Profiting or Profiteering

Rerenaissance, Rereformation, and an Open Note to Greta

by  the editorial board

On the last day of October 1517, a professor at a recently founded university posted a notice on the town bulletin board.   He was proposing an academic discussion of some of the financial practices by the most powerful institutions of that day and the effects that those practices were having on the everyday lives of ordinary people throughout the society and on the future prospects for the entire civilization.

A new media industry had come into being 70-some years earlier; it was based on a new invention called printing with movable type that’d been invented by a blacksmith and goldsmith in Strasbourg named Johannes Gutenberg.   That invention had enabled an unprecedentedly transformative method of mass communication, which had brought about an information revolution and had allowed the extraordinarily more rapid spread of news and ideas.

In that new media age, the discussion and advocacy that was sparked by the professor at the University of Wittenberg, and then others, spread virtually overnight throughout the country and the continent; within a couple months, a movement based on his theses and then a strong opposing reaction condemning and ridiculing it were sweeping throughout Western Civilization.

That movement came to be called the Reformation, and it radically and inalterably changed the scientific, economic, industrial, educational, political, financial, and governmental foundations, infrastructure, and history of the Western World and thereby of the entire globe.

On the 20th day of August 2018, in the first year of the second half millennium since the naissance of the Reformation, a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Stockholm began to skip classes.   Through this action, she was voicing her theses about some of the financial practices by the most powerful institutions of this day and the effects that these practices are having on the everyday lives of ordinary people throughout the society and on the future prospects for the entire civilization.

A new media industry had come into being 20-some years earlier; it was based on a new invention called the World Wide Web that’d been invented by an engineer and computer scientist at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire: European Council for Nuclear Research) near Geneva named Tim Berners-Lee.   This invention has enabled an unprecedentedly transformative method of mass communication, which has brought about an information revolution and has allowed the extraordinarily more rapid spread of news and ideas.

In this new media age, the discussion and advocacy that was sparked by the schoolgirl sitting alone outside the Swedish parliament, and then others, spread virtually overnight throughout the country and the continent; within a few months, a movement based on her theses and then a strong opposing reaction condemning and ridiculing it were sweeping throughout Global Civilization.

Whether this movement has the potential to so radically and inalterably change the scientific, economic, industrial, educational, political, financial, and governmental foundations, infrastructure, and history of the entire globe is yet to be seen.

Renaissance and Reformation Hand in Hand

In the 16th Century, ordinary people were faced with key questions posed by the Wittenberg professor, Martin Luther, and others of that day.

The invention that Gutenberg had introduced in the 15th century had been helping to unleash the flourishing of technology, arts, sciences, and new ideas of and new perspectives on what people and peoples were capable of, along with new thoughts on what peoples, institutions, and especially individuals were responsible for and accountable for.   This flourishing, this emergence from the Dark Ages, came to be called the Renaissance.   The dynamics of the Renaissance helped to propel the Reformation.   And the Reformation’s dynamics synergistically had the same effect on the Renaissance.

It was in the fervency of the newly kindled, and rekindled, notions of capabilities, and of responsibilities and of rights, that the ideas of Luther and others of that day arose and took hold, as the adamant opposition to those ideas also took hold.

The Third Year Thence

In the 21st Century, ordinary people are faced with key questions posed by the Stockholm schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, and others of this day, explicitly and implicitly, about whether we are able to muster, or are even capable of mustering, the resources to assuage the potential damage to our environment that many scientists have warned we could be exacerbating or outright causing.   We certainly face the question of whether we even want to do anything different about this apparent environmental peril.

We may wonder how much the Web can live up to the hype of its potential, which has been touted since it was introduced in the 20th century, for facilitating and galvanizing the deliberation and resolve of the planet’s people as much as movable-type printing did.   Can Berners-Lee’s invention, to anywhere near the revolutionary extent that Gutenberg’s invention clearly has, rekindle ideas of what people are capable of and are responsible for and accountable for?

Now this month, having just begun the third year of the second half millennium since the Reformation’s naissance, we might ask how firmly and how fervently the ideas of Thunberg and others of this day might be taking hold, as well as just how adamantly the opposition to these ideas might also be taking hold.

Thank you, Greta

Thank you, Greta, for the clear, urgent, and passionate wake-up call that you have given us all.   You have encouraged us.   You have given us renewed focus to work towards finding and sharing creative solutions to these complex and critical issues involved with climate change.   Here are some basic questions, observations, and thoughts on the circumstance we find ourselves in and on potential tools, mechanisms, and approaches that we offer in response to your call to action.

How can sufficient financial resources be applied to facilitate the necessary shift in focus and urgency?

We know how money is created, and for a long time money has been continuously created at the levels necessary and yet not used to address these issues:
Into the Heart of Darkness—of Money: Upstream to Its Source

Where did our financial power go?

Emerging ideas are flowing on how to put the financial resources back into the hands of the people:
Feeding the People or Feeding off the People

What are the old, dysfunctional, institutionalized habits that hamper efforts to take effective collective action?

Emerging ideas are flowing on the obstacles we must overcome to effectively work together toward solutions:
Collective Action and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

Where does the power of the people reside?

Emerging ideas are flowing on how to reclaim the political power of the people:
A People Who Thought They Could Govern Themselves: Prescriptions for an Ailing Body Politic

The Highest Aspiration

Throughout all of human history, squalor, abjection, and misery have been the rule for the masses of the populace.   And for thousands of years, it was normal to accept these as being the norm, in particular to accept abjection as the standard.   Cinderellism was essentially the highest aspiration that ordinary people could hope for: that by fluke or good fortune or some other providence, some power or person would come in and sweep them off (along with, at best, a small number of family or friends) to a world of decency and prosperity.

The aspirations that the Renaissance and Reformation engendered were idealistic.   Although when Europeans began their foray into the New World, quests for cinderellistic grandeur and riches, for El Dorado, were common, some colonies arose that dreamt of societies in which the entire populace could live decently and prosperously, at least, it was perceived, for any who would work for it.   Thus anticinderellism has been at the core of the American ethic right from its genesis.   And that ethic included the notion of attaining prosperity from honestly profiting from one’s work, not from profiteering.

At the very start, a part of America really included essentially and uncoincidentally the pure and inevitable expression of the Renaissance and of the Reformation.   It has been the absolute quintessence of America from its very inception.   Thus the apparent resurgence of cinderellism in recent decades seems to be overwhelming the American populace with a cognitive dissonance to the point of mass loss of self-recognition and loss of self-identity.

This was, after all, a people who thought they could govern themselves.   They had just enough of a semblance of grownuphood to band together, to rise up, and to aspire to set themselves apart.   Now many generations later, having seemingly lost this sense of themselves, they yearn for it and desperately flail about seeking it: feeling so lost and bereft of this sense.   And having lost any semblance of it, they give the impression of having even lost the ability to recognize what attribute defines this and identifies it.

We may ask if they and others around the globe can now find it within themselves to band together, to rise up, and to unleash a rerenaissance and rereformation.   Or have we humans sold our humanity for profiteering?   (There’s a grownup in the room—who happens to not even be an adult yet.)   Greta has found that we are still not mature enough to face what is too uncomfortable.   Still she refuses to believe that we are evil.   If Greta has not given up on us, have we?

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