“[We] just dropped in to see what condition [our] condition was in” – Kenny Rogers and The First Edition, 1967
A Manifesto
1. We cannot take action on climate, and other challenges in our changing times in the 21st Century, by exercising only the agency as human beings that we get through the social architectures of Markets and Governments that we inherited from the 20th Century.
2. We need to explore all the social architectures for agency as human beings that we have in society today to find the one that is the right one for taking action on climate and other things.
3. Then, we have to mobilize it!
4. The right social architecture that we have to mobilize is Fiduciary Money (Pensions & Endowments).
5. We can and must exercise our agency through the social architecture of Government – legislation and litigation – to mobilize Fiduciary Money, to Fix Finance, and Fix the Climate, and Reshape Our Economy to be right for our times, in the 21st Century.
Fiduciary is a difficult word, largely because we have not yet unpacked its powers as what Indra Adnan has called “the missing social architectures of agency for human beings”.
The two most important kinds of agency that fiduciary can give us, once we unpack it, are individual, and professional. Individually, it gives us a new agency as new 21st Century Global Citizens in a new 21st Century Global Commons of Fiduciary Finance. Professionally, it opens up a new career path in stewardship of The Pension Promise of Quality of Life for Workers in Retirement, and the Endowments Promise to Civil Society, by deploying Fiduciary Money as financing for enterprise to shape a Quality of Life Economy for all.
This is a BIG conversation, and I hope you will be intrigued to explore it further.
click here to view: Fiduciary Money is Our Superpower
Here's the plan:
Enforcing the law...
to fix finance...
to fix the climate...
...and reshape the economy...
The violation of the law to be enforced:
Insufficiency for Longevity
personal health > public health > habitat health > social health > The Fiduciary Way
Living well means having enough of the right stuff to keep ourselves ongoing into a dignified future. Forever. Or at least as close to forever as it is possible for us to get.
What is right, and what is enough – what is sufficient for our longevity – is different for different people, at different times and in different places.
However, what is sufficient for our personal longevity, as individuals, must also fit within and be a part of what is sufficient for the longevity of all humanity, which must, in turn, fit within what is sufficient for the longevity of the natural habitats within which we, as humans, can and must live.
enforcers of the law
People Who Care
self-selected from among the general population of everyday people living our everyday lives
reckoning with
the future
consequences
of present
choices
a social contract
for sufficiency
Which brings us to the social structures for social decision making through which we, as humans, regulate our relationships:
- with Nature and the habitats within which we live and on which we depend;
- and also with each other, and the transactions in technologies within which we all participate and on which we all depend for sufficiency and our own longevity;
- and to some extent, with ourselves, and our individual and personal expectations for future experience that inform our own personal and individual choices that motivate our actions, as we each work to live our own best lives;
- and with our shared future.
We each depend, personally and individually, on healthy social decision making for habitat health; for public health; and for our own personal health, our own sufficiency for our own longevity.
Which means that we each have a vested interest in making sure our social structures for social decision making are making enough of the right decisions to deliver us sufficiency for our own longevity. That’s the social contract that we all enter into with society: that we will reckon with the consequences of our individual choices and actions on the longevity of society; and society will reckon with the consequences of social decisions on our own, personal possibilities for sufficiency and longevity.
Today, too many people feel that this social contract is being broken; that society is not keeping up its end of the bargain. It feels to too many that we have lost our way.
How did that happen?
To find out, we have to travel back to the 20th Century (not in time, but in understanding), when the path towards Progress that people were taking in the 19th Century petered out, and we had to choose another way. When we do go back there in our imaginations, we will see that we should have chosen a path towards Sufficiency. Instead, we chose a path towards Growth.
That was a mistake.
