The Individual Age of Renaissance and Reformation
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In the twenty-first century — a Humpty Dumpty lament:
After the Great War, the nation state of Humpty Dumpty determined to build a Great Wall. For two generations the citizens of Humpty Dumpty toiled and labored to achieve the goal. When the wall was finally complete; the view from the top of the wall was mind-boggling. It was like on a clear day you could see forever.
In the fullness of time something radically changed, the bricks of the wall became human and came to life. Struggling to be free from all that impediments that stifled their individual creativity, they sang: Ring around the rosy, A pocket full of posies, Ashes, Ashes, We all fall down!
The Humpty Dumpty king rushed to the wall with all his faithful well-trained horses. Following close behind were all the king’s men, who tore their robes and moaned and bellyached.
Then the king, his horses and the king’s men held a requiem and each spoke in unison: “Whoa is me! I told you so! Humpty Dumpty is broken, and these people want to preserve their cake, just eat desert, and not get back on the wall. We can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again!
The chaos was just too much for them to handle; yet they were all too selfish to admit that they were really the designers of the wall’s structural problems and Humpty Dumpty’s demise.
But these newly freed people all sang, “We’re tired! You’re fired! It’s time for a Renaissance and a Reformation based upon self-evident inalienable human rights. The Industrial Age is dead. Long live the Individual Age.
Today we are seeing this lament playing out in countries around the world, as we see the end of the Industrial Age that brought totally unique prosperity to parts of the earth, while scores of other people were almost untouched by these material blessings.
Just what is an Individual Age?
If we were to look at the coming to life of Humpty Dumpty’s wall we would think that it is self-absorbed, narcissistic, materially driven and incapable of anything that does not have me as the center.
However if you have spent your whole life as a brick in the wall, as did your father and mother before you, and that traces back as far as you can track down your family history, then maybe a little self-absorption might be appropriate, at least until you examine possible alternatives.
At the end of the Industrial Age, traditional historic opportunities seem to becoming more limited and more expensive with every passing day. Mark Twain once said, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” That comment seems exceedingly appropriate today. But when we look at our world in proper context, the Denial River dwarfs the flow of all the world’s natural rivers as it empties into the ocean of Deadbeat Debt.
Let us broaden our view of history to see if we might begin to drain a Denial River oxbow.
Western history began by definition with Jesus, a really famous individual. Moving rapidly along, in both religious and secular terms, we come to Constantine and the fall of Rome in the late forth and early fifth centuries. Then we move forward to the prophet Mohammed and the founding of Islam in the late sixth century.
Then really individuals of history become silent until the Renaissance followed rapidly by the Reformation. The Renaissance generally began in the fourteenth century and fused with the Reformation in the sixteenth, both giving way to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth, which brings us to today.
We can begin that Renaissance journey with Thomas Aquinas, followed by Martin Luther, John Calvin — soon the whole world is buzzing with individuals. In our context it should be noted that this exponential increase in individual and individualism was brought about by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440.
Furthermore if we lump all these dudes together from Jesus, through Mark Twain, to today, they were all communicators. We begin with the written word, but over time this individual expression takes place more within the larger venue of the arts, rather than with individual artisans. Musicians; we know many, from Beethoven thru John Denver, who flew off literally alone into eternity.
Somewhere along the way there was a “Day that Music Died,” February 3, 1959, when rock and roll legends, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.
Looking back to that date in the United States, a unified “American Pie” economic concept slowly began to expire also; just about that time. Shortly thereafter the United States began the Vietnam (undeclared) War and build a Great Society, all with deficit spending. This began with a national discourse not much more diverse than the assumption we wanted to move far away from the firmly rooted village of Reality and buy a houseboat on that great Denial River.
The truly great thing about a houseboat on the grand Denial River, even if the engine runs out of gas, the river’s current will still take you to the Deadbeat Debt Sea.
Before we get too carried away, let us attempt to define our current common human universe in terms of the geopolitical or cultural world. Where we come down within this model of diversity determines to some extent, the stresses you will face as the world shifts from the Industrial Age into the Individual Age.
So within this universal shift we have two distinct, mutually exclusive worldview paradigms that will attempt to guide us to the future. Those two paradigms are the human collective worldview and the other is the human independence worldview.
The human collective worldview states that the world is slowly evolving towards perfection, or at least it is our human task on this earth to attempt to make this improvement by everyone working together for the common good.
Divergent from the collective paradigm is the human independence paradigm that basically states that individual uniqueness is the ultimate goal of humanity, and by every human being pursuing that improvement vision, by their very personal nature, improves society through human diversity, thereby creating improving cultural conditions for everyone.
Attempting to operate within those paradigms are three human enterprise models: progressive markets, natural markets and free markets.
