Tweetios: “The System is Broken”

By Eric Schechter on Thursday, 29 September 2011

No, it doesn't and never did.

“The system is broken” has become a commonly used phrase, in part because it is so tidy. My own view is more extreme than that, though I haven’t figured out a tidy phrase for it yet.

To say that “the system is broken” suggests that it once worked well, and that it can be made to work well again, through reforms. I disagree with that view. I believe the system has inherent flaws in its basic design, and never has worked well, and never can, though for a time it may have given some people the impression of working well, or of having worked well at some point in the past. I think we need to scrap the whole design and start anew. And I think we need to do it soon, or the old design will soon kill us all.

Separateness is a basic paradigm of our society. Your bank account is not my bank account, your interests are not my interests, your loss is not my loss and might even be my gain. This attitude leads to the privatizing and plundering of the commons, and so now the ecosystem is dying. Unless we take drastic steps together soon, it will die, killing us all along with it. 

Other paradigms are hard for us to imagine, since we’re so used to our separateness. But other paradigms are possible. Hunter-gatherer and tribal societies do not make into private property anything of great value. The Native Americans could tell us that no one should “own” the sky, the rivers, the forests — that we must respect and care for these things together.