I’m reblogging this because the current (Spring) sprinkler ban by Hastings District Council has once again raised the whole issue of why – oh for heaven’s sake why – we give our water – *our* water – away to an outside water bottling plant, rationalised with all the empty rhetoric and clichés like “this is simply the market allocating resources,” or “investment, jobs and GDP.” Such ordinary thinking. Such ignorance of our wider world.
Some are now calling for ignoring the sprinkler ban in order to highlight our discontent. It has certainly raised the issue and kept it in the public eye – and hopefully it will make the councillors responsible realise that they need to demonstrate thinking beyond merely the wording of the regulations and ‘resource management plans’. We are not happy with your financial deal maker thinking on this issue Mr National Party politician, though for most it will be enough to make a vocal stand, and keep our sprinklers off.
But I don’t think we will not see serious reframings such as the recognition of rights of nature and communities, or the duties thereto by more powerful interests, or the control of corporate influence in politics, while the neoliberal/corporate nexus remains at the policy levers. They have far too much at stake in pleading in the interests of selfishness and greed.
connections and interdependencies of people to other people, and to the places on this planet whole to which they belong and on which they depend.
political movement, cannot coexist with such meaningless mechanical ‘dys’-connected views of people and place.
extractors; and we disempower the nation, the community, cooperation, and the creative potential of both individuals and our economy.
happening are rubbish.
That is the greatest distinction I would make between Social Democrats and Neoliberals. Neoliberals have no sophisticated view of either people or society (how it actually works), or the environment (how it actually works). They have no ecology. They have no sociology. They have no psychology. They have no history. They have no philosophy. They have modelling and mathematics … and false assumptions.
The Guardian’s Oliver Milman has written that 
meaning into the future beyond.
which to understand you need a little systems background – the complex adaptive systems of socio-ecological things. The straw that breaks the camels back, the threshold over the edge of which the unravelling begins, the ball that flips out of the bowl to some new attractor point and system state that absolutely no one can predict with any certainty. Likely the closest one to predict that new state (if they survive) will have been considered slightly batty.
taint of big money and narrow goals; open dialogue; channeling a corporate money, money, money message of meritocracy and other myths; reforming the public sector into a corporate autocratic functionary state for the reward of group-think and train-scheduling technocracy, where conceptual thinking is banned.
speaking on the side of truth and compassion. To think for ourselves and never be afraid of seeing things differently. To make choices based on our hopes, never our fears.
There is a very great problem with this recurring theme of the subjugation and ‘othering’ of people and place. At some point, someone gets carried away with their own delusions of grandeur and decides to invade a metaphorical Poland. And then the unraveling begins after a brief spurt of triumph, and you end up in a bunker or strung up from a lamppost in Milan.
Because I saw it happen in my years working for the public service – we went from an ethos of public service and a clear purpose outcome-focus (though we never used the word ‘outcome’) with engagement expected within the professionals (you were expected to think, and we had some incredible characters who could express!)
Naturally, I laughed. Such a small mind. Such a dangerous mind. Such an autocratic mind. A pure functionary. Scheduling trains without thought of the inhumanity of what he did … in the interests of obedience and a certain, mechanical, hierarchical world. Who would not reject this view? It is not what a life should ever be.
Inhumanity dressed up as “just doing my job.”
than Shakespeare and the great British romantics.
uncontrollability doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have an end, an outcome we consider good. Though I would say that any outcomes ought to be well
control, to command, to establish hierarchies and order, to have only room in life for one thing and to be ‘efficient’ in that, to live within the delusion that they can eliminate surprises. Within their imagination, they build a brittle castle around themselves, convinced of its iron strength. Deluded by the paper bulwark they build against the tidal shift.
There is another way. We provide best for our children by providing the *capacities* and the abilities that are the prerequisite for a good life of their free choosing. Resilience and flexibility. The capacity to live life to the fullest; to bring forth every Picasso and never command them into being an accountant. The ability to see and be wise, to relate and feel.
enthusiasm for open dialogue without the arrogance that takes offence. To rejoice in the beauty, to accept when it changes you because there was a moment that was so profound that you can only stop and drop into the bliss. To embrace, to sit and contemplate, to be broad or focused whenever the need arises.
