PARADISE is not a place. It is a state of mind. We have learnt that much from the failure of utopians like Plato and Thomas More. Their blueprints for justice-based communities could not be converted into practical solutions. But if we emancipate our imaginations, apply the basic tenets of morality and work with the plasticity of culture, we can create new ways of living. That means co-existing with each other and with nature in what we would happily call paradise on Earth.

An Italian artist, Michelangelo Pistoletto, evoked paradise symbolically by twisting the infinity sign into three circles. Nature was the first paradise. The human condition that emerged out of nature was the second paradise. And then, referring to the universal judgement portrayed in the fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Pistoletto argued that “the apocalypse does not end in nothing, but has a sequel: Heaven and Hell. For me the sequel is the Third Paradise, a heaven on Earth in which the reasons that have led to the infernal consequences which threatened to swallow up humanity today are absorbed and dissolved” (2010: 86).

Pistoletto does not rely on the religious concept of transcendence. His ideal is wrought through “the generative function of art”. But we need to fuse art with ancient wisdom, and test insights with the tools of science. By combining these elements, we would begin to reconstruct our communities. The moments of paradise would be extended into ever longer periods of contentment. Paradise would be perceived all around us, in the beauty radiated by nature and society: from a sunset to the smile on the face of a child. Paradise is a dialectical experience: achieved by emancipating our minds from the limitations that restrain us from realising our full potential.

Barriers to the transformation of our earthly condition do appear insuperable. Freedom of the individual is the declared objective of philosophy, a legacy from classical Greece. And yet, concurrent with the fine words was the violent disconnection of people from the natural rights that defined the state of liberty. Freedom is a hollow notion if children cannot grow into fully formed personalities because they are denied access to all of the social and ecological endowments that are necessary to achieve maturity.

We treat society as the subordinated servant of atomised individuals. Yet we derive our identities – and our pathologies – from both nature and nurture. Self-fulfilment cannot be achieved if the potential of the whole population is not realised. So the first step towards paradise begins by striking the correct balance between the needs of the individual with the collective rights of all citizens.

The pre-histories of early humans is encouraging. There were cul-de-sacs episodes, but our ancestors re-orientated themselves back onto the path of evolutionary development. Ominously, this time may be different.

Our central problem was identified by Cambridge University sociologist Gary Runciman (3rd Viscount Runciman of Doxford). Social evolution, he notes, can be constrained “by a parasitical practice which reproduces itself at others’ expense” (2009: 184). As we have explained in the Ten Theses, European cultures were deformed by a parasitic virus known as rent-seeking. That virus has now pushed our civilisation to the point where the characteristics of parasitism are analytically inadequate.

In nature, a balance is maintained between parasites and their hosts. Parasites do not devour their hosts, for that would extinguish the means of their existence. Early humans developed immune systems within their cultures to ensure the sustainability of their biological units. This enabled them to expand demographically into ever-larger societies. That process of growth could continue for so long as the immune system was kept in good working order. Switch it off and anarchy reigns. That is what happens when we permit rent-seeking to corrupt responsible behaviour.

Rent-seeking is an autolytic process (Box 1). It is the anti-social parasite that rewards behaviour that devours the host when too many people are lured into living off the labour of others. That is when people cease to produce sufficient means for their social existence. Once incubated, the parasite is unrelenting in its quest for privileged greed. The accelerating trajectory terminates in self-devouring death. This is how and why previous civilisations imploded.

So, to construct paradise in the here and now, we must recover the natural and social laws that maintain our social galaxy in equilibrium. Early warnings of danger abound, but they tend to be ignored (EEA 2013). Too often, ignorance or complacency prevents action.

Thesis Number: #9 (Page 1 of 10)

Induced Ignorance & Social Change

OUR WORLD is locked into an aggressive state of bi-polar disorder. The emerging half, centred on Asia, will continue to grow if it can avoid a military conflict over lumps of rock in the China Sea. The retreating half is centred on the trans-Atlantic nations. They are preoccupied with depleting their assets (human, cultural and material) to preserve the fiction of authority and prosperity. The outcome will not be a partnership of equals.

The fractures in our globalised civilisation are revealed by the civil disturbances: 843 of them between 2006 and July 2013. Most were protests over the lack of “real democracy” (Ortiz et al 2013). But proposals for reform advocated by think-tanks and governments will not banish deep-seated problems. The OECD (2014) classifies its proposals as “structural”, as capable of delivering “strong and sustainable growth”. In reality, they would dismantle arrangements that were originally intended to alleviate suffering. Labour markets, for example, would be de-regulated. No assessment is offered as to who would ultimately gain (the net benefits would be capitalised in the land market).

