I'm posting the link above because I agree with this agenda, and it points to a problematic paradox that I think we need to consider, namely, that we've become the tools of our tools. Institutions and ideas that should simply be the means to a desired end have become an end in themselves. Arguably we need banks or something like them to facilitate credit and other transactions, but these are functions, tools to reach a set of goals that reflect our values as a society. Somehow, it seems to me, we're now in service to banks and other economic ideas. We're perpetuating them and working for them as if they have intrinsic value without enough attention to what they are supposedly designed to do for us. We're tinkering with the engine without asking if the car can get us anywhere that we really want to go. I think the heated ideological arguments that take the place of discussions about practical issues are evidence that our values, our collective agreement about our destination, have gotten confused and murky.
This brings to mind a story from the Popul Vuh, the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. This book is an interesting creation story but it's more than ancient history. The Mayans understand the text to be alive, full of insight about the present if properly interpreted. According to the Mayans, the creation of human beings was part of the gods' vision of the earth but they fail three times before they create us. The gods want human beings who will walk, work, and talk articulately, who will be able to understand the complex and beautiful rhythms of the world and the nature of the gods and participate appropriately. This vision is hard to realize.
The first human beings can't work or talk and they become animals. The second set are made of mud and they can't do much either. They slowly dissolve. Finally the gods decide to try wood. The wooden people look and talk and reproduce a lot like we do but they fail to harmonize with the rhythms of the world in an orderly way and they neglect the gods. They create a certain kind of chaos that ultimately destroys them. This chaos first takes the form of hurricanes and the proliferation of dangerous life forms. (If this sounds far fetched to you, consider the increase in storms and natural disasters linked to global warming and the rampant destruction of forests, reefs, and wetlands, the emergence of AIDs, and mad cow disease and other flues for example, traced to farm practices conducted with a cocktail of chemicals and disregard for the natural order.) Then the tools of the wooden people turn against them. They are all killed, killed by the instruments they initially employed to create a world out of harmony with what is, a world out of balance.
Today we are metaphorically run over by our cars, poisoned by our "food," and sweating, stressing, round the clock to meet the needs of our possessions.We are not the wooden people says the Popol Vuh, but we can't just keep going either, worked by the very tools that have brought us to this place.