This is indigenous thinking. Belonging and resilience go together. Those that try to set us apart, or reduce us to parts within a transactional machine, destroy them both. Being Native to a People and Place is incompatible with ideas of trade-off, exploitation and attempts at engineered certainty, because you are arguing for the insanity of eating yourself. We
future of our culture – then that is somehow OK. “The market will provide,” and other cliches (whenever you read a cliche, take it as a red flag – a thoughtless functionary mind).
is, the planet for what it is, community and belonging for what it is, ethics for what it is, merit for what it is. They understand people and the things that make us whole – our creativity and spirit, our sense of belonging. They also understand that a ‘thin’ economy with all the money at the top and no demand in the rest of society is doomed to stall. The small businesses suffer; health and crime rise; the potential of individuals, communities and landscapes lies moribund. Greed eats the soul of our home, but the greedy can never see that because they aren’t looking.
institutions (companies, departments, research, policy, community) is a very serious concern in my view. We become rigid, autocratic, centralised and hierarchical rather than flexible, dialogic, decentralised and empowered.
You have to look beyond the mechanics of the model to the system to appreciate those core community qualities. Sports teams understand it, the better managers, any half competent military unit.
“To know the world, you have to live in the world.”
For us it was eels, cockabullies, birds nests and bees – and about any other thing that involved water, trees, mud and a live (or dead) thing, as well as the community activities on the land from mustering to dusty yards smelling of dung. We were curious beyond measure. But it was never about measure. It was about awe, reverence, contentment, and fun. I’ve written about relationships to landscapes and people in my blog 
both sides of our brains. Belong; to the wholeness of life, of consciousness. Realise the connections, and that you are connected to others and the landscape.
back recording bird counts where all the connections of a particular spot, with particular qualities, were in play. The fact that it was a great spot for kereru had made the place in which I lay.
focus on predictability and technology – is, to me, a risky enterprise in unwisdom; in UNeducating the mind.
Treasury took relating to policy analysts from the 1990s. We were told that knowledge of a sector wasn’t required. Economics would be the ring that binds them all. Not merely necessary – itself debatable – but sufficient. More, that any practical and professional knowledge within the field and within communities was a disadvantage.
disconnected from any real world in this universe.
I’ve used this diagram often when talking about land use. But it is so much more than that. The connections between and among things, patches, processes, dollars, functions of soil, stock, trees, wetlands, water and thought – many not quantifiable, even definable in any consistent way because they shift, and sometimes die, and sometimes create something new – like life or consciousness – out of something that wasn’t a part of any part. It’s why I like murmurations of starlings as an allegory on life – shapes come into being … and then dissolve into nothing but air. You cannot understand it all by reductionism. You have to see things as both whole and parts – Arthur Koestler’s holons.
functions and processes contingent on time and place, changing with the breeze and the season (verbs of relationships) far more than objects (nouns of measured things). Land isn’t a ‘unit’ of anything we can visualise as a ‘resource’ – not in any meaningful way. That is as blunt and brutal as looking at an individual and measuring ‘it’ in terms of how much soap you can make out of the body. There is so much more, and that is where morality and wisdom lies – outside the machine.
model for business following World War II. Cognitive dissonance took hold. The rise in the ideal of the corporation was the first explanation for our wilful amnesia.
doctrinaire Neoliberal economists are still looking at their models and believing that it will. This is the second reason for our amnesia – the rise of Neoliberalism. Strongly associated with it was the fall of empiricism within the economic discipline, having its nadir with the cult–like Neolibs, upon which all reference to the real empirical world was lost.
Some time in the early 1990s, flush from the Mother of All Budgets, then Finance Minister Ruth Richardson made the comment, “What’s good for business is good for New Zealand.”
Adam Smith recognised and wrote about this – keep checks on the powerful, their political influence, and on immoral behaviour. Once that is done, regulate lightly, because the village looks after itself – but his words have been twisted. The Neoliberals who hold Smith up as some saint for the ‘free market’ don’t mention his warnings and lessons of immorality and power, his preconditions of fairness and equity to free commerce. They don’t mention that before we deregulate, we need to ensure we have both an ethos of care, and checks on those who would use and grow their own power to influence the field of play. Power and morals don’t come into it remember. Just utilitarian calculus – if the mob’s happiness is greater than the innocent’s they happen to be lynching, then that is the ‘rational choice’. All good. All calculus, with each dollar a unit of happiness.
