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Ecology Economics And Objectivism

By Chris James

20 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Imagine a world without any nations, governments, hierarchies or authorities - a self-organising world that operates much like the default system on a personal computer - a world where society is set to an equilibrium and when it shifts nothing changes because everything is arranged to go back to default. Could such a world exist? The ‘default' world is already with us and we barely notice it. Societies are fast moving towards self-regulating systems based on nature. The problem is nature is not set to default, nature is always changing.

The philosophy underscoring the idea of a self-regulating system is called Objectivism and it was created by the Russian-American philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand [1905-1982]. Objectivism holds that reality exists independent of consciousness and that human beings have direct contact with reality through their senses using concept formation and inductive logic. Rand believed that the proper moral purpose of one's life is rational self-interest and the only social system consistent with this idea is embodied in laissez faire capitalism. Rand wrote her ideas in novels, The Fountainhead , Atlas Shrugged and the non-fiction Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and The Virtue of Selfishness. In the 1950s Rand gathered a group of highly influential people around her for the pursuit of her Objectivist philosophy. They accrued immense influence in politics and the global economy. Rand's followers saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could live freely with almost zero government and they considered altruism a weakness. [1] Rand found her biggest supporters amidst the neo-conservatives whereby Ayn Rand's biographer Jennifer Burns has referred to Rand's Objectivists as ‘the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.' [2]

Rand's philosophies coincided with the rise of the digital age and she advocated the creation of new networks of entrepreneurial individuals via the Internet's cybernetic system. When Rand's ideas became coupled with those of ecologist Arthur Tansley the prospects for governing the world through artificial intelligence became even more surreal.

Arthur Tansley had an interest in the works of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Tansley saw Freud's mind as a kind of electrical circuit and from it he produced a mind model based on nature and he called it the ‘ecosystem'. Tansley then made a connection between his model and the ideas of Ayn Rand's Objectivism . The connection for Tansley was in the likeness between the ecosystem and the mechanical global markets. Applying the model of the mind to the whole of nature's energy flows in a continual loop, called a feedback loop; Tansley conceived of a self-regulating social system. Hence, Rand's Objectivism combined with ecology turned humans into the components of a self-regulating mechanical Earth suspended in a self-regulating universe of energies and circuits; otherwise a universal connectivity.

The idea of a self-regulating system is not new; it emerged from the west's dissident ‘Cultural Revolution' of the 1960s and was predicated on a perceived cosmic consciousness. Some neo-conservatives who opposed the dissidents saw an opportunity to use the revolutionary ideas for their own purpose and they turned the imagined ‘cosmic' network it into a real system for social control. Cybernetics led to systems dynamics aimed at developing self-regulating markets based on nature, but they also provided a window into social behaviour. While the natural sciences found that the notion of a self-regulating nature is simply not true, the idea was embraced by conservatives who encapsulated it into a totalising economic regime. They called this regime ecology economics. [3]

The combination of ecology and economics appears in the works of Kenneth Boulding and Herman Daly. Boulding's evolutionary perspective was borrowed from Vladimir Vernadsky's [1926] term the ‘Noosphere'. Teilhard de Chardin [1959] also used the term. This is the equivalent in social and economic evolution to the role of genetic information and DNA in biological evolution.

The vision of earth as a mere mechanical object was transitioned into the vision of earth as a mechanical spaceship in 1966 when the American economist Kenneth Boulding published a book of essays titled The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth. In 1968 Buckminster Fuller released his book titled Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth . Both writers drew on the results of the Apollo mission, which showed a vibrant earth against the lifeless moonscape. Fuller viewed the earth as a space vehicle flying through the universe with a finite amount of resources on board. [4] This was the vision of globalisation, which had citizens in many western nations seeing themselves as citizens of the world not national citizens, but as the futurist Peter Ellyard suggested in 2001, it was a vision at odds with an emerging and ‘rampant tribalism'. [5] The tribal/nationalist mentality won out because by 2008 Rand's Objectivist driven free markets were in a state of collapse. The new ecology economists though gained immense traction because damage to the environment was blamed on deregulation and over-consumption and the ecologists were offering the rescue.

Ecology economics is different from neo-classical economics because the economic system becomes embedded within an environmental system. Ecological economists argue that neo-classical economics has ignored the environment and this has contributed to environmental degradation, pollution and climate change. Ecology economics preferences natural capital over labour capital, but it does not eliminate the capitalist paradigm; it simply makes the worker invisible. The invisible body has been the Objectivists dream.

[1] Curtis Adam [2011] All watched over by machines of loving grace British Broadcasting Corporation Documentary production. www.sbs.com.au/documentary/program/ allwatchedover by machines of loving grace Accessed 28th October, 2011.

[2] Alternet; Review of Ayn Rand's biography. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Author Jennifer Burns. In The Truth about GOP hero Ayn Rand. http://alternet.org/culture/150680 Accessed 26 th October, 2011.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Fuller Buckminster [1968] Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth at http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Buckminster _ Fuller Accessed 29 th October, 2001

[5] Ellyard Peter [2001] Ideas for the New Millennium Melbourne, Melbourne University Press p31.

Dr Chris James is an artist, writer, political activist and psychotherapist currently researching the Transitions Movement at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. She lives on a property in country Victoria, and can be contacted at:

Email [email protected]

Website www.doctorchrisjames.com

 

 

 



 


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