Progressive markets are designed and controlled to help fulfill the common good. In its purest form this is much more complex than the twentieth century models. Therefore, geopolitical terms such as, communist, socialist and social justice are really operational methods of players and institutions of our next level down scale.
Progressive markets are simply a means of market control in which laws and regulations attempt to push markets towards geopolitical goals, such as ethanol subsidies to produce fuel and individual mandates so that everyone will be covered by healthcare.
Free markets are not designed at all. Not only that, promoters find any type of market regulation absolutely repulsive, as well as any attempt to stop people who game the system, or fix something that is broken. Laissez-Faire is simply defined is letting things take their own course, without any human interference. The problem is simply what your definition of interference is? True free marketeers believe that Ayn Rand successfully answered that question.
In reality this assumes that not only the people, but all citizens of Humpty Dumpty, are just bricks in the wall and Humpty Dumpty, as a real person or nation, is just figment of a childish illusion.
There are natural laws that include laws of natural science as well as common natural laws that regulate morality in human communities and societies. One of those natural laws is the rights of those communities to codify civil laws to limit human behavior. Natural markets are a means that those natural laws can allow a limited amount of interference to fix what is broken and to truly punish illegal human behavior. One of those natural law premises is to allow market speculators to receive their just rewards on the down side of their practices, rather than sheltering or bailing out their over active leverage transactions.
Finally we have developed six Player-Institutions that are present in our modern societies. Each of these groups have a vested interest in seeing the current Industrial Age continue. None of them have or will seriously look at the reality that the Industrial Age took place in the world of essentially unlimited cheap resources, easy highly leveraged debt and an operational paradigm that all this would continue forever without becoming subject to the natural law of the minimums.
Together we have defined these Player-Institutions along a continuum not so much as the typical liberal — conservative, or left — right, but more in terms of their desire to achieve absolute focused power. Those Player-Institution positions also may shift locations over time.
In our program we have listed the most power seekers first with the less focused to their right. It should be noted however these power centers, being creations of human culture, work diligently to use all available resources to maintain or enlarge their respective power bases. The forces of Renaissance and Reformation will greatly alter or may eliminate some, or layers, of these Player-Institutions.
We have listed these six in the following order: Central Finance — Unions — Government — Religious Institutions — Corporations — Individual Diversity.
Now that we have outlined this fixed universe of options, your first step is to determine in which Player-Institutions you have invested most of your human capital. Human capital defined as not only your physical assets, but also your professional assets all the way through your future desires.
The next phase is to see how comfortable you are now and what will be your best path to move to a world in which Individual productivity through applications of your skills combined with the skills of others can provide for the betterment of human culture.
The Individual Age will not only free you from the collective grip of the Humpty Dumpty wall, but will also require you to carry a fair share of the cultural load. That is truly a new and scary frontier, for those who have been conditioned to never buck authority and compete on the true playing field of life.
We have been discussing for a number of weeks the use of the Moses Model of Leadership. Those groupings begin with you and move outward to groups of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands. The outside world also approaches you from the groups of thousands filtering down to you the individual. At each of those levels is an opportunity to provide a product, or a service, to improve the lot of your fellow man, and produce wealth for you, your family, and your fellow adventurers.
The United States of America was formed by in influx of malcontents from around the world. Even if you include Native Americans, or First Peoples, we all got here long after the rest of God’s critters. Some came not of their own free will, but once they got here and understood the land, they became just like the rest of us. America, contrary to popular opinion has never been a melting pot, but rather a savory stew, always ready for the little more flavor, a little more spice.
The day that music died, a lot more died than just the music. Something happened to turn off the heat to the stew pot. Tepid stew, mixed with raw ingredients and no salt or spices — Yuk!
If you look at the continuum that we put together above, you the diverse individual is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the powers that control central finance. That is not just the American Fed but central bankers and their administrators around the world.
To get some of the faux money to you, it pretty much as to go through the other four Player-Institutions in totality or in part, until it gets to you.
So what has happened recently?
The price of everything has gone up because worldwide Central Financial institutions, but especially the United States Federal Reserve, have drastically increased their creation of fiat money, and that has caused worldwide commodity prices to skyrocket, especially as it relates to the daily individual requirements for energy and food.
At the same time deflationary pressures continue to work against your ability to raise capital or borrow money on your own. You always thought you might be able to make a living doing something you think your are really good at, but that job in Humpty Dumpty’s wall was the only job you could get and now you have bills to pay.
You might have been forcefully pulled or dumped from the wall and now people who were once your best friends think you have a fatal communicable disease worse than the plague. Others have seen your hours or your pay cut, and you can clearly see that you don’t really want to learn that: “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Next week we will attempt to bring some insights on how you can become a leader in our reluctant march into the Individual Age.