The Sharing Economy Several years ago, I read that Max Planck, the founder of quantum physics, studied physics rather than economics at university because he found economics to be quite perplexing. I know exactly what he meant. I studied economics for a year at university, and since then I have read a number of economics books and been on some business courses in my managerial career. Nevertheless, the subject of economics, as it is practised today, remains a complete mystery to me; I find it quite meaningless and incomprehensible. The reason, as I now know, is that economics has no roots, it is not based on the Truth. The global economy is like a giant redwood with no roots or a huge skyscraper with no foundations. It only needs a puff of wind for these great structures to come tumbling down. Under these circumstances, it is a wonder that the global economy is still functioning at all. Indeed, the System does not work for many millions of people today; they have been marginalized. The reason that the global economy works at all is that people have confidence in the System. Yet what is this confidence based on? It is based on fear and ignorance. This is obvious when we look at the jitters that arise when the stock market takes a nosedive or when we see the euphoria that is generated when the markets rise again. Such a way of managing our business affairs is hardly conducive to the development of a healthy society. Today, we are playing a confidence trick on ourselves in believing in the sustainability of the global economy. This situation cannot possibly last very much longer. As the rising tide of consciousness becomes a tidal wave in the years to come, the truth will be revealed, and the global economy will simply collapse in a cloud of dust. The sixty-four thousand dollar question that I have been wrestling with for the past twenty years is how many millions of people will be killed as the result of the collapse of Western civilization and the global economy? Can we make the transition out of the mental-egoic age into the Age of Spirit without great bloodshed? While I don't want to be alarmist or pessimistic, I have to admit that this looks most unlikely. Today, it is virtually impossible to have an intelligent conversation about the role of money in society without immense fears being raised, most especially in the USA. Money is the greatest taboo subject in the world today. While people are talking about money all the time, looking deeply at the subject of money is avoided even more than God, death, and sex. Yet something in me says that we shall pull through. For deep down, within every human being, there is a great longing for Love and the Truth. It is this longing that will set us free from our delusions. It is this longing that will cause the rising tide of consciousness to become a great tidal wave in the early years of this millennium. Money and information I first became aware that all money-based economies are incompatible with the Information Society we are now in in the late 1970s. That might seem a surprising thing to say in view of the billions of dollars being made out of the information technology industry by individuals and companies. But it is quite easy to demonstrate. To do this, we need to see that the late 1970s were a major watershed in the evolution of the information technology industry, and not just because of the advent of the personal computer. For about this time, business executives began to recognize that data and information are resources of a business, and need to be managed like the traditional four 'm's': men (sic), materials, machines, and money. "Manage data as a corporate resource" was a marketing slogan at IBM at the time. In response to this insight, many organizations appointed a chief information officer (CIO), typically called the information services director, to work alongside the chief financial officer (CFO), the finance director. Before this time, the data processing (DP) function had generally been managed by a technically oriented DP manager reporting into the finance director. So why does this organizational change make the information society incompatible with both capitalism and communism? To see this, we need to ask the question, "what is the relationship between money, managed by the CFO, and information, managed by the CIO?". Well, money is a type of information, not the other way round. This is because the value of information derives from its meaning, which cannot be expressed in a quantitative manner. Conrad Hopman, a highly innovative thinker living in the South Pacific the last time I heard, gives a graphical illustration of this: a glass of water has a quite different meaning to a person drowning in an ocean to one dying of thirst in a desert. So information is not like a physical object with a definite position in space and time. For example, in this age of virtual reality, when documents can be organized in multiple hierarchies, it is quite possible for us to file them in more than one directory/folder on our hard disks through the use of aliases (on the Mac), shortcuts (in Windows 95/98/NT), shadows (in OS/2), and links (in UNIX). But this is quite impossible in a physical filing cabinet. Furthermore, when someone gives another some information, no exchange takes place, as it does when we buy a loaf of bread. Both the sender and the recipient know the information when it is passed from one to another, such as a teacher in a classroom, a point also made by Tom