At about this time each year, without fail, the lament will go
out about how the real meaning of Christmas has been lost. This
pre-Christmas tut-tutting is as much of a tradition as the
obligatory Christmas cards, and treated in the same casual way.
But for many, Christmas was stolen and Dr Seuss's Grinch didn't
do it.
The economist Karl Polanyi was the first to notice the crime back
in the 1940's. In his classic work, The Great Transformation:
The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, Polanyi drew
attention to a remarkable event without historical precedent
that discarded everything that had gone before. This was the
emergence in the nineteenth century of the market as the central
institution in our society, making the exchange of goods and
services the key feature of human life, bordering on becoming
the very reason for living. Understanding the nature of this
transformation is the key to unlocking the crime.
But the latter day beneficiaries of this crime have become
masters of subterfuge. With teams of experts, they easily bog
down any attempt to get at the real story with complex economic
concepts and political jargon. To avoid this we remind them,
detective Goran style, that all systems, political, social and
economic have one thing in common-people.
One of the tricks of the experts is to talk about these systems
as if they exist independently of people. This is one of the
oldest tricks in the book and enables the system to develop a
life of its own, to exist in its own right with its own goals,
ambitions and needs. It is important to remember these systems
don't exist in their own right-we make them, for us. Their
only goal is to provide a framework that encourages and enables
enough people to like one another enough to live and work
together, and that's all.
Ultimately, it is all about how people interact with one
another. Finding the best way to interact has been the goal of
humanity since the earliest times. We've been searching for the
traits and characteristics that make humans like each other and
trust each other enough so they prefer to live in society,
rather than as a bunch of hermits.
Once we discovered these traits and characteristics, we then set
them up as ideal standards of behavior and called them virtues,
which found expression in our sense of decency and love. For
millennia, chief of these virtues was the idea of self-sacrifice.
In other words, we found the best way to get people to like us
was to prove that we could be trusted to not only not harm them,
but also act consistently in their interest. People whom we can
trust in this way we call friends.
We discovered there were levels of trust. The more we could
trust somebody the closer was our friendship. But the highest
level of trust was when we formed a relationship with another
person whom we could always rely on, no matter what, even if
it meant that one of us could personally lose out.
We discovered that it was possible to form a relationship that
was so strong that each person in this relationship would not
think twice in putting down his or her life, for the sake of
the other. This we called love.
With the discovery of love, we found the perfect standard for
society. We found that a society bound by the ideals of love
was not only incredibly strong and resilient, but the whole was
greater than the sum of the parts. Individually we were weak and
helpless, but cooperating as a society made us so powerful that
nothing seemed out of reach, nor impossible.
In cooperating in this way, we discovered the secret of progress.
Thus, the evolution of humanity can be seen as an evolution to
greater levels of cooperation extending from the clan to the
village, to the city and nation, and today, encompassing the
whole globe. Christmas is the celebration of the discovery of
this secret and veneration for one of its greatest teachers.
In gift giving, we remind ourselves of the central importance
of the selfless act, which is the foundation upon which trust,
friendship and love is built. In receiving a gift, we are
reminded of the practicality of this wisdom-the more selflessly
we give the more we receive. This is the secret of life.
Leading up to the Great Transformation, we thought we had not
only discovered the secret of creating stable societies, but
that we had refined it to a fine art. Naturally, there were
disputes and disagreements, some resulting in war, but these
related to fringe issues: the central principles of human
relations were never in dispute.
Imagine the surprise and shock when a group of thinkers in the
Middle Ages suggested this basis of society was so wrong, the
only option was to throw it out. That it needed to be replaced
with a new system, built on what amounted to an opposite set of
beliefs. The idea of self-sacrifice and selflessness was now
outdated, they said. According to this new thinking, the
opposite characteristic of selfishness was the key to building
a new society where trust was no longer necessary. These ideas
were initially received with shock and disdain, but eventually
they took seed finding expression in Adam Smith's Wealth of
Nations, a work of enormous scope and breadth, earning him the
title of father of the social science we call economics.
According to these thinkers, this new economic system was able
to transform the vices of society into virtues through the
mechanism of the market. Thus pride, vanity and greed should no
longer be considered as bad, they said, but should be encouraged
and promoted as good because these were the engines of this new
society.
In this economic-based society, self-sacrifice, kindness and
altruism were to be avoided because these tendencies, they said,
created a class of people who were dependent on others. These
people could never fulfil their human potential, and rather
than being useful, contributing members of society, they became
parasites. As such, those who practiced self-sacrifice, kindness
and altruism were do-gooders of the worst kind. In their
misguided attempt at doing good, they were, in fact, doing
great, irreparable harm to those they were trying to help,
and to society in general.
Even to this day, most people find it difficult or impossible
to reconcile these beliefs. I don't know of any parent who would
deliberately teach their children that sharing and being kind
to others was bad, and that being greedy and selfish was good.
Despite over one hundred years of indoctrination, most of us
still believe the self-centered, the greedy and the proud can
never be trusted and should be avoided. It is inconceivable that
these characteristics can form the basis of true friendship, let
alone love.
Yet, despite our continued misgivings, we continue to hold
the market as our central institution because the idea of
self-sacrifice-the gift of Christmas-has been stolen. As a
result, we are now tied to the market for our material needs,
even our very existence, forcing many of us to live a double
life. In private and family life, we try to live by the ideals
of love and altruism, but in our external dealings, we are
forced to live by the law of the market which is self-interest.
Living a double life makes it hard to bring up children in any
consistent way. The children hear their parents teach one set of
rules, but see them and the heroes of society behaving in exactly
the opposite way. And when the heroes of society are the greedy,
the vain and the proud; the job of the parents becomes almost
impossible.
Living a double life is hard, if not impossible, because as
humans we need to live by a consistent set of beliefs. Eventually
we gravitate to one set of beliefs, and because our most basic
need for survival is linked to the market, we start to adopt the
rules of the market as our own, sometimes imperceptibly. This
is why selfishness is now the distinguishing characteristic of
Western society. This is the reason our society is becoming a
society of the lonely, the divorced and the depressed.
Polanyi argued that previously the market was imbedded in
society, meaning that all transactions in the market were merely
extensions of social relations. In other words, extensions of
people relating to people and subject to the same considerations,
where profit was merely an incidental by-product, not the sole
and only consideration.
As the economics of greed took hold, the market was extracted
out of this social context reversing all the normal rules of
social interaction in the process. In this new setting,
voluntary cooperation and altruism were driven out as people
were made to compete against one another. With competition
came greed and self-interest, and these were promoted as the
key virtues of a new type of human being-the Economic Man.
The new system of economics was ruthlessly efficient, and
great strides were made in productivity, but at a huge cost--
environmentally and socially. People surrendered their central
position in society, becoming just another commodity that could
be bought and sold in the marketplace. As a result, relations
between people came to be seen as extensions of market
transactions, and with this, the Great Transformation was
complete-people became nothing more than a means to an end for
other people. With this sleight of hand, the gift of Christmas
was not just stolen; it was replaced with unthinking consumerism.
In the best tradition of Detective Goran, we place in front of
the culprits not only the indisputable evidence of their crime,
but also the repercussions. The pain and suffering of millions
that go hungry each day and without the basics of life while
a small minority live in luxury. The continued, heedless
destruction of our biosphere; the crime and the violence in our
streets, and the lies and the deceit that passes for politics.
It is time to expose the hoax, cuff the culprits and reclaim
the gift of Christmas.
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