Trashing unsustainble debt that leads to garbage lives

(This post is an expansion of thoughts expressed at the 19^th anniversary celebrations of SIRASA and may also be found on the Daily Mirror) 

Thirty three years ago, I was a soil and concrete technician and laborer on the Maduru-Oya dam project, working for the Canadian consortium of FAFJ when I first came into contact with the true peoples of our beautiful land – the vedda community. I was no tourist and they were not interested in tourists. Instead, they lived with the earth, off the earth and over a period of months when I was permitted into their wadis and their world, they taught me much. Of the many things they taught me and colored and flavored my worldview for all time, two stand out. The first was the sanctity and non-negotiability of the continuance of all sentient life and the second was the importance of maintaining the balance and harmony of the human-environment interface with all its attendant complexities, nuances and surprises so that live guilt-free and debt-free with respect to the future. In an era where few people even knew the meaning of the word, I was given an advanced course in sustainability by the kings and queens of is practice and to them I owe a debt that cannot be repaid.

Speaking of non-payable debt, we have about 80 trillion dollars of cash in the world of which about 65 trillion is useable. Global public debt is 59 trillion dollars and growing at 7 million dollars a minute while total debt is 199 trillion dollars – three times the amount of cash there is to cover it. The total global debt is currently at an eye-popping, heart-stopping 325% of the global gross domestic product. 1.2 quadrillion dollars of what is tantamount to funny-money invested in derivatives alone. Much like drugs addicts in thought, word and deed, we are living on a puff of smoke and a clutch of dreams where there is absolutely no possibility of wealth creation – only debt escalation. This essentially means two things.

One, everyone is over their eyeballs in debt to everyone else and when we build our houses, buy our cars, acquire are little electronic gadgets and appliances, put our kids through college and continuously seek acquisition of things that make us feel that we are living civilized and developed lives, we are not displaying our wealth. Instead we are living our lives sloshing around in a toxic vat of unsustainable debt.

Two, most of us are living a shallow, blatant lie where we believe we live in comparative affluence when in fact, we live in abject poverty.  It is not that hard to understand that poverty is not a measure of what one doesn’t have but rather, a measure of what one wants. Whenever we want more money, a bigger estate, higher qualifications, more recognition and power and position - we are becoming poorer. Living in an age of snowballing needs and wants, we necessarily live in a world of snowballing paucity, unhappiness, unrequited needs and unfulfilled desires. So lustful are we for “stuff” that every time we pay off a small debt, we are immediately thinking of acquiring twice the debt as soon as possible to feed our next wave of needs. Greed then is the primary driver of individual poverty and, regardless of the socioeconomic stratum into which each of us is slotted, let us be under no illusion that we are all living beyond our means.

I am not going to pull my punches here friends, because if I do, then I cannot be considered anyone’s friend. This is a pitiable, shameful, wasteful, garbage of an existence far dirtier than the physical garbage that we generate that is the outcome of the gunk in our own minds.  Regardless of where we are, what we are, we must understand that we are a bunch of stinkers, disanitizing the world in a whirlwind of mental and physical filth. Unlike the lives of the adivasivarigaya who spend more than half their lives preserving and regenerating the resources they have for future generations, we have  cannibalized  a few hundred years’ worth of  earth’s resources earmarked for the future - just to live a few hundred months ourselves. Continue this way and we will not have life on earth in a few hundred days.

The world is indeed in grave, grave trouble and very few of us realize it or even want to. To realize it is to understand that everything we have valued is valueless, everyone we honor is without honor themselves, every method, system, process and science we trust is as untrustworthy as a pit of vipers. Yet, all is not lost for us in Sri Lanka because we haven’t completely bought into the great lie of the industrial age. Our culture, traditions and spiritual systems have protected us. We can become safer. We can become more durable. We can become more resilient. But, to do so, we absolutely must make the effort to remove the vision impairing pastel shaded glasses we have been trained to wear and resolve to see things as they are. In that respect, the most important vision we must have is that we are not, repeat NOT, a developing country trying to become a developed country. We are a country that the horror of the industrial age labeled as a “developing country” but which is, in fact, simply a country that is trying to become a sustainable country. We are not going to damn ourselves by trying to imitate developed countries, nor are we going to visit upon our people the stressful, competitive, miserable twilight existences that are the tragic legacy left for our brothers and sisters in those countries. NO!

To become sustainable, to pull ourselves out of the global bind of debt, we must think smart, think collective, thing corporative, think together. We are not trying to create processes or technologies that require massive borrowings and merely result in top-heavy monopolies or massive machines that remove human beings from the life-loop and log every dime in profit to the bank accounts of a few individuals. What we have to do is create appropriate methods and technologies that help individuals to ease their lives and their livelihoods.

We are going to create a super-efficient plough not the next generation combine harvester. We are looking to create small aps that will collectivize and synergize the physical effort of many people not killer programs that literally kill that effort. We are looking to use drones, small-scale dispensers and tiny-payload delivery systems that will help improve the precision of our agricultural methodology not create next generation airplanes that over deliver on inputs and force under-delivery of produce. We are looking to create many thousands of inventors and entrepreneurs helping, learning and sharing with each other and not one or two monopolists. 

We are looking to launch the happiness, fairness and contentment motives to the top of everyone’s minds – not just a few. To do that, we cannot approach such exercises with the profit motive on top of our minds. Indeed, while profit is a happy outcome, it is not a primary goal. It is not every a tertiary goal. Instead, if it happens, then it should happen as a collateral outcome of more critical activities.

This is a tough, tough ask folks and I do not say it is not. Habit dies hard if it dies at all. However, the choice here is whether the habit dies or you die and there is no workaround that stark reality. Killing the root of this evil will require a few habits to be replaced. The habit of hoarding wealth and resources must be replaced by the habit of sharing both. The habit of competition must be replaced by the habit of cooperation. The habit of defaulting to individualism must be replaced by the habit of defaulting to collectivism. The habit of complaining, manipulating, gossiping to suppress others and project one’s self as greater must be replaced by the habit of lauding, championing, discussing and highlighting the good in others regardless of what it costs one.

In short, the habit of greed must be replaced by the habit of contentment.

Let me wish ourselves good luck as we dig our heels in and embark on this painful yet rewarding journey towards personal salvation, future-proofing our nation and ensuring global emancipation. We will need it.