Category Archives: Healthcare

At What Cost?

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I was handed a book this week entitled: “People over Capital” (the co-operative alternative to capitalism) and I’m looking forward to reading it on my way to Toronto later next week. The back cover starts with these words: “Economic turmoil, rampant inequality, austerity politics, climate chaos. Capitalism is clearly failing and ordinary people are being forced to pay the price. Faced with such deep-rooted problems there is real hunger for alternative ways of organising our economic systems.”  Increasingly I am becoming aware of the effect of what Foucault calls “biopower” or the commodification of life itself.

The film UK Gold has highlighted with insightful and expository brilliance the true relationship between the UK ‘democratic’ government and the corporate giants. If we’re not careful, we turn a blind to the cost of the cuts and the immense toll that the squeeze is really having on the little people. Whilst literally billions of pounds are being siphoned off into tax havens to bolster the super rich, we are making unbelievable cuts to our public services and welfare systems. The heartbreaking truth is that we are paying for this, not only financially, but people are being eaten up like bread, fodder for the economic machine that is destroying the very life we are made for. I know of two people in the last few days who sadly took their own lives under extreme pressures being placed on them as they tired to serve the public good – one a police officer, the other a social worker…….

I have blogged about ‘revolution’ and the need for something utterly and life-givingly different to what we have now, but I maintain that even in the face of the pain and sorrow, stress and strain that many find themselves in, the answer has never been and will never be violence. There is another way, and it is the way of love. We must love those who perpetrate these crimes against humanity. Our only hope is to forgive the wrong we are suffering and so find a better future for us all. How do we ‘turn the other cheek’ when we feel smacked in the face by an uncaring system that would squeeze the very life out of us for the sake of keeping the economy going? How do we give of ourselves lovingly in the face of such opposition and uncaring greed? How do we dance to a different rhythm than the dominant marching beat that sets it’s metronome to the whims of ‘market forces’?

Now is the time for creative experiments, like those of William Penn, before his sons sold out to greed and dominating hierarchy. These are days to love our enemies until there is nothing left for them except to love us back, as Martin Luther King demonstrated. We are in a moment of extraordinary potential. We must not rush, but take our time to let new hope, vision and pragmatic ways of reorganising ourselves to germinate within us. Kenarchy is about emptying out power, laying our lives down in love for one another, prioritising the dispossessed and radically renegotiating our relationship with money (sacred economics). We can remain as we are but the stark ongoing cost will be destruction, demoralisation and death. Or we can put on love, forgive the past, learn from it and embrace the future. It will cost us everything, but our hope is one of life.

Revolution

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Ok, I can’t sleep. I’ve been needing to write this for ages. I know my voice is small and I live somewhere in the north of rural lancashire in the UK, but I want to add my voice to the growing song that is rising in the hearts of the multitude. We need a revolution and we are in the midst of one, but we don’t fully know it yet. It is stirring in our hearts, the yearning for something truly and radically different. Russell Brand gave voice to it, in his interview with Jeremy Paxman. You can see it on youtube.

I watched question time the other week, and I nearly threw my shoe at the television. I was filled with such indignation at the lack of real debate.The ‘right’ and the ‘centre-left’ may as well be saying the same thing, the odd difference in policy, but a maintaining of the status-quo. We cannot and must not allow the wool to be pulled over our eyes. We cannot and must not allow ourselves to be hypnotised or enslaved in our thinking and believe that things cannot and will not change. Part of my job description at the moment is to try and help save/cut 70 million pounds from the health budget for the Morecambe bay area. Save 70 million pounds! I ask you! When there are billions of pounds in off shore tax havens?!

You see we do not dream of a future in which we allow competition and greed to drive us. We do not dream of a future in which our african children starve to death or our afghan brothers are killed by our european ones. We do not dream of a future in which our children are commodities, eaten up by an economic system that pitches them one against another. We do not dream of a future in which we value our children by their grades and devalue education to the degree that we measure success by literacy rates at the age of 16. We do not dream of a world where healthcare is about profit and the ones who need it most cannot access it. We do not dream of a world where we continually rape the earth of her resources and leave an unsustainable planet. We do not dream of a global economy in which the rich are protected and given more and more privilege whilst the ‘feckless poor’ are punished and scapegoated. We do not dream of a world in which girls are slaves within a sex industry. We do not dream of a world in which there is such disparity between rich and poor. We do not dream of a world in which we spend trillions of dollars on war because we have such a skewed idolatry of nation states. We do not really believe that war will eventually bring real peace. We do not dream of a world in which billions of dollars are siphoned into tax-free havens so the rich can build their super yachts and we have to cut back our public services to the extent that the only other alternative on the table becomes to privatise everything and increase yet more competition whilst sacrificing our very souls. NO!