Change is needed, but the West will endure a deepening cultural crisis if it fails to reappraise the foundations on which power is constructed. For the prevailing economic doctrine is causing the West to haemorrhage its vitality. We see this in many tragic ways: the dispiriting effect on young people who cannot find employment; declining standards in schools; corruption in the law-making and law-enforcing agencies; the de-skilling of middle-aged men; families that cannot survive on their wages and must turn to food banks for hand-outs…the list goes on. Governments retrench, incapable of meeting their moral and financial obligations. In Britain, the health service allows elderly people to die needlessly, and money is saved by cutting the funds that are required for life-saving drugs.

With the exception of Germany, western governments are desperate. The implications are dangerous. The US justice department, for example, has confirmed “the legal basis on which the US government can kill Americans in a way that does not contravene a US government ban on assassinations” (Dyer and McGregor (2013). At the UN, member states discussed the use of battle robots – “fully autonomous weapons” – to kill people (Chivers 2013). These are anecdotal indicators that reveal a civilisation out of control. Geopolitical space is being fashioned for a power struggle in which everyone will lose.

Absolute decline in the West is proceeding apace. What would it take to reverse the process? The only way to develop sensible answers is to examine the formative process. Western civilisation is the accomplishment of the culture of rent-seeking.

The core of this process may be simply stated. Wealth created by working people is transferred to those who monopolise the assets which are (for most practical purposes), fixed in supply; on which we all depend for our existence. These are the resources of nature. Those who control the land are consequently endowed with the power to control the culture of the communities on those territories. Why does this follow? Populations fund and sustain their culture and physical infrastructure out of the net income they produce. This is technically called economic rent. Social rent is the organising principle that governs the fate of complex societies.

• Correctly applied, social rent makes the Good Life possible for everyone willing to work.
• Diverted from its social purpose, rent rewards behaviour that causes society to spiral out of control.

MORE than two thousand years ago, Li Bing was appointed as the governor of China’s Shu Province.  His legacy is a canal: Li diverted water cascading down the Minjing River from Tibet. His canal waters the plains of Chengdu to this day. He initiated a piece of infrastructure that delivered a permanent increase in welfare for the peasants working the fields, by providing a steady stream of water for their crops. The original investment has repaid itself in terms that cannot be calculated. Who can doubt that the canal covered its costs? Since 276 BC it helped to generate additional food out of the soil, creating a “Land of Abundance”. Dykes and dams ensured homes and fields were never again subjected to floods and droughts.

But such monumental investments can be a mixed blessing. To maximise the social value delivered by investments like that canal required more than the engineering genius of Li Bing. If the gains were not shared on an equitable basis, the canal could be turned into a tool for exploiting the peasants who farmed the 25,000 square kilometres that were irrigated.

The water needed to flow alongside wise financial policy. Otherwise, the net gains – what Marxists call the “surplus” – would attract warlords. Those social renegades were always ready to unsheathe their swords and go a’huntin for the rents that emperors failed to collect and recycle back into the community to fund the common good. If we cannot compute the rents generated by the canal, we can examine more recent examples to gain a sense of the role played by infrastructure in enhancing a society’s productivity.

Take the case of London’s Blackwall tunnel. It was dug beneath the Thames in 1897. Before it was opened, the productivity of nearby locations was measured by the selling price of land: £3 an acre. After it opened, the price jumped to £200 an acre (Tyler 2013: 158). But that increase in productivity was not shared by all the taxpayers who funded the excavation beneath the river. Over the past century, commuters who travelled into North London via the tunnel pocketed the enhanced productivity that they did not fund. Result: the burden on taxpayers was higher than it need have been.

The tunnel illustrates the way in which “public goods” like schools and highways are converted into instruments for redistributing a nation’s income. A democratic mandate does not exist for the policy of transferring wealth from those who create value to those who exercise the power to extract a nation’s rents. That is why the process is covert. Politicians fabricate myths about the need to raise taxes to pay for such projects without disclosing the ulterior motive: the quest to enrich those who own land, or who can manipulate the credit-creating system to share in the spoils.

One justification for increasing investment in infrastructure is the need to create jobs. But instead of improving people’s welfare, the boom in investment that is now in the making will inflict enormous costs. The world is on the cusp of one of the greatest redistributions of income in history.

Economists at McKinsey Global Institute estimate that, just to keep up with projected global growth of GDP, $57 trillion needs to be spent on infrastructure by 2030 (Dobbs et. al. 2013). Governments are planning investments that will turn into a rip-off on a scale unparalleled in the annals of capitalism. Natural habitats will be wrecked, and cultures impoverished, in pursuit of the capital gains from tax-funded investments. Here, we focus on the impact on culture.

Culture is a composite of two elements.

• The software consists of the customs and practices into which each new generation is schooled. Children are inducted into their community’s language, belief system, moral code and “manners”.
• The hardware consists of physical amenities like the highways, water and energy utilities, monumental structures (administrative and spiritual centres). These are public in nature, distinct from the assets owned for the private use of individuals.