What happened when we took that wrong path is that our institutions of social decision making, the legal constructs that we create and sustain under the law, for making social decisions:
- through Civil Society and the marketplace of ideas, social norms and social narratives;
- through Enterprise and the marketplace of “stuff”, for effecting transactions in technologies to shape our economies and provide ourselves with the possibilities for choosing new beginnings for sufficiency and longevity in our own changing times and changing places;
- through Finance and the marketplace for aggregating money set aside for our future to be deployed as financing for enterprise to shape our economy;
- and through Government and the marketplace for popular support for regulating social behavior
lost their authenticity. They began to operate illegally, in violation of their own institutional logic and purpose.
The
Untaken
Safer
Alternative
We can see this in Finance, which is broken. We can see it in Climate, which is also broken. And we can see it in many places throughout our economy, which has become misshapen, by Finance and by Climate and by a cascading cavalcade of other social failings that fall out of our wrong turning, from Progress into Growth, and away from sufficiency for our own longevity.
We have to restore that authenticity. We have to hold our institutions to account for the choices they are making in disloyalty to their lawful purposes. We have to enforce the law against our institutions that have begun to operate lawlessly.
The
Fiduciary
Way
And the institutions we have to begin with are our Pensions & Endowments, the superfiduciary stewards of society’s shared savings aggregated into social superfunds for retirement and civil society, as institutional fiduciary owners of intergenerational fiduciary money.
Why Pensions & Endowments?
Because they are the only social structure for social decision making today that has the mission, the duty and the scale to finance enterprise to shape our economy for sufficiency for longevity.
But they are not doing that. They have lost their way. They have become faithless to their fiduciary duty, to our shared future. A future of sufficiency, longevity, and dignity. For all. Forever.
We have to take them back, to where they lost their way, and took a wrong turning, towards Growth, and make them take the right turn, towards Sufficiency for Longevity.
We need to make them take The Fiduciary Way.
reckoning with the future consequences of present choices when deploying
Fiduciary Money as financing for enterprise to shape an economy of sufficiency
for keeping a good society ongoing into a dignified future, forever, through
THE FIDUCIARY WAY
technological propriety,
social equity and
habitat longevity for
living our best lives
in the 21st Century
and beyond…
The Fiduciary Reckoning Initiative
The Cape Cod Center for Sustainability
20th Century
Neoliberal
Recklessness
a BIG rethink
21st Century
Fiduciary
Reckoning
a simple proposition:
fiduciary money needs to be deployed in a fiduciary way
a radical* transformation
* in the Latin sense, of “going to the root”
digging
deep
diggingshared social subconscious
digging deep into our shared social subconscious, to bring to the surface our shared social contracts for social decision making, that we inherited from those who lived before us, so that we can agree that they have become outdated and obsolete in our times,
no longer fit to our changing purposes,
not right for choosing OUR new beginnings
from among OUR prevailing possibilities
they need to be updated:
innovated, and restated
social contracts
need to change
shared social contracts
bringing to the surface
upgrading, innovating and restating
real, fundamental, structural transformations that are not just “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”
Neoliberal SELF-DETERMINATION + GROWTH + MARKETS vs. GOVERNMENT
more = better
quantity = quality
>>>
becomes
The Fiduciary Way of institutional accountability to institutional purpose in shaping an economy of sufficiency for keeping a good society ongoing into a dignified future, forever, through technological propriety, social equity and habitat longevity for living our best lives in the 21st Century, and beyond…
the FALSE simplicity of reduction to NUMBERS
>>>
becomes
the TRUE complexity of being human in society through transactions in technologies to shape an economy
We need a new story.
New words. New frames. A new vocabulary.
This is our current story: GROWTH. Simple numerical increases in the money value of transactions completed from one period of measurement to another.
That is the story of our shared prosperity today.
It is reductionist, extractive, externalizing, dehumanizing, uncaring and recklessly unreckoning with the future consequences of our present choices.
And it is wrong. Crazy, really. To think that more is always better, without ever stopping to ask, More of what? Better for whom?
Nature teaches that more is not always better. That enough is what we need. Sufficiency for Longevity. The right amounts of the right stuff to keep us ongoing, evolving and adapting. Living our best lives.
It is unnatural to say that more is always better. Irrational. Not reasonable.