Stonier in A Wealth of Information. So we cannot measure information as if it had length or weight. In this materialistic and mechanistic age of ours, we try to make information behave like a physical object through intellectual property laws, such as copyright, patents, and trademarks. Such an activity is a gross distortion of Nature. For ideas don't belong to persons or institutions; they are a gift of God, freely available for use by every individual in the world. The implications of the fact that information provides meaning are that the value of money can be represented in the enterprise models developed by information systems architects, while the value of information cannot adequately be represented in management accounting models, or more generally in econometric models. For meaning cannot satisfactorily be represented quantitatively in financial models. Only the semantic models of information systems designers can capture the meaning of information. This means that the business models developed by systems architects provide a more comprehensive view of the workings of an enterprise than do financial models. Indeed, these business models are being used today, not only to develop software systems, but also to radically restructure organizations, as Ivar Jacobson, for instance, tells us in The Object Advantage: Business Process Reengineering with Object Technology. However, the modelling techniques used in business today have one major limitation. They are able to model all the jobs being performed by human beings and machines except one: the job of the systems architect him- or herself. Most particularly while these business modelling techniques represent the structure of all the various processes and entities in organizations they omit the process of developing the model itself. Relational logic removes this limitation in business modelling techniques. It provides a comprehensive and completely general method of modelling our own learning processes, seen as a natural extension of all evolutionary processes on Earth. Now our models are like the maps that guide us as we travel around the Earth. But the maps that we use today to manage our business affairs are hopelessly inadequate in the Information Society. This is because they give us a false picture of the territory that they are supposed to map. To use financial maps to manage our business affairs is like trying to sail the high seas using the maps of the Middle Ages, which said that the Earth is flat. The Unified Modeling Language, developed by James Rumbaugh, Grady Booch, and Ivar Jacobson of Rational Inc, and the modelling techniques developed by such organizations as the Club of Rome provide a somewhat better picture of the dynamics of the business world than econometric models. However, as they do not include the process of developing these models, they are severely limited in scope. If we are ever to create a human-oriented, ecologically sustainable economy, then we need to burn our fragmented obsolete maps and replace them with one that provides a true and complete representation of the Universe we live in. Without such a comprehensive map, there is very little chance that our children will be able to resolve the great crisis the world is in today. And even if we had such a comprehensive map, it would not be much help if we did not know at any point in time where we were on the map. In seafaring terms, sailors only had an accurate and reliable means of determining their longitude when the English clockmaker, John Harrison, produced an accurate, seaworthy chronometer around 1760. Before that time, sailors would often lose their bearings when out of sight of land and when the skies were cloudy. The most disastrous result of the lack of good instrumentation was the loss of two thousand men, when four of the five ships in Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell's fleet floundered on the Scilly Isles, south east of England in 1707. So not only do we need a comprehensive new science of humanity, we all need to be able to see where we are on this map, both as individuals and as a species. For otherwise, we shall live in delusion about what it means to be a human being, and thereby drive ourselves onto the unseen rocks that lie just ahead. To get our bearings in this way, to put our lives into perspective, we need to throw away all clocks and live in the timeless. For it is only from this divine viewpoint that we can see who we truly are. Money as an immortality symbol Whether or not we as a society can avoid floundering on the rocks is not anything that anyone of us can decide for ourselves, either as individuals or as a species. We are entirely at the mercy of evolution; we have no control over our lives whatsoever. Indeed, if we are to make the transition out of the mental-egoic age into a superconscious epoch without major bloodshed, a miracle needs to happen. But miracles do happen. For if they did not, the word would not appear in the dictionary. The reason why the death of capitalism and Western civilization could well be a pretty violent affair is that money, for very many people, acts as a immortality symbol, as Ken Wilber points out in Up from Eden. Of course, immortality symbols are false icons, for nothing in the world of form is permanent, least of all monetary systems. But we are not taught this basic fact of life in our schools, businesses, and churches today. Rather we are taught a set of beliefs about the world we live in that have