Ownership matters. What size and dominance it has, and whether those owners are part of a community and place or distant geographically and without a sense of belonging. This is what we need to look after; our structures of ownership that drive creativity alongside a motivated people and a healthy landscape. Beware the Vesteys and the oligarchies. Build de Tocqueville’s democracy; Jefferson’s vision of agrarian democracy.
to the many. Our policy people were not then so blind that they saw no difference between the local hardware store and our then equivalent of Walmart.
Christopher Alexanders, Lewis Mumfords – are right. Think local. Don’t get seduced by some swank from the metropolis with the big cigar. Look to the artisans in the back alleys.
The question of how we as a region encourage a better economy and jobs for our people is not often debated. Certainly not deeply. We seldom differentiate. There is an implicit view that we support new enterprises, but which ones. I know of artisans who do incredible things with sound systems but lack the start-up capital to take the next step. Who knows what could come of them. And yet 
if an outsider comes in and promises a number of low paid jobs by extracting something of ours and ‘compromising’ our commons, the suits are on full display for the photo op.
Small business and artisanal start-ups are just not as sexy. Perhaps it is about a sense of importance. Is there
We have even heard politicians appeal to outsiders with our ‘low wages’, attempting to compete based on lower costs rather than higher quality. They are not lower costs. Someone always pays, and it is us in lack of hope, the dulling of local enterprise, engagement and thought, and water we cannot drink and in which we cannot swim.
corporates, has higher median incomes, less inequality, lower unemployment, better community infrastructure, streets, schools, community gathering place, as well civic and social engagement.
Local firms are more reliable, they do not take the subsidy money and run; they are more locally accountable; tend to buy local themselves; generate greater creativity and entrepreneurship; and care about the local identity and celebrate diversity and difference. Look at our Hawke’s Bay cafés and bars. Some of them are proudly weird. That’s Austin Texas’ small business slogan; “Keep Austin Weird.” Portland Oregon as well. We really ought to steal it.
Albuquerque’s is even better and focused on buying local – “
Which highlights two things. How you see the world – as mechanical device with people and land as measured cogs, or as a system of mutual interrelationships and necessary cooperation – is one.
Hawke’s Bay Kaumatua Des Ratima quoted to me once “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Actually, I have to take a notebook with me when I meet Des because you can guarantee you’ll have to write a few things he says down! Yesterday it was “That’s bricks and mortar. Where’s the *soul*?”
And then it won’t matter what you say. Our trust in politicians has fallen from well over 50% in the early 1980s, to 23% in 1992 after a history of lies and not listening from Roger Douglas, to Jim Bolger promising “a decent society” in 1990 and giving us Ruth Richardson instead. Now it is at 8% under the regime of overt justification for the selfish and destructive agendas of mega-commerce. Who patently, obviously, demonstrably …. do. not. care.
‘normal’ science from within a theoretical construct. Most we think of as completely true. Most probably are. But we also know that in 50 or 100 years time some precious theories and constructs will probably be rejected and replaced with another. The history and philosophy of science clearly demonstrates it – geocentric to heliocentric, the four elements to Lavoisier’s chemical revolution, Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian to Quantum physics, static plate to plate tectonics, eugenics and physiognomy to “what race?” And it is still goes on, with a current shift from mechanical determinism to complex adaptive systems where the focus shifts from the parts to the relationships within particular and shifting settings. I was taught climax ecology in the early 1980s – the idea of a predictable succession to a ‘natural state’ climax, and then along came patch dynamics theory. What is true?
be blind to the bull charging because it is closeted within a bubble, looking at its feet. It assumes that their view is the only view. They would presume to know the kestrel from a position in another world.
At the other end of the continuum people speak in cliches to justify an unexamined life – “the market will provide,” “it is written,” “the financial analysis demonstrates,” “we need to be science-led.”
data, but on those values they presume you hold. If, for example, you are tainted with a short-term or narrow worldview – or profit before people – or what people see as narrow technocracy – then you may lose peoples’ trust to the point where they will not care one iota what is said; *even* if you speak the truth. Others, of course will think you are a fine fellow because they share those values others find appalling. If you are insincere, it eventually shines like a warning beacon.
I’ve seen 
people don’t trust the outside ‘expert’. They distrust their competence until they prove themselves able to think within a space. But once a technocrat who understands the field, you encounter more problems from you ‘expert’ colleagues. I you counter the false analysis by referring to complexity and pointing out that their analysis is framed too simplistically, then you risk – within the technocracies – being called “anti-science.” Been there, had that, many times.
at the failures of neoliberalism. Belief fades when the results don’t come. Spin becomes a liability because it suddenly stands in sharp relief. We hear the words “trickle down” and we laugh. They don’t say those words any more. They know their power is gone for good.