It defies common sense.
Which is crazy. And illegal.
And yet, we are letting our common sense as reasonable people, that enough of the right stuff is what we need and want, be pushed out of our story of what is good in the economy today.
Why are we doing that? How did we let our condition get into this condition?
What were we thinking?
As humans, we live together through stories of Money and Finance and Enterprise and the Economy and Social Structures for Social Decision Making. The story we are living within today is Neoliberalism.
The three primary themes in this social story of Neoliberalism are:
- the Invisible Hand makes all the decisions, as the sum total of the aggregated individual choices of each of us, as individuals, acting individually, in individual pursuit our own individual self-interest, as we determine for ourselves what is in our own self interest: not so much selfishness, as self-determination (which is, of course, simply not true: because in the Markets for share price trading, which are only the markets that Neoliberalism is really talking about, individuals don’t vote; shares do; or rather people who hold shares get to vote the number of shares they hold; and shares are bought with money, so the people with the most money hold the most shares, and therefor the most votes; but the most money is not held by individuals at all, but by institutions, so that it is the people who control the money owned by institutions that actually make all the decisions in a Neo(not)liberal economy; there is no Invisible Hand; just the very visible had of those professionals who are in control of the money that we aggregate through our institutions, that they have seized control of);
- except that every individual decision has be a decision about where the growth is going to come from, according to The Growth Imperative (that’s what the experts in control of our institutions are actually expert in: Growth); and
- the Markets are the only social structures through which individual decisions about Growth can be allowed to be made, except when the Markets fail, then Government must step in to socialize the costs of that Market failure, to get the Market working again, and then step away (until, that is, the Markets fail again, which they always do).
This popular Neoliberal social story, of the Invisible Hand choosing according to The Growth Imperative through Markets backstopped by Government, is actually preventing us, as society, from making the choices we need to be making to meet the challenges of our changing times today, in the 21st Century. This story needs to be changed. It is outdated (and also fundamentally flawed from the get-go). It needs to be upgraded. Innovated, and restated. Replaced. And retired.
Choosing the right new story will be made difficult because Neoliberalism co-opts plain English words, and encodes them with specialized meaning, so that we receive those words and understand them in their plain English meanings, in which they are understood as authentically good. But they are actually being used in a specialized way that would not always be received as good if the intended meaning was made clear.
This use of “slippery slope” words to convey specialized meanings that are not quite the same as the “plain English” meaning in which those words are so often received, this Neoliberal linguistic sleight-of-hand, suppresses and oppresses our capacity to think critically about the various propositions that comprise the Neoliberal narrative.
The words are the same, but
the Neoliberal meaning ≠ the “plain English” meaning.
Which leaves us confused in our expectations, and in conflict over the right actions we can and should be taking.
Because of this pernicious and pervasive encoding of “plain English” words with specialized meanings within the Neoliberal narrative, it becomes necessary when innovating a new narrative that can replace-and-retire the outdated and obsolete (and also fundamentally false in some very important ways) narrative of Neoliberalism to speak with a degree of precision and particularity in our choice of words that can be criticized (unfairly) as tedious, persnickety or even pedantic.
Recalibrating language
to construct the new vocabulary of The Fiduciary Way
Words matter.
When we talk with experts using words that we think mean one thing, but to the experts mean another thing, we are going to think we understand the experts, because we think we understand the words they are speaking, but really we do not.
The result is confusion. Nothing makes sense.
We think it is us. It’s not.
It’s them.
returning to sense by upgrading our shared common sense, of experts, and their expertise
clarifying the language of Money and Finance and Enterprise and the Economy and Our Social Contracts of Authority and Accountability in Social Decision Making
for talking about
- fixing the LAW
- to fix FINANCE
- to fix the CLIMATE
- and reshape the ECONOMY
BY PUTTING HUMANITY BACK INTO THE CONTRACT
holding our institutions of money for finance accountable for
authenticity and integrity in the institutional exercise of their institutional authority