very little to do with the Truth. We can see quite clearly that money is an immortality symbol from the tower blocks that the banks build in the centre of many major cities today. As James Robertson points out in Future Work and other books, these buildings play a similar role in society today to the cathedrals that dominated the centres of medieval cities. Both serve to reinforce our belief in immortality symbols; in the Middle Ages, the notion of a personal God, and today, money. And as James goes on to say, "The theologians of the late middle ages have their counterpart in the economists of the late industrial age. Financial mumbo-jumbo holds us in thrall today, as religious mumbo-jumbo held our ancestors then". Nevertheless, immortality symbols have historically played an important role in society. They help to assuage our existential fears. Existential fears are quite different from the worries we might have when we imagine what might or might not happen or even the fears that arise when faced with a threat to our physical existence. Rather, existential fears arise when we are faced with a threat to our egoic sense of identity. And when this happens, we are quite willing to kill our fellow human beings in order to defend our immortality symbols. The holy wars that have dominated human society for the past few thousand years are clear evidence of this. And for most of my life, I have lived under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust, as the capitalists and communists have threatened to blow us all up, just to protect their illusions about money. Money as a commodity But what exactly is money? The economists give many different definitions. Most particularly, money is regarded as a medium of exchange and a store of value. For money to function in this way, it needs to have some most peculiar properties. If a particular entity is to function as a medium of exchange it must be comparatively scarce, but not so scarce that there are not sufficient units available to cover all trading needs. The reason for this is that if there were an infinite supply of money, it would have no value. Initially, this commodity called money had physical form, such as gold, silver, cattle, tea, salt, cowrie shells, tobacco, sugar, and nails. But today, money doesn't have the physical form that once kept money scarce. It consists primarily of pieces of paper and information in computer systems. And the scarcity of money is maintained through obscure economic rules laid down by the financial authorities. Of course, you wouldn't know that money is scarce by looking at the trillions of dollars sloshing about the world's financial markets every day. But it is. If there were an infinite supply of money, money would no longer have any value. There would no longer be a league table of billionaires and millionaires. Our value to society would naturally be determined by what we are, not by what we have. In such a society there would no longer be any constraints on learning. For Consciousness has no limits; we can therefore continue to learn, to grow in consciousness, indefinitely. But not in a society governed by the scarcity of money. A society that imposes artificial constraints on human development is contrary to the natural creative power of Life. It is therefore not surprising that so many feel stress from living in such a society. Such a way of managing our business affairs is pathological, not healing and life-enhancing. But what do we mean by value? If we want to measure the size of a picture in order to frame it, we take a ruler to measure its width and height. And if we want to measure the weight of a bag of potatoes we use scales. These are just a couple of examples in the way we quantitatively determine the value of things. Money also provides a means of measuring value, just as scales or a ruler enable us to measure the weight or length of something. So money is a measure of value, like yards and kilograms. Yet, for the most part, we don't use money simply as a measuring tool. We have turned money into a commodity with value. 95-97% of economic activity today is concerned with buying and selling money as a commodity; we exchange money as if it were metres and pounds weight! The figures of 95% and 97% have come from Willis Harman, the late president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and Glen Saunders, co-managing director of the Triodos Bank, a social bank in the UK, respectively. Willis mentioned his figure in a working paper he sent me in 1994, titled System in Decline or Transformation? And Glen told us that only one pound/dollar in every thirty-six in used for the exchange of nonfinancial goods and services when he spoke at the Business for Life conference at the Findhorn Community in Scotland in 1996. When Harold Wilson was prime minister of the UK, I remember him commenting that 85% of all financial transactions by value were related to the exchange of money as a commodity, not to the goods and services that you and I need in our daily lives. I wonder how much further this trend can go before we come to our senses. Money as a lowest common denominator Yet even as a measure of value, money is severely limited in an information age. The value of an entity in any particular situation is determined by its uniqueness, by the differences in its properties from other entities in the context under consideration. So having determined that our picture is 50 cms by 70, there is little purpose in buying a 30 x 40 