Though now to disagree and discuss is dissent. And so I trust even less because who can abide a frozen mind in the head of bully. We have lost a great deal with that loss of care for others from our political and commercial heads.
effect on our communities and local businesses. We can connect the dots. We can see the red light flickering on the dash. We can see the spin and deflections away from any possible blame on intensive land use, and irrigation, and attempts to make our land a factory to suit the narrow commercial ends of mega-corporate thinking. Giving our best water to overseas owners is “just the market in action,” they say. Oil and gas fracking over the catchments feeding our precious Hawke’s Bay aquifers is “great for jobs and GDP.” The Ruataniwha Dam will bring prosperity and free ice-cream for all. Wadeable water is fine says Minister for the Environment, Nick Smith. Campylobacter has nothing to do with the drive to more irrigated land use. 
The people in the regions do not need a democracy to decide whether they want industrial agriculture and GMOs because they are all flat-earth plebs who don’t understand the science. That’s why we gave Canterbury an appointed commissioner in place of a democratically elected council …. twice. Totalitarianism by stealth. And we won the last election by a whicker because a nice German created a fiasco that scared the public, so we should try that getting-rid-of-democracy game again. It’s a good one.
Our aquifer water has always been superb. We did not need systems of water management that had to treat for such things as campylobacter. The impacts on people and local business has been extremely hard. A great local butcher, our high quality food producers and cafes. And we are a region known for the quality of what we produce – quality water, quality food, quality environment, quality experience. 
The key lesson with the Havelock North water crisis is the need to acknowledge connections. We so often think of the environment, community and business as silos to trade-off one from the other. That is the sickness of our modern economic age, and it is a deadly idea.
Nazi era of inhumanity; of totalitarianism, of the ascendancy of soulless mechanical acting where humanity loses itself in instruction, obedience and order.
We hear the screech with the metal on metal jarring of the corporate automaton; the hierarchical order of a machine reduced to outputs, tasks and ‘accountable’ measures. Human as machine; animal as machine; society as machine; economy as machine; corporation as machine; planet as machine. We hear it in the accosting of good science and quantitative disciplines into a rationalisation of the insane. We see it with the reduction of the whole damn planet in all its glorious complexity to a neoliberal economic defining of all things as weights and dollars – yes, life included – to infinite and measured ‘resources’. We see it in the pursuit of ready money, quantitative ‘instrumental rationality’ without the guiding rudder of ‘moral rationality’, transactions and markets.
thinker, or student of humanities. It should be apparent to us all. Life means more than this. We do not live in a certain and controllable world known through numbers and technology alone. It is unwisdom masquerading as objective truth. It is monochrome presenting itself as the light from a prism. It is totalitarianism trumpeting “freedom and folk”; exploitation wrapped up in the rhetoric of sustainability. It is words like ‘balance’ and ‘efficiency’ and ‘accountability’ and the clichés of power. It is loss and eventual collapse hailed as profit, progress, jobs and GDP. They point us to the promised land, and march us toward Mordor.
rationalise the pursuit of a mad end. Without a moral rudder, you can rationalise anything. Melville’s Moby Dick was about that. Only their purpose was mad; the deranged pursuit of the white whale for revenge; all by rational means – the technocracy of the harpoon and how to get close enough to thrust it home. The same ill-considered purpose of the rational Dr Frankenstein – let us build a man from body parts – the insanity but technocratically brilliant Dr Strangelove riding his precious bomb.
totalitarianism as convention. The machine as metaphor for life. Love as chemical reaction. Reducible to that. This is how it is. This is what we do. To question is dissent. And my reductionism mechanical screech is superior to yours.
o see the potential corruption of humanity when technocrats take charge, or corporations and economists. The cult of Eugenics was one shared by many others besides the Nazi regime.