Friction arises when the boundary that divides private from public assets is not respected. That boundary was eviscerated after Europe’s States were privatised some five centuries ago. A perverse model of statecraft was incubated that was then embedded (through colonialism) across the rest of the world.

Two hundred years ago, the infrastructure that supported Britain’s Industrial Revolution accelerated the debasement of culture’s software. Decisions were made to accommodate the appetites of those who dedicated themselves to the art of living off their community’s rents. Those people used infrastructure (like mass transit systems) to short-change fellow citizens by engaging in a psycho-drama. The trick was to persuade others to fund the infrastructure that would increase the rents going into their pockets.

The lead role in facilitating that trick was played by those who manipulated the statecraft of greed (Thesis #1). The drama, in the form of multiple rip-offs, illuminates how the public’s finances served as a malevolent force, one that now disrupts communities across planet Earth.

Thesis Number: #5 (Page 1 of 9)

The Pathology of Money

Thesis Number: #4 (Page 1 of 8)

Mortal Taxes or a Life of Liberty

DEMOCRATIC societies are being undermined. Homeland security is not being compromised by crazed suicide bombers shouting blasphemous slogans. Vitriolic corrosion of national vitality may be traced to the actions of middle-class citizens who feel deeply aggrieved with the way they are governed.

The negative attitudes of a growing number of citizens are systematically weakening the State. The process has been taking hold for decades. The US Federal Government shut-down in October 2013 illustrated how a small group, voicing anger at tax policy, can shame a superpower and diminish politics to a crude game of horse-trading.

Taxation is the lightning conductor of popular discontent. Animosity directed at taxes is the sure way to unite people against their representatives. Taxes are inherently bad; at best, a necessary evil. This shared perspective drains confidence in government and weakens public agencies, a weakness that will be exploited by the emerging Asian powers which are seeking a larger share of the spoils from a new geo-political order.

A model of governance exists that would unite rather than rupture nations. The win-win formula is based on a structure of High Finance which, applied globally, would enable every nation to share prosperity. That outcome is predicated on the adoption a public finance system that emancipated all citizens.

The process of erasing popular awareness of that model of freedom originated a century ago. The initiative worked. Special interest groups are now free to engage in reckless behaviour that weakens public institutions. Those groups are not being effectively challenged because the experts – including professional economists – continue to shroud the wealth-creating process in language that impoverishes public debate.

The confusion over taxation is not an accident. It serves the rent-seeking culture that relies on property rights that privilege one section of the community. Preserving those rights depends on the ability of rent-seekers to retain control of the State’s law-making functions (see Thesis ♯1). In that State, democracy is nominal. People are neutralised to prevent them from demanding the reform that would emancipate everyone: scrap the bad taxes and raise revenue from rents that people are willing to pay to use the services provided by nature and society.

The vision of a strong but fair State emerges, once we expose the lies that have been embedded in our minds by the guardians of the rent-seeking culture.

Thesis Number: #3 (Page 1 of 10)

Divine Right & Betrayal of the Covenant

GOD can fall asleep, according to Pope Benedict XVI. The pontiff advanced this proposition in Rome on the occasion of his retirement. Could that explain the existential crises facing humanity? Or does responsibility fall on the three Abrahamic religions which no longer honour the founding Covenant on which monotheism was based? Someone or something must be responsible, because our societies are out of control.

The challenges we face include economic cannibalism, globalised poverty, abuse of Earth’s eco-systems and conflicts over resources in other people’s territories. Might these have been avoided if the three faiths had remained committed to the founding Covenant? That Covenant was a land deal: God gifted land in return for the promise to honour a moral code of conduct.

Alternatively, should responsibility be directed at scientific materialism? The secular approach to public policy has prevailed for three centuries. Forget Jesus, declaims Lawrence Krauss, the professor of theoretical physics at Arizona State University: “The stars died so that you could be here today” (Krauss 2009). The atoms in our bodies came from exploding stars. We originated as stardust, rather than as twinkles in God’s eye. So forget Jesus, and learn about carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron – all the elements that were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars that exploded in the universe, and initiated life on Earth.  But as a tool for aligning our relationships with each other and with the natural world, scientific materialism has been found wanting. What is missing from the secular approach to life? To answer that question we need the anthropological context: we must return to the beginning.

Metaphysics empowered pre-civilised humans to evolve self-consciousness, develop their physiques, deepen their understanding of natural habitats and refine the rules for organising communities. The core of that metaphysics was a reverence for the divine, infused with the mystery of the universe. The key issue was one of relationship – to Earth, and to each other. Relationships had to come with meaning, which emerged through the stories that were recounted to make sense of life. Deities were at the heart of the narratives. Thus, humans were guided by their gods through time and space.  In populating a divine world with deities, our ancestors revealed their pragmatic wisdom. This device served two purposes.