frame. It just wouldn't do the job. Yet money does not honour differences as a measuring tool. Rather, it reduces all values to a lowest common denominator. Of course, this property of money arose to facility trade, to overcome the well-known problems of bartering systems. But what this does to businesses today is pretty gruesome. When we reduce all values to a lowest common denominator, essential differences are lost, which leads to money having a dehumanizing effect. For instance, managers record the value of human beings in their spreadsheets and databases in exactly the same way as the value of raw materials, machines, premises, travel, and other expenses of the business. On the broader front, human beings are traded on the labour market like cattle, soap, and guns. It is utterly demeaning. There is some attempt in businesses to address the developmental and emotional needs of human beings through the human resources function. But even this title reflects that human beings are regarded as no more than resources of the business. When the accountants and shareholders decree it, human beings are expendable. Their essential needs as spiritual beings are of no relevance to the business. Because money is the lowest common denominator in determining value, there is no distinction within the economy today between companies that bake bread, build houses, and make clothes to meet our basic needs for food, shelter, and warmth, and companies that manufacture drugs to poison the body and sell arms with which to kill our fellow human beings. So long as these companies are making money and creating jobs that is fine as far as the economists are concerned. In recent years, the social and ethical investment organizations have made some attempt to distinguish between those companies that make a positive contribution to human well-being and those that clearly don't. However, these worthy efforts do not address the essential problem; these organizations still regard money as a commodity with value rather than a measure of value. In national economics, the concept of the gross domestic product (GDP) as an indicator of a nation's well-being is the most absurd consequence of money reducing all values to a lowest common denominator. To take one simple example sometimes mentioned at conferences and in the literature, car crashes are included in the GDP as a positive contribution to a nation's economic health. Of course, when money is the dominant decision factor in business, the ecological consequences are quite disastrous. The New Economics Foundation in London is making a major effort to develop a set of more meaningful indicators that address these ecological needs. This is a great step forward. But it is really doing no more than attempting to repair the Titanic as it sinks. What we really need is a Carpathia built to a completely new design, a design that is in harmony with Nature and therefore meets the needs of all human beings on this planet. A Global Economic Learning System So can we build Carpathia? Is there a way out of this mess? Is it possible to build an economic system free of the notion that money is a commodity with value? Impossible, do I hear you say? Not at all. Such economies already exist in the world today. Foremost among them is the Local Economic Trading System (LETS), introduced by Michael Linton in Vancouver in the mid-1980s. In order to free local communities of the tyranny of the banking system, a LETSystem enables people in a local community to exchange goods and services using an accounting method where money is simply a measure of value in exchange. Today, encouraged by the New Economics Foundation, there are some 400 LETSystems in the UK, using money with such delightful names as bobbins. So such systems work. The difficulty they face at present is that they only work if they are not too successful, as Michael Linton told me when I met him in 1985. If a LETSystem is too successful, it is often regarded as threatening by the central authorities, who could well move to destroy these life-giving systems So would such an economic system work on the global scale? Provided that we can free ourselves of our fear of death and of our delusions about what it means to be a human being, there is no reason why not. We have the necessary technology. If we can send men to the moon, it is quite within our capability to build a life-enhancing economy that is in harmony with Nature. The key point about a commodity-free monetary system is that in such a system, money has no physical existence. Exchanges in LETSystems are recorded through the use of cheques, telephone calls, and other means of communication. In a global system, smart cards and the Internet would ensure that the necessary records were kept with the minimum of fuss. But I would not put the emphasis on trading in a global economic system for a superconscious society. In such a society, indeed to help such a society to emerge, the emphasis will be on learning. And not just the book learning of the mainstream education system or the systems-oriented Learning Organization, but also learning to discover who we truly are by looking inwards towards Love, Consciousness, and Truth. I would therefore call such a system a Global Economic Learning System (GELS), which, as its acronym implies, would help evolution bring us all together in a peaceful, harmonious global community. Now in order to free ourselves of the delusion that money is a commodity that can be bought and sold, we