The one line thing is such a topic here. Like Auckland CBD 15 odd years ago where the reliance upon a single line of power led to a major failing for six weeks. They did not heed advice from wise engineers arguing for the need of back-up options and resilience. Their obtuseness led to a major national economic disaster. And these same financial administration-type ‘managers’ – these narrow technocrats with spreadsheets for brains – argued during the disaster that their purely financial focus (and their assumptions of certainty and controllability) indicated a “well-run” business. Interviewer Kim Hill was almost speechless in response. There is no power in the most important CBD in New Zealand and you say it is a well run business??!!
quanta as the only basis for decision making) was unable to grasp principles of policy and strategy. He *could not* grasp the concept of a decentralised system with modularity (different ‘module’ subsystems that can keep going if the “centre does not hold”) and with built in resilience to shocks and uncertainty. Solar and other potentially decentralised systems – micro-hydro, wind etc.- may be more expensive. They certainly were within the contexts within which he chose to place them. He had a spreadsheet, so that’s ok then, it must be true. And so, it follows within his chosen myopic space, then obviously the large centralised mill approach is just the berries. We keep failing to think. We get more narrow and hierarchical and autocratic, and the narrowest non-thinkers and administrative types climb and climb well above their level of incompetence.
and engagement with the complex real world outside. There is this strange conjunction between desires for power, ignorance, arrogance and technocratic thought. And they build castles in the sand with nonsense assumptions of control, and by so doing set up the conditions for not less, but *more*, uncertainty and uncontrollability by pushing us toward thresholds they do not see.
You cannot predict when the storm may hit, or what type of ‘storm’ it will be (economic, social, environmental, a structural failure), or its effects.
They don’t think of ‘trust’ much when they talk about the economy. They split it up. They, the technocrats. They put such things as ‘trust’, ‘integrity’, ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ in the box marked ‘social’; something to deal with “after we get the economy right.”
performing organisation, then build the social capital – the trust, participation, sense of belonging, engagement, spirit of cooperation and collective action. You cannot create that culture if you don’t have integrity, a real regard for the greater good, and for truth.
organisations. If they have strong cultural capital – open dialogue, participation and engagement that goes far beyond cynical box-ticking tokenism, honest reporting and integrity – then you build trust and the cultural freedom to see beyond boundaries in time and convention, to innovate, to live and work to greater goals than any prescribed task.
We now live in an age where many of the people and practices within our public service departments, large corporations and our parliament are far more interested in deal making, back room collusion and the manufacturing of truth. The erosion of integrity has lead to an erosion of trust. That cannot be disputed.
John Key has no capacity to think strategically (other than how to jolly the public to get himself reelected), only fiddle at the edges of his ideology – an asset sale here, a deregulation to allow more exploitation there, a tax cut over the horizon. We have never – I would argue – had a more disconnected PM with less concern for our nation, our people, or our future..
be a very useful exercise. Large Corporates were given the rebuild of Christchurch, with small firms and public agents marginalised. They even have gagging clauses in their small firm contracts so they cannot speak their grievances about Fletcher Building shenanigans to the media. One said to me that eventually all the small firms will be little more than contracted labour. This process of gutting our small & medium enterprises (SMEs) to make a corporate even wealthier is just what happened to Iraq post the last invasion with Dick Cheney’s Halliburton et al. ‘rebuilding’ Iraq and subcontracting all the local – and highly competent (after all, they built the original infrastructure) – Iraqi SMEs. Christchurch has become an exercise in corporate welfare once again. The earthquake gave a boost to GDP, because rebuilding destruction does that. GDP is a measure of money flows that takes no account of the loss of an asset – an environmental asset, social capital, or built infrastructure. And so it is illusory for the National Party to claim GDP ‘success’ when that was always going to be a consequence of the quake. Half truths galore.
with declining real prices. They do not understand value or market position. They do not understand resilience or diversity and continuing differentiation. They do not understand that ‘leaving it to the market’ alone (where power *does* truly exist, though the Neoliberal priests assume otherwise), is tantamount to leaving it all to the powerful. That does not mean locally owned, batch-processed, long, high value differentiated value chains; it means the opposite. It does not mean that we create value, multiply value locally, retain value in a place, and then attract value because we build a vibrant cultural life; it means the opposite: a latter-day version of extractive colonisation by corporations. What culture?
Most of these amazing people are not the dull conformists who keep the trains running (sorry, I know that is important). The schedulers are the same people who now get promoted to positions where it isn’t operational scheduling that is the necessary attribute, but thought and the ability to create a motivated, adaptable team who genuinely care about the direction, rather than just the task. Thinking strategically and adaptively requires an understanding of culture and having both a broad and long term view. You need more than technocratic spreadsheets for brains. Seeing a bigger picture recognises potential opportunities and threats, and of the wider system feedbacks you will not find within a spreadsheet. That sort of capacity to both see and think is increasingly lacking, in both the individuals we have promoted to the top, and in the organisational cultures technocrats and megalomanians promote within.
