Great article:
http://www.inquiringmind.com/Articles/MidasEconomy.html
The following article appears in the Spring 2009 issue
of Inquiring Mind
THE MIDAS ECONOMY:
BUDDHIST REFLECTIONS ON THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
AN INTERVIEW WITH AND ESSAY BY DAVID LOY
David Loy is Besl Professor of Ethics/Religion and
Society at Xavier University in Cincinnati. His work is primarily
in comparative philosophy and religion, particularly comparing
Buddhist with modern Western thought. His many books include
The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory, and Money,
Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution. A Zen
practitioner for many years, he is qualified as a teacher in the
Sanbo Kyodan tradition of Japanese Buddhism.
David Loy: Is the current
financial and economic crisis a good thing? I wouldn’t want to
minimize the suffering it’s creating for many people, but the world
economy is an unjust system, and absolutely unsustainable. If we
don’t know how else to transform it, maybe it’s better that it
collapse sooner rather than later so as to lessen the long-range
impact both on people and on the biosphere. Our economic system is
devastating the Earth. The financial losses from this collapse may
amount to several trillions of dollars, but who can compute the
value of the rain forests we have been cutting down? What price do
you put on species extinction or global warming?
Inquiring Mind: What do you see
as a Buddhist approach to this current situation?
DL: On some level, the Buddhist
solution is always the same—awaken yourself and live in harmony
with others. In our time, especially, that means learning how to
live in harmony with the biosphere. Our economic system has to be
ecologically sustainable, and it has to work to the mutual benefit
of everyone, rather than to just a small percentage of the Earth’s
population.
IM: The Buddha and his followers
chose a form of communalism or socialism: the Sangha.
DL: That’s true. The Buddhist
scholar Trevor Ling believed that the Buddha wasn’t just forming a
small group of monastics to support their own realization, but that
he was modeling a broader, transformative vision for how society
should function. Did he perhaps see the Sangha as the example or
“vanguard’ for a more egalitarian social order? And more recently,
the great twentieth-century Thai reformer Buddhadasa proposed what
he called “dhammic socialism.”
But what is most distinctive about the Buddha’s social
analysis is that the fundamental dichotomy is not between good and
evil but between delusion/ignorance on one side and
wisdom/enlightenment on the other. The challenge is to understand
our economic system not primarily in terms of some people selfishly
exploiting others but instead as a system of collective greed and
delusion. Some suffer much more than others, of course, but even
those at the top are trapped by their own ego-based cravings.
IM: So the current economic
breakdown may be a “heavenly messenger”—a great opportunity for
collective insight—as people begin to see more clearly into the
fundamental flaws of the system. You say that you would like to see
Buddhists step forward more vigorously at this time to offer an
alternative perspective to the world.
DL: Yes. I’m encouraged by the
“gross national happiness” movement inspired by Bhutan, for
example. And recently there have been several Buddhist economics
conferences, most notably in Thailand. Perhaps this is an idea
whose time has come. Unfortunately, the people in politics who are
closest to the Buddhist analysis—liberals, progressives and other
left-of-center groups—often dismiss the Buddhist approach as simply
“religious.” It’s Marxism’s old “opiate of the masses” critique.
Maybe now, in the middle of our discontent, they will be encouraged
to take a fresh look.
According to Legend, Midas was a
Lydian king who was offered any reward he wanted for helping the
god Dionysus. Although already fabulously wealthy, he asked that
whatever he touched might turn to gold. Midas enjoyed his new
powers, transforming everything in sight—until it came to be
dinnertime. He took a bite—cha-ching! The food in his mouth turned
to gold. He took a sip of wine—cha-ching! It solidified into gold.
He hugged his daughter—cha-ching! She hardened into a golden
statue. In despair, Midas pleaded for Dionysus to deliver him from
this hateful power. Fortunately, the god obliged; Dionysus sent
Midas to wash in the river Pactolus, which cleansed him of what he
now realized was a curse.
We are all familiar with this story. Despite its
simplicity it is one of the most profound of all Greek myths. So
why do I retell it now? Because today it is more important than
ever: it can help us understand the financial and economic crisis
that has just begun and that is about to transform all of our
lives.