shall need to dissolve those institutions that embody this principle, most particularly, the joint stock companies, joint stock banks, and the stock markets. It is vital that we end our obsession with the bottom line, so that we can focus our attention on a company's articles of association, which state the contribution that organizations make to humanity. No doubt many will think that I am crazy even to make such a suggestion. But really we have no alternative. If we are not able to use our intelligence and consciousness to create a Global Economic Learning System, then our fear and ignorance will drive us into extinction, to a premature death, before we have had the opportunity to realize our fullest potential as a species. Of course, we don't really have the freedom to make such a choice, for it is evolution that is determining our fate. If we destroy ourselves and the planet on which we live, then this is what is meant to happen, whether we like it or not. Something deep down within me says that eventually those people who run the business world will one day see that running the global economy in the way that we do today is in nobody's interest. For as Willis Harman, co-founder of the World Business Academy has said, "Business has become, in the last half century, the most powerful institution on the planet. The dominant institution in any society needs to take responsibility for the whole." I am particularly concerned here about the attitude of IBM, Microsoft, and Apple, the human face of the information technology industry. For these three companies command the major resources that we shall need to build the global economic learning system. Without their support, it is very unlikely to happen. We could therefore say that the fate of the human race rests in the hands of three men, Lou Gerstner, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, the CEOs and interim CEO of these three multinational companies. For if Spirit can speak through these three powerful leaders, as Spirit is speaking through many millions of people today, there is a real chance that we can move out of the mental-egoic era into the Paragonian epoch with comparatively little bloodshed, even though the tears may flow profusely. Work in the Sharing Economy I need hardly say that the work we do in the Sharing Economy will be radically different from that in the mental-egoic era. To put this into perspective, it is now recognized among many that we have moved out of the industrial era into what Daniel Bell has called the Postindustrial Society, generally called the Information Age or the Information Society. To see the significance of this, we need to go back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which began around 1760. Before this time, societies in the world had been essentially agrarian in nature. Indeed, there had been comparatively little change in this respect since human beings began to settle in village communities to farm the land some 10,000 years ago. The first major census in the UK tells us a little about the types of work done before the Industrial Revolution. This was undertaken by Gregory King, who was employed at the College of Heralds. He made an estimate in 1688 of the population and wealth of England and Wales. In this survey, King estimated that nearly 80% of the population of around five and half million were engaged in agricultural work, either as employers or labourers. Then over the years of the industrial age, the number of agricultural workers fell dramatically, so that by 1976 just 3.3% of the working population in the UK were engaged in the extractive industries, which include forestry, fishing, and mining, as well as agriculture. At that time, 39.5% of the employed population were working in the industrial sector, consisting of the manufacturing, utilities, and construction industries, with the remainder in a wide variety of services industries. So even then the number of industrial workers was declining rapidly as the industrial age was giving way to the Information Society. There has been a similar trend in the USA during the last two centuries of the last millennium. This is clearly shown in the diagram below, which uses a four-sector classification of Agriculture, Industry, Service, and Information. So during the last half of this century, the industrial and agricultural sectors have been in decline, while the information and service sectors have been expanding. I don't exactly know what is included in the service sector, but I would imagine that it includes financial services and tourism. But the vast financial industry is based, more than any other, on the delusion that money is a commodity with value. Also, as we exhaust the oil that fuels the tourist industry, we can expect this too to decline. So what is misleadingly called the service sector in today's economy is likely to diminish in the Sharing Economy. For a Sharing Economy will primarily be based on the service that each and everyone of us can make to the community, whether local or global. As a starting suggestion, I see the Sharing Economy as having these six main principles: To reflect the fact that Life is the primary creative power in the Universe, human growth will be the primary motivator of the sharing economy instead of economic and technological growth. This means that the primary emphasis in the economy will be on a lifetime of learning, not on trade, on the exchange of goods and services. As a GELSystem will ensure that everyone