Why does this happen? Why do we promote the excellent train schedulers above those who have a bit of free-thinking art and connection in their lives? Perhaps Hannah Arendt on the rise of totalitarianism has it right. Under tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think. Caring becomes a career threat; one of the great dystopian literary themes.
called ‘manager’; you were senior, principal, deputy, officer in charge amongst other officers, etc.), and where you got brownie points for thinking and where there was explicit concern for your personal development and career path if you had a particular personality and skill set. Your art was nurtured, encouraged and promoted.
Being particular and obedient gets promoted. And with that comes reductionism and the machine. The solution to a flood is to build higher stop banks, not build water holding capacity in the upper landscape. Deal with the symptom you can measure, not the root cause you need a conceptual mind to see. The solution to a drought is a simple – a dam. Measure only one thing and spin a story to defend your small idea. The solution to P is to declare war, not ask multiple questions “why?” to dig into the social system and, god forbid, immeasurable psychology of belonging and hope, or culture or art. Utility trumps grace. Stark grey boxes replace the sense of place you can build with a tree, birdsong, good company and good coffee.
With conformity comes rigidity – and any demand for immediate innovation or adaptation results in a headless chicken panic (change!! uncertainty!!!), and any questioning dialogue about how we are going relative to a purpose resulted in shock, more rigidity, denial, anger and blame, reference to the manual, intakes of breath, and Vogon guard behaviour where Resistance is futile!
and control of a minutely regulated machine with hierarchical layers of instruction and the expectation of blind obedience.
assumptions of Neoliberalism; “there is no such thing as society, just a collection of individuals.” Look after number one. Assume that is the way. Never think that there are such virtues as Manaakitanga, Whanaungatanga, Kaitiakitanga. Never imagine that we could have a world that is better because at the centre of it all is not control, or a desire for power, or selfish ends, but an Ethos of Care.
Dialogue is dissent. Only the megalomaniacs and the train schedulers rise. And for the rest, we have as Albert Hirschman argued, three options: We can Exit, we can Voice in the hope of effecting change, or we can become actively or passively Loyal to the growing power of the dispassionate machine.
there for ‘freedom’, while in the meantime they construct signs over the factory gates with new versions of Arbeit Macht Frei.
We have spread across and changed our world. Change is the constant. But it is maintaining the integrity of our systems that is more important than whether there is any particular ‘natural state’.
Case in point ….. The equatorial tropical forest zone is a hot bed of how we look at socio-ecological systems. Authorities are still trying to get people out of the forests, either to make them preserves (is that ‘making’ a natural or an anthropogenic process?), or to turn them into the local equivalent of a Palm Oil plantation.
The challenge I think is to shift from a structural/compositional (noun) view that any disturbance and harvest is a negative – to a functional (verb) view that a healthy system is one where the integrity of all the functions is maintained above all else – the fertility, reproduction, recruitment, dispersal functions etc. In the long run, culture can only survive within that framework.
Turning those lands into factories that separates and treats everything – EVERYTHING – as a ‘resource’, simply and inevitably leaves the reserves as dysfunctional elements within an environmental desert. It inevitably degrades. It all degrades because it is all connected, each is integral to the other. That degradation includes cultural values because it is valued by neither the ‘resourcists’ nor preservationists. And it inevitably includes the loss in the end of the gold ‘rush to destruction’ economy.
powerful corporates and slum landlords are apparently OK. Governments are big and evil, whereas all commercial enterprises are analogous to small and powerless village bakers. What? So we leave it to the property developers, speculators and slumlords? Such nice chaps. But they donate to the party of course. Keep the wheel churning. Keep the spin going.
the opportunity, connections and information available to the lords who keep taking more of their land and keep them in penury. It’s apparently a meritocracy. So obviously the Irish have less merit. A bit like those struggling for a house. This is where evil begins – with the neoliberal framing of life.
Reducing our world to some delusional purity of markets is a pernicious evil. It encourages power because it assumes it’s all ‘willing buyer-willing seller’ rubbish, and so those with seven corporate lawyers can rip off the worker who has none. Fair deal? Fair go? When you point out this reality as a refutation of the logical bankruptcy of their theories – and all the other nonsense assumptions that have no basis in any real world near you – they will act like religious zealots and defend the indefensible.
