I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and I have to say that my inaccurate take on recent world history has been skewed by the popular press and my predisposition to blindly trust the western governments to protect human rights. The book has been a real eye opener on a lot of things for me, the least not being the current state of affairs with the economy and why we find ourselves at the precipice on which we now stand.Over the past quarter century the west’s support for the freedom fighters in Latin America, South Africa, Poland, and the Eastern Bloc has been solely based upon our greed. Open market capitalism has been forced upon these countries at the cost of democracy and personal freedom. While our rich got richer, their poor got poorer.
I am not sure our current economic woes are even solvable with the way we have structured the workings of our economy. How can a stock market stabilize when corporations are only interested in taking care of their shareholders in the short term as opposed to taking care of their company in the long term? Our whole system not only supports but encourages speculative investors over long term investors. Did we not learn from South Africa’s stock market crisis after apartheid that speculative investing destabilizes an economy?
So once again I find myself encouraged by initiatives like the Ultimate Black Belt Test. With current global crisis’ caused by over-consumption and greed, how much more pertinent can we make the martial arts when we include activism, environmental awareness, sustainable living, and empathy training as our core values. I’m definitely proud to be a member of UBBT Team 6.
“If the firms that employ an increasing majority of the population are driven solely to satisfy the owner's greed at the expense of working conditions, of the stability of the community, and of the health of the environment, chances are that the quality of our lives will be worse than it is now.”
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (b. 1934)
2 comments:
After being through a basic economics class I understood that our economic system is quite infantile in scope, and based on the interest of making money, not too much else. The fiscal meaning of interest became my focus one day when I compared it to someone's interest in something. The value system of a human mind is definitely not in tune with the value system of the Earth, as our limited scope prevents many considerations and variables into the equation. Perhaps the two will converge in a short time; perhaps it was necessary to create a divergence, wiseacring a value system in order to realize our situation consciously.
The technology for revolutionizing our power supply, transportation, agricultural systems is already there, but the interest in making it widely available simply is not. So more money goes to causes such as wars to perpetuate a destructive ideology.
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