1. Ownership of the planet was assigned to the deities: this removed land as an asset over which people might otherwise kill. Everyone would be treated as equal in relation to natural resources. Prosperity depended on sharing nature’s riches, not cheating by depriving others.
2. Rules attributed to divine authority provided feedback mechanisms to create harmony. The Jubilee, for example, was an early practical device for securing social stability.

When gods ceased to be of service they were replaced. Finally, in the contest of the gods, one deity offered a deal that was too good to refuse: a new narrative of creation was born.

Thesis Number: #2 (Page 1 of 8)

The Cheating State

GREED is not embedded in the DNA of society. In its cultural form, it has become the DNA of what is now a globalized civilization, the triumphant achievement of a statecraft that manipulated people’s minds and manners to the point where most people do not recognize that they have been co-opted into a routine process of cheating.

Institutionalized greed was incubated in Europe in the 16th century. It mutated over the following centuries, and was transplanted through colonization. In the late 20th century, the cultural virus captured post-Soviet Russia, and is now being seeded in China.

As individuals, we are all susceptible to over-indulge ourselves. I am not referring to that kind of behaviour. The greed that is authorised by statecraft is the art of living off the labour of others. Slavery, one of its rudimentary forms, was outlawed once its beneficiaries realised that there was a more efficient way to cheat people of the fruits of their labour. Today, the statecraft of greed is continuously schooled into the minds of the young, to create a new generation of acolytes.

There are two ways to demonstrate that greed has rendered society dysfunctional. The first would be to compile a dossier of indictments. Files on individual cases from countries like Greece, Italy and Spain would be thick with evidence drawn from politics, business, the media, and so on. The problem with this approach is that those who would not want to face the awful truth about their societies would rationalise the corruption as the failings of individuals, rather than symptomatic of a structural flaw in their culture. They would settle for the prosecution of individuals as “rogues”, believing that this would cleanse the system. That is the favoured ending to Hollywood movies: blame a few villains rather than accept the need for fundamental changes to the pillars that support our communities.

More effective is the forensic examination of the law, and of institutions, and the collective psychology of the population, to excavate the sources of systematic corruption. This reveals the processes by which people are lured into greedy behaviour, the kind that causes people to cheat.

This approach identifies the solutions that would erase the propensity to cheat. But how may we recognise the kinds of behaviour that encourage cheating? Tony Blair, the man with a mission to change society, had no doubts about the answer to that question.

Thesis Number: #1 (Page 1 of 7)

Dynamics of the Statecraft of Greed

NATIONS are governed by a culture that was incubated in Europe in the 16^th century. England played the leading role in enabling that culture of greed to mutate into a statecraft that propagated chaos through its laws of the land. The statecraft manages the anarchy that was embedded in traditional communities as a result of the violent transformation of people’s rights of access to the commons. Understanding that history is the pre-condition for addressing what the CIA calls the mega-trends that threaten all our futures.

The doctrine that rationalised the statecraft of greed was called the social contract. This philosophical device was constructed to argue that when people came out of the “state of nature” they consented to a particular kind of authority. The arch exponents of this myth were the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Their discourses justified the violent re-distribution of land by monarchs and their courtiers. In Britain, the aristocracy used Parliament to justify the enclosure of the commons. Comparable trends occurred in most parts of Europe. People’s authentic cultures were ruptured as an alien order was imposed on them. The social creation myth legitimised and sanctified the power of the aristocracy.

The erosion of liberties was directly related to the erasure of people’s rights of access to land. The monarchs silenced opposition by claiming that they ruled by divine right. Their courtiers then employed devices like “the rule of law” to secure their monopolisation of land. They executed coups against kings in a struggle over the power to tax. It was imperative for the barons and knights to control taxation, so that the Land Tax could be reduced and the fiscal burden shifted onto peasants. They succeeded. The outcome was the statecraft of greed.

Now, politicians exercise sovereign power through “democracy”. That power is conditional: we know from the cut and thrust of 20^th century history that they are not free to transgress the material interests of those who appropriate the rents which were traditionally reserved to fund the services shared in common.

Today, governments are not free to institute the one reform – to the financial system – that would enable people to resolve the crises of the 21^st century. Global under-employment of labour and capital, debilitating mass poverty, suicide on an epidemic scale in southern Europe, planetary degradation of natural habitats, all are symptoms of a pathological social structure. The guardian of that structure is the culture whose agents are embedded in the seats of power.

If people are to successfully challenge the statecraft of greed, they first need to understand the terms on which healthy societies evolved over the past 100,000 years. For what is today regarded as “normal” is pathological. And without the restoration of the ancient rights and the code of natural justice, there is no prospect of remedial action capable of undoing the damage wrought over the past five centuries.