Yet it persists. Even after the history of the other ages of neoliberalism – the 1840s (food distribution and ability-to-pay disasters) and the depression (at least we got some reform acts out of that debacle). Then the 1870s and 1890s – the robber barons and more manufactured famines and Lord Curzon (who bought his Lordship before becoming the famously inflexible, moralising, murdering Viceroy of India) repeated the process of famines in India – and another world depression. The 1920s neoliberal jazz age leading to what John Kenneth Galbraith referred to as a ‘thin’ economy (all the money at the top) followed by the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression.
I find it slightly ironic that when in opposition to the extremes of neoliberalism – which actually unleash the worst of powerful, unscrupulous, short-sighted corporate dogs – you can end up strongly supporting Adam Smith’s village ideal – a place without power, where there is social concern and a broader view through an ethic of place.
. It is a mix between an Orwellian and a Huxlian horror where utilitarianism has taken us beyond the edge of reason (the rationalisation of the unjust and the insane); justifying human sacrifice for profits, abolishing democracy because it is so highly ‘inefficient’ if you are a corporate wanting to maximise profit for instance. A world where power continues to concentrate and grow, and besides continuing to exploit, turns on the other power elites without checks – a warlord world of corporate beasts with people and land as defined by their ‘utility’ to respective powers. Talk about a life that is nasty, brutish and short – unless you are one of the few elite.
influence outcomes – power (e.g. colonial history), ideas & culture & meaning, the state, the land, the relations of people and trade, the influence of the new colonising agents – mega-corporates, etc.
that destroy our place and the values of community. I’ve written previously about Creative vs. Extractive economies 
Treasury since 1984. They are not wise, and the institutions that teach them not to think with any breadth or depth are culpable. They are not informed, but at least they can act upon it.
agents’ (read soulless automatons) at the centre of things – 
documentary 
reality of social and natural systems being complex and adaptive *beyond* the dead ideas of mechanical determinism.
It is really profitable to rort a forest from an innocent (call it merely a market thing, ‘arbitrage’; the Solomon Island chief didn’t realise the value, but that’s his problem), to mine it, to reinvest in drift netting, to reinvest in sucking an aquifer dry because some idiot government in New Zealand has no concept of Commons or colonial history, etc. ad infinitum until you come face to face with the abyss. But what do you care. You die before the abyss is beneath the feet of our future, or it happens elsewhere, or you can shield yourself with your money and political influence. You’re ‘rich’, and in your tiny little mind you’re ‘successful’, an ‘achiever’, a ‘winner’. When you’re not at all. You are beyond despicable (choose your own anglo-saxon term of deep disdain).
And so we push the ball up the edge of the resilience bowl thinking everything is ok ….. until it isn’t.
technocratic obsessions; greed; selfishness and power.
We need a return to a world where values (of what is good), deep and broad understanding of complexity (‘ken’, not technocratic ‘wit’), and wisdom and imagination should always direct policy making and strategy. We should put markets where they belong. As useful tools within a context. Never as master. And we should never elect the unwise, or allow any mega-corporate anywhere near policy making. They are unwise by definition because their focus is short-term money, not a meaningful future.
At the very bottom of that mega-corporate heap are the deal makers. You can spot them. They have a track record in financial trading, in gambling, in shady corporate deals, in the manipulation of messaging to the public, in the modus operandi of con artists setting up The Sting for the love of it.
The figure below provides the range of positions around that framing. Where are we at? Where are the trends and the drivers taking us? Where do we want to be?
The sands of Iraq and the karst mountain bones of the Grecian hills tell a story. These were once fat lands; the Tigris/Euphrates fields of Sumer, the Arcadia of Greece. They were once Mediterranean empires, now struggling countries of a somewhat lower prestige. Shelley’s 
functioning whole.
We live in a resurgence of an Extractive Age. It is no longer Creative, if it ever was. The deal makers look to easy extraction; mining of ‘resources’, forests felled and left, the soil with all its water-holding lost, the cod fisheries netted to collapse from which it may never return. The irrational exuberance for polluting irrigation and dairy expansion is more of the same. We demand higher inputs to keep the rusting tramp steamer afloat, creating junky dependency. This Extractive Age continues to ask for more, which is great for GDP. Those that follow this practice are usually not resident within a place for long. They become absent because they can afford to leave once the slag heaps appears.
