Every Frame has an Edge

From the Climate Psychology Alliance I receive a journal, with a variety of contributions of many kinds, worth reading. It is called Explorations, and the latest issue has a theme: Widening the Frame. Worth a read.

I would like to “widen the frame” to include the hegemony of a money creation economy that starts with debt*. This matter deserves greater attention being paid as it affects so much of our “everyday experiences of being in the world”. Money creation as currently practiced worldwide is a process where over time we have come close to the end of an exponential curve that may well have been begun quite blindly.    

*The word “debt” is here used to encompass all of the ways in which money is created, and by such creation becomes the pot (store of value in currencies) from which the many varieties of exchange, investment, satisfaction of needs happen, and where relationships such as earning, spending, even giving, etc. take place.

Debt, this hegemony pot, includes our everyday experiences of mortgage and credit cards etc., the capital investments needed by businesses, and governmental creation processes for example bond issuing and quantitative easing. The latter are in effect governments lending to themselves via the financial industries and commercial banks.

The commonality of all this “created debt” and the reason for using this word as a catch-all for monetary creation, is that debt automatically brings with it the requirement to return.  Therefore in our hegemonic system the return requirement has to be added to the amount of money used to serve other needs [to spend, to earn, pay tax etc.]. The process, which is dynamic, of return as well as the servicing of need, means that for any individual, group, organization or government there is never enough. The conundrum of scarcity inherent in the creation system is that growth and/or exploitation follows. The hegemony of our monetary creation system damages and/ or colonizes ‘other’, people or planetary resource or our future generations, or all of them. And we are all in it in everyday ordinary life.

This is just logic, could be part of left hemisphere detail [McGilchrist] and can be followed within the work of reformng economists (like Raworth, Hickel, others who dare to imagine), and also is identified in papers from the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve. The latter institutions, along with financial industries, propose only a variety of ways by means of which the growth imperative might be maintained within economics as the monetary system is now. The former who propose “green ways forward” do offer difference, but are more frequently attended to via their proposals, while analyses of the monetary creation system is left lurking under the surface of those proposals, as though they could come to fruition without attending to and halting or rejecting the dynamics of the debt curve brought about by money creation. A challenge cannot happen, let alone succeed, while the hegemony remains invisible, or at best noted, then left to continue.

In this climate psychology group there is interest in psychological aspects of being, there is openness to exploration of differences, and willingness to face the shadows in ourselves. We look for places where:

• we can “disappoint the plantation” [Resmaa Manakem]
• the unknowns of psycho-social assumptions insert themselves [Wilfred Bion]
• discover the ‘honorable harvest” [Robin Wlll Kimmerer]
• “journey into magical otherwise” [Bayo Akolomafe]   
• And, seek in sharing, our own destroyer / polariser / poisoner
• However you express bringing life force, presencing with gratitude, to the life in your own inadvertent place

Why have we not yet attended to how this monetary system and the hegemony with which it is practiced, suits some part of our being?

We do look for spaces where we can act with gift, gratitude and grace, but at the same time we live within the hegemony without understanding where it lies in inner worlds. We can acknowledge that many of us live within a privilege that has been inadvertently accorded to us by this hegemony; can we use psychology to name its darkness within? Is it denial? Or a different kind of disavowal?

What psychology enabled money to be created this way? What psychological process turned ordinary debt and obligation into an object to be counted, making it a commodity that could sell and buy itself in an endless market? A snake eating its tail?

What psychological insight can mount a real challenge? The monetary reform people (who seem to be hopeful organizations) discuss mainly logical rational issues, recognize alternative possibilities, see effects on climate, eco-diversity, inequalities, mental/physical health etc. but do not yet see psychological causes, the specific underlying human dynamics. They also wonder, as I do, why people cannot see that money creation matters.

Could psychological insight be what is needed for a breakthrough that would begin the breaking of the hegemony? Can we explore this everyday experience with a specific attention?

Remember: the cup of coffee; the loaf of bread; the teddybear; the pencil. Part of the cost of each drives growth and exploitation. This is an everywhere everyday problem.

I have previously written others of these blogs on “Money” – see them here.

Hey – we could do it differently – and better!