We dream of something different. We imagine a very alternative future to the dominant reality of our time. We hope for something far more beautiful. We are in a change of eras and we must not be scared. We must not be silenced and we must not give up. Something is stirring in our hearts and we must let it stir us more into love and action.

Can you imagine a world in which we didn’t send young men and women off to war, but instead trained them to rebuild cities that have been devastated, like Damascus, or taught them to irrigate deserts so that streams would flow there and there would be no need for starvation? Can you imagine a world with multiple economic systems based on gift in which the primary drive was giving and receiving instead of buying and selling? Can you imagine people living where they want to, not only where they can afford to? Can you imagine excellent healthcare available to all people everywhere, not just in the rich, developed lands, but given freely to all who need it? Can you imagine a radical overhaul in how we create energy? Can you imagine a government which doesn’t dominate or control and isn’t in the pocket of multinational corporations, but rather serves the real needs of the peoples and partners with other governments to ensure everybody has enough, through a sharing of resource and ideas? Can you imagine businesses which are not driven by greed, but by the needs of the communities around them? Can you imagine laws that really free us to live and breathe and have our being, but protect the most vulnerable rather than exploiting them? Can you imagine education that celebrates difference, creates a genuine love of learning and inspires the next generation to go even further in love and creativity? It’s not beyond our imaginings! It is the longing of our hearts. It is what God gave life to us for……to love, to create, to heal, to steward, to tenderly care for, to enjoy.

There are many solutions to explore. There is much co-creating to be done. We must end the commodification of human beings and the earth and treat one another and the land as friends. We must resist the temptation towards violence and hate. We can dismantle the old oppressive systems whilst building together a wholly different future. Do not be put off by a seeming lack of answers. If we ask the questions, more questions will come! And from more questions, we will together discover some answers we hadn’t thought of before. The earth is calling for it, our hearts are longing for it, the spirit groans for it. It is time. It is time for a deep and long-lasting revolution of love.

Sacred Economics – Money and the Mind

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If we don’t begin to understand the place money has in our minds, how it is interwoven with the current story of humanity then we will not be able to changeimgres the way we think about it and therefore how we use it. Christine Laguarde (head of the IMF) recently said that ‘there is no alternative to the current measures being taken around he world by governments and banks in dealing with the financial crisis we find ourselves in.’ Surely this de facto statement isn’t actually true!

Some economists argue that money has been around for about 5000 years and define it according to its functions as a unit of exchange or unit of account or a store of value. But Charles defines money as something quite different – something which only came into being in the 7th imagescentury BCE in Greece. It was in Greece that coins first started having a stamp on them to indicate their value. This stamp or sign or symbol then gave the   power. The marks became tokens of social agreements. It is this power of agreement that is the real essence of money. CE goes on to argue that those who want to return to the ‘good old days’ of the gold standard are longing for something that never really existed, except for brief moments in history as an ideal but not a reality. The transformation of money does not involve us going back to a certain standard but from an unconscious to an intentional embodiment of our agreements.

Now that everything has become commodified, we believe that things are equal to the money that can replace them – “you can always buy another one”. This immaterialism has depersonalised the world and removed the sacred. It is no wonder that we live as though if we wrecked the world we could simply buy another.

Money has become an agent of separation. We cannot mix business and friendship. We have tried to put a price on everything even our creativity. We have come to believe that we cannot accomplish our dreams without money and for some of us we believe that if only we had enough money then…….

So much of the way we view the world, and therefore money is underpinned by the philosophy of Ancient Greece, especially Plato. Such thought splits our world into a sacred/secular divide. But Charles challenges the idea that says “Sure, economic reform is a worthy cause, but what is more important is  transformation of the human consciousness”. We try to separate out that which is utterly interwoven. Just as we cannot separate out spirit and matter, so we cannot separate out the psyche or our paradigms from how we think about and use money.

Money does not need abolishing, it needs restoring to its proper role. It has become a means of homogeneity/commodification and depersonalisation, a god that is not only our universal aim, but also our universal means. But money can change. We are not its slave. We can separate it out from the story of limitless growth and domination. It can become an agent of reconnection, redistribution and reconciliation. It just needs a bit of reimagining!