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Monday
Sep212009

A New Economic Map

DateMonday, September 21, 2009 at 12:35PM

Friday evening I had the pleasure of seeing Riane Eisler at Holy Name College in Oakland on her new book, The Real Wealth of Nations. In her talk Riane spoke of her lifelong effort to bring systematic partnership thinking into the world of economics and politics.

By partnership, or mutual respect system, Riane suggests that we expand our current limited economic perspective (of control, domination and scarcity) to include the life-supporting activities of households, communities and nature (that produce new life). By this we would reflect on how we human beings relate to our natural habitat and our intra-household relations, and consider these economic activities, i.e. seeing these are natural places of exchange, that require mutual respect and care.

This is where Riane and the work I do with Inner Economics meet. Our work reconsiders the original meaning of economics as “management of the household”, and we consider economic sectors such as the household, natural habitat, inner world and volunteer communal sector indispensable and necessary to maintaining the overall health and wellbeing of the individual and collective home.  In fact, these sectors oftentimes create a different type of “in-come”, one that may or may not have a monetary representation, but that does symbolize an inflow of reciprocity, potencia, fulfillment, and overall life- all of the qualities that in essence shape us to become who we really came here to be.

So if it is true that in our post-industrial technological society what is of utmost important is the quality of human capital (i.e. people who have the opportunity to develop their full potential and have found their own delivery tools), than an economics systems based only on the market and on control of scarce resources will never get us there. If we are convinced that resources are scarce, we will fight to get what we need and remain stuck in the dominant paradigm of there “not being enough”.

But if we expand what we imagine economics to be, then we can relax into a deeper embodied knowing that there is enough, realizing that in fact there is an unlimited supply of life available to us all, and that it mainly requires that each one of us step more fully into the journey of life, with all of its pains and challenges, to let it shape us into our natural capacity to give and receive, create and initiate, and to fully feel alive.

It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a world to offer the full-spectrum opportunities to develop our true potentcia. It takes partnership to balance this journey of exchange.

AuthorElizabeth | Comment3 Comments |

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April 22, 2011 | Unregistered Commenterused ibm pcs

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