will be able to obtain what they need to reach their fullest potential at each stage in life, whatever goods and services are necessary for this purpose will be made available. For it is in the interests of the whole community that they are. When people feel alienated from the society they live in, unable to express their natural energies, they can become disruptive and even delinquent. The work people do for society will not be for the purpose of survival or for the satisfaction of immature needs such as power and prestige, but be treated as meeting the natural need for unalienated, productive activity as an integral part of the human growth process. This does not mean that everyone will be able to do an 'interesting' or 'satisfying' job all the time. There are many menial jobs to be done in society that can be performed consciously with quality and without alienation; what is called a working meditation in spiritual circles. This does mean, however, that the distinction between employed and unemployed, which is so divisive in today's society, will disappear. Most particularly, the notion that a job is a job is a job, just so that people can be used as cannon fodder for the System, will naturally not exist in a highly conscious, caring society, basing its principles on the Truth. This also means that the pressure to force people out of welfare, beyond the dependency culture, into an unsuitable job will also disappear. As well as everyone having the opportunity to make a worthwhile contribution to society, everyone will have the opportunity to work inwardly to develop self-knowledge and so expand and deepen their consciousness. As the purpose of the economy is to serve human beings, rather that to control and exploit them, there will be a clear distinction between human resources and all other resources, unlike at present where the value of all resources is measured in the lowest common denominator–money. As a corollary, human values will not be quantitatively determined, but rather be contextually expressed in terms of meaning. Human needs are not a function of the contribution individuals make to society or of what they own, and so resources will not be distributed according to people's purchasing power, as at present. A comparison of business principles To summarize the essential difference between the Sharing Economy and capitalism, I can do no better than end this short overview by a comparison of business principles, which I wrote on the Estonia in 1993 a few months before it sank with the loss of over 800 lives. I was on this ship for a kick-off meeting with IBM, then my employer. We were on a 48-hour round-trip from Stockholm to Tallin. On this trip, we were all handed a list of eight business principles, which we were asked to agree to if we wanted to continue working for the company. This gave me a major difficulty because IBM regards monetary and technological growth as being more important than human growth, learning, and the awakening of consciousness, while I consciously recognize that human beings are at the forefront of all evolutionary processes on Earth and need to be given priority. It is the purpose of business to serve human beings, not the other way round. So I wrote down the guiding principles of my life, corresponding to each of the eight IBM principles. I have since added a ninth, intended to serve to reconcile whatever differences might exist between the principles that guide our dying Western civilization, and those that we shall need in the Paragonian epoch.   IBM principles (System first) My principles (People first) 1. The marketplace is the driving force behind everything we do. The power of Life is the driving force behind everything I do. 2. At our core, we are a technology company with an overriding commitment to quality. At my core is the timeless and formless Absolute Whole, which is the ultimate source of all the creative energy in the Universe. 3. Our primary measures of success are customer satisfaction and shareholder value. The primary measure of my success is the degree to which I can dissolve the fears that prevent the full power of Life flowing through me. 4. We operate as an entrepreneurial organization with a minimum of bureaucracy and a never-ending focus on productivity. I operate within an organization that is a living organism, adapting to change as the need arises. 5. We never lose sight of our strategic vision. I never lose sight of my strategic vision, which is to realize the peace and stillness of God within me. 6. We think and act with a sense of urgency. I think and act with a sense of purpose, recognizing that evolutionary processes, like human learning, take time and can never be forced. 7. Outstanding, dedicated people make it all happen, particularly when they work together as a team. Every human being has an immense unfulfilled potential to grow, a potential that can best be realized in an environment of love, trust, and honesty. 8. We are sensitive to the needs of all employees and to the communities in which we operate. I am sensitive to the needs of all human beings, knowing that only love and learning can overcome the fear and ignorance that drive the business world today. 9. Using the nondualistic Consciousness and Intelligence that is within each and every one of us, to reconcile whatever differences exist between these two sets of principles. Home | Introduction | Vision | Foundations | Book | Institute Related sites | Bibliography | Guest book | About me