Within Extractive Economies we deal in low value commodity, the simple homogenous economy, increasingly expropriated by outside owners, our colonial masters. This is New Zealand’s immediate past history whose lessons are obvious. It is still happening. Mega-corporations make money by a type of colonial extraction, and so their political support goes to those who think in similar ways. Who then argue for the rights of corporates over local firms.
Gandhi wrote well about the process from the heart of the beast. He argued that such extractive ‘development’ was a “nine days wonder.” Part of that process is a self-reinforcing vicious cycle. Commodities inevitably loses price to the strong buyers. The response from short-term thinkers is not a re-examination of strategy – heaven forbid – but the cutting of costs and increasing yields. They increase scale and reduce diversity in the interests of standardised ‘efficient factory’ thinking. They think shorter and shorter until the monthly income statement is all.
environment is something to be ‘compromised’; pollution and further theft of the commons is rationalised; public subsidisation imperative. Commodity value chains are short or non-existent, processing centralised to some other place. The effect is that more and more wealth is exported out of a region, and most become poorer. If the environment
of neoliberal economics put an end to all those classical economic thinkers – from Smith to Marx to Veblen to Keynes to Galbraith to Kohr to Schumacher. All that stuff about the complexity of human behaviour, equity and power differentials and what it is that makes a strong economy (a strong society and environment as it happens) was reduced to assumptions that by unleashing the hyenas of commerce, we would all be better off. It would trickle down. Yeah, right.
And so, in the best tradition of neoliberal thinkers from Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson on, a few years ago we heard a local MP and a few other ‘business leaders’ promoting Hawke’s Bay because of our “low wages.” That is effectively advocating our competing with Bangladesh. It would make us a third world country, with most living on low wages, a few living in mansions on a hill, and a shriveled middle.
wages will also lose jobs. There is only one thing in common with this contradictory cant, and that is the narrow self-interest of those who are unwilling or unable to see the big picture, even to their own benefit.
Is this where we want to be? As the famous cartoon states, “Wal-Mart put my store out of business so I had to get a job at Wal-Mart. Thanks to Wal-Mart I can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart. Enjoy shopping at Wal-Mart.”
perfect world these qualitative things; zero absenteeism, low staff turnover, a sense of fairness, high morale and spirit, a can-do ‘go-the-extra-mile’ cooperative attitude, commitment, performance, quality focus, the free expression of new ideas and innovation. As with business, so in society: we do well as a community and an economy when there is a sense of belonging, trust, opportunity, aspiration, inspiration and the encouragement to try something new.
a shifting murmuration of life, connection and meaning – (
Creating something new – being able to work in a ‘transdisciplinary’ way – break out of the old paradigms and mechanical reductionist world views. Look at the world as an irregular complex adaptive integrated system, not as a machine of cogs and wheels always governed by regular Newtonian formulae. It isn’t just material and hard head stuff. Feelings and values matter. We are not, nor ever should be, Spock – especially the grasping greedy selfish version of Spock the neoliberal economists presume we are.
The mechanical way is a nine-day wonder that fails because it cannot see and integrate the greater whole. It sees neither in the dimensions of space, nor within time, before and to come. It sees no Dances with Wolves (another murmuration – dance) – only the man ‘cog’, and the wolf ‘problem’. It cannot Think Like a Mountain.
It is not
make a practice of cruelty and undignified death.
environmental functions. There are no life-supporting environmental and social functions, just things which The Market allocates in a machine.
of this key point. It is another tragic failing in policy direction, exacerbated by neo-liberal mechanical ideology.
pervasive industrial corporate thinking and their narrow and short-term money lens, which makes us less, not more, wealthy in the long-term.
“… spawned gargantuan organisations with simple goals, roughly analogous to the body/brain ratio of the dinosaur … lack[ing] the ability to think much beyond business equivalents of ingestion and procreation. The monomania drove out thought of the morrow, warped lives, disfigured much of the world, and dominated the intellectual landscapes.
Nor will they understand from within their pea-brain dinosaur models that harming this system and the stories attached will eventually harm themselves, or that there is real potential in raising all values by rejecting industrial commodities.
path: recognise the land, place and community as a place with the potential to create value, and focus on marketing our quality story. Get off the blandness and sameness of cheap volume where all life’s meanings are diminished, degrading us all.
The coolest Snood reflects her mood,
I thought that one particularly nice
Pointed her finger,
