a global civilization, in which shared values and our common humanity, are driving forces that outstrip historical prejudices and rivalries.
Media technologies have rapidly developed into a kind of planetary neural net, but we are not adequately adept at parsing information or ensuring that needed practical information gets to where it needs to go. So cynics can easily make the case that an informed citizenry is now all but impossible, because information overload as so eroded the value of information as such.
But, we must remember: we are evolved to deal with complexity. As Buckminster Fuller so ably argues in the collection of lectures compiled as Utopia or Oblivion, the human brain is the most powerful ‘anti-entropy machine’ we know of, highly adapted to lend order to universe ruled by entropy and to synthesize astonishingly complex informational subsets.
In short, we can adapt our hyper-literal industrial mindset, so tightly bound by the false dualities stagnation-progress, backward-forward, unproductive-productive, valueless-valued, irrelevant-measurable, to the more difficult, more useful, more far-reaching intellectual project of dynamic evolutionary systems.
Complexity is not beyond us; it’s the challenge we face, just now with more human-generated meta-complexity than ever before.
I think the problem of an overfed, overfunded Congress is central to the practical problem solving that needs to be done, but I think we can make great strides if we get large numbers of people thinking about the practical problem solving, and how it can be done.
A few points:
- Predatory lending must be treated as a serious offense: lenders should never be rewarded for creating business relationships that fail utterly and ruin lives.
- Tax credits related to lending should be oriented toward markets and activities that help build community-level sustainable businesses and quality of life increases.
- Mark-to-market refinancing has to be an option, in part to de-incentivize banks’ pushing the inflation of real estate profits to increase profit projections.
- Bankruptcy negotiations have to restore balance between lender and borrower; recent “innovations” in bankruptcy laws have shifted power to banks, put consumers at steep disadvantage, helped to drive crisis.
- Money borrowed from federal government cannot simply be used as buffer against banks’ reserve shortfalls; lending must lead to lending.
- Restoration of something like Glass-Steagall protections, to keep wealth-focused investment banking from marginalizing small-investor consumer banking.
These are just a few of the practical approaches that we need to be thinking about, however little the average citizen’s understanding of these topics may be. These are concrete steps citizens can pressure Congress to act on.
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