Obviously, the Midas story is about greed, the first of
the “three poisons,” or three unwholesome roots, according to the
Buddha (the others being ill will and delusion). But the moral of
this tale is about much more than greed. Midas valued gold more
than anything else, so the great irony is his realization that a
golden touch makes everything else worthless. He couldn’t eat or
drink gold, and he certainly couldn’t love it the way that he loved
his daughter.
By no coincidence, the same is true of our own
currency: even a $100 bill has no value in itself. It’s just a
piece of paper—in effect, nothing. We can’t eat it, drink it, live
in it, ride on it, etc. When we treat money as the most valuable
thing in the world, that’s simply because we have collectively
agreed to make it so. We forget that money is a social construct—a
kind of group fantasy. The anthropologist Weston LaBarre called it
a psychosis that has become normal, “an institutionalized dream
that everyone is having at once.” As long as we keep dreaming
together, it continues to work as the socially agreed-upon means
that enables us to convert something (a day’s work, for example)
into something else (bags of groceries, perhaps).
Yet as Midas reminds us, money can also become a curse.
In more psychological terms, the danger is that means and ends
become reversed, so that the means of life becomes the goal itself.
As Arthur Schopenhauer put it, money is abstract happiness, so
someone who is no longer capable of concrete happiness can set his
heart on money. Money becomes “frozen desire”—not desire for
anything in particular but a symbol for the satisfaction of desire
in general. But what does the Buddha say about desire? Frozen or
not, it remains the root cause of suffering.
The news media have also been telling us that the
financial crisis is due to desire—or, as they put it, the excessive
greed of Wall Street speculators and the unbridled spending of Main
Street borrowers. But the problem goes much deeper, and our
predicament is much worse. Our financial and economic system has
institutionalized the Midas touch. To use another metaphor, the
“Midas problem” is not like a virus that has infected the economic
hard drive; rather, it has become the software that runs our
economy.
The Buddha’s first noble truth identifies dukkha
(“suffering, dissatisfaction”) as inherent to the human condition:
it is the nature of an unawakened mind to be bothered by a feeling
of lack. Our society conditions us to understand this sense of lack
as lack of enough money, so that we always want more, like Midas.
Our economic system institutionalizes this lack into a collective
craving that can never be satisfied. Consumers never consume
enough, corporations are never profitable enough, the GDP can never
be big enough, etc. The goal of the system is to end up with more
money than we started with, to turn whatever we touch to gold.
Those who think like Midas rise to the top. Investors seek
increasing returns in the form of dividends and higher share
prices. This generalized expectation translates into an impersonal
but constant demand for ever more profit and growth, a desire that
can never be fully satisfied.
But who is responsible for this unrelenting emphasis on
profitability and growth? That’s the point: we all participate—as
workers, employers, consumers, investors and pensioners. The
ultimate irony—or rather, tragedy—of this process is that
everything that gives life value is devalued into a means for
maximizing something that has no value whatsoever in itself.
Everything becomes a means to making more money. “Everything” in
this case includes the biosphere (resources), human life (labor),
and society itself (we must continually adapt to the changing
requirements of the economy).
It is becoming increasingly obvious that this system is
unsustainable because it involves a growth obsession that, left to
itself, will not cease until the whole of the biosphere has been
converted into profit. Capitalism made more sense a couple
centuries ago when the Earth seemed infinite and capital (money for
investment) was relatively scarce. Today the obvious metaphor is
cancer on a planetary scale. Cells become cancerous when they
mutate into uncontrolled growth and spread throughout the body to
disrupt its healthy functioning. That is not a bad description of
what might be called Midas globalization.
Midas could ask Dionysus to remove his self-imposed
curse, but we cannot appeal to a god to remove ours. Individually,
meditation practice reduces personal dukkha by reducing desire, but
how are we to address the collective dukkha generated by
institutionalized desire? Ultimately we must choose between this
economic/financial system and the survival of the biosphere. Yet
there really is no choice. Our current system is doomed no matter
what in the same way that a cancer always ends up destroying its
host. From that perspective, the financial meltdown is actually a
wonderful opportunity to address a much deeper problem. Such a
crisis would be a terrible thing to waste.
© 2009 Inquiring Mind