The Circular Economy

in real and fake guises

The circular economy. What a marvellous idea! Outputs from one process are inputs to another, and the world doesn’t get destroyed. Surely wonderful!

We live however, in a world where fundamentally good ideas get turned into caricatures: A charge on plastic carrier bags to encourage us to use them again, but no discussion at all about the environmental impact of everyone on the planet owning or using (e.g. at work) at least three or four digital devices, and replacing them all every three to five years. Campaigns against eating meat, but no visible discussion about wildly excessive food packaging, or the fact that ‘food miles’ are often many times the distance between the place of production and the supermarket. (Even when the two are in the same country / county / state).

You get the idea.

However, even if we were really serious about physical re-use, and even if ESG¹ were really a project about sustainability, rather than a means for turning corporations into governments, a more important pre-requisite is being missed: Sustainability and equity cannot be achieved until money and human effort circulate properly.

Let me elaborate: ‘Human Resources’ is an interesting expression. In the corporate world which sponsors ‘ESG’, it means turning people into commodities. But if that too were made into less of a caricature, it would mean recognition that unused human potential is the key to transforming the world - not ‘grandiose schemes from on high’ which, to the extent that they achieve anything, usually achieve it for their authors.

Before going further, I must confess that I face a dilemma with my ‘World in Transition’ project: A meaningful vision of social change cannot be arrived at piece-meal. In the 21st century more than ever before, everything is tightly bound together. Every possibility of change in one area runs into a dependency on change in several others. Attempts to change those will run into dependency for change in other areas yet. And all of those complex dependencies cannot be addressed in a ‘Substack-sized missive’. (Even if they could, we would still be left of course with the problem that in the real world we will have to push and pull in many places simultaneously for decades to make headway).

As things progress, I will start to link together themes from different pieces (see ‘World in Transition’ archive), and hopefully synthesise a more integrated vision - with help, of course, from the gradually growing numbers of people who are contributing their thoughts in the comments. (Because a genuinely ‘integrated’ vision is one that is organically developed and shared. It forms a guiding principle shaped by the mutual influence of hearts and minds over time. It works in the world organically too, not like a written manifesto. If it is not those things, it is just more egotism and ideology).

For now though, I must present a ‘patchwork quilt’ - brief attempts to be thought-provoking on narrow and isolated specifics….

…. like the ‘circular economy’, and why that expression means we must be thinking about how money and human effort circulate, and how remedying the problem of under-cultivated talent is the key to a viable world:

Last summer, I wrote a piece called ‘Why Culture Must Lead’. In it, I referred to Vaclav Havel, who was instrumental in ending years of Soviet-inspired darkness in the Czech Republic at the end of the 80's. Havel subsequently noted that political reform had not led to Czech society’s re-awakening, but the other way around. Point being (and the argument has a long pedigree through Blake² and von Humbolt³ in the 18th century, through Tolstoy,⁴ Madison and de Toqueville⁵ in the 19th, Steiner,⁶ Hayek,⁷ and Jung⁸ in the 20th, Hillman,⁹ Sardello¹⁰ and Ross¹¹ in the 21st, and many others), positive social transformation much more often arises from culture, and from the shared values and actions of the population, than it does from ideologues and politicians.

In October, I wrote of ‘The Failed Mantra of the French Revolution’, and how ‘liberty, egality and fraternity’ should be related respectively to ‘culture, rights and commodity-production. That is, a three part society, in which the ‘free cultural’ should have its own institutions, and real responsibilities, such that it becomes the balancing force between the interests of government power and corporate power. We can see at present that without that, those other two band together and cause us great problems.

And then in my most recent post (‘The Economist is Wearing no Clothes’), I proposed that there must in future be some means for us all to have some input to what the raw materials of the planet are turned into by manufacturers. (Maybe for instance, we have other priorities than delivery robots, and AI computers that we can talk to when we get ill). Well, that too implies ‘institutions of the cultural’.

Perhaps an impression is developing that by ‘cultural’ I mean rather more than philosophy, art, cooking and spiritual belief? Indeed I do. In fact, I mean everything other than the limited and legitimate role of the state in defining a rights framework and the extensive and collaborative enterprise of producing, distributing and retailing the commodities we need to live. All the rest is ‘the cultural’.

What it means to say that is that all the rest should be in the hands of the population, through freely-formed institutions which draw upon the talent and goodwill of the people, and their clearly shared interest in getting it right, and in both enabling and holding to account law makers and commodity producers.

The very big question which must immediately follow of course is YEAH, OK, BUT HOW ARE THOSE INSTITUTIONS GOING TO BE FUNDED? That brings us back, quite naturally, to the proper circulation of money and human effort.

‘Culture’ properly defined, includes (among other things), education, science, medicine and healing, religious belief (or non-belief), sport and philosophy. And also co-ordinated input to the legislative and production functions which serve it.

Within the dynamic of these three social elements of culture, state and commodity production, the outputs from one must indeed be the inputs to another. To give a simple example, education and science provide the innovations and the personnel needed by the production sphere. A proper reciprocal action then, is for the production sphere to return money to those institutions. Since a government with a more limited role of defining the rights framework for the interactions between the three needs much smaller level of tax income (compared to when it sees its role as controlling everything in all spheres of society) much of the money which goes to taxes should be routed to the institutions of the cultural. Not in the present manner of today’s corporate ‘charitable foundations’ which give money to schools, start-ups, research projects etc. of their choosing, and with conditions attached. No, that set-up means it is still the corporations calling the shots. Rather, funding must flow back to cultural institutions (mostly ones which don’t yet even exist), unconditionally. A kind of direct democracy is born, in which the people will decide themselves how that money is spent.

If one doubts the realism of this, it is interesting to note that a small move in that direction has already begun to arise spontaneously, in the form of crowd-funding. However since that is presently controlled once again by the big corporations (and their overlapping interests with government) we have already been seeing them assuming the right to seize contributions freely made by the public if those contributions support things at odds with their own desires.

In the end what I’m saying, as I often am in ‘World in Transition’, is that our most urgent need is to get beyond the world in which governments and giant corporations stitch everything up between them and crush out of existence all possibility of wider participation in society.

What I’m saying is that we must move from a two-part world of governmental and corporate-commercial institutions, to a mutually-regulating three-part world in which those two are joined in partnership by broadly-defined ‘cultural’ institutions.

Nothing I write of here will be achieved easily or in the short term. But then ‘short-termism’ has long been part of the problem, and a devastating side product of our existing ways of doing things. A guiding principle on the long road ahead is that it is the investment of money and human creativity which must be circular. Not plastic bags and ideological arguments.

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1. ‘ESG’ is a new coroporate buzzword. It stands for ‘Environmental, Social, Governance’. Under its banner, the corporate world seeks to wash its public image by presenting an altruistic face, and putting right the wrongs of the world. In practice the levers of immense wealth get used to intervene in social dyanmics without electoral accountability, while corporate intersts inevitably continue to come first. It’s real nature and consequence are well explored in ‘Woke, Inc.’ by Vivek Ramaswamy, 2021.

2. William Blake: “The arts and sciences are the destruction of tyrannies or bad governments. Why should good government endeavour to repress what is its chief and only support? The foundation of empire [let's today consider that to mean governance] is art and science. Remove them and empire is no more. Empire follows Art, and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.”

3. Wilhelm von Humboldt was a Prussian philosopher and government functionary. He was also an educator with liberal (in the traditional sense) views, who believed that the task of education should be the realisation of individual possibility, and not the drilling into students of the ideas of the day. He famously said “the government is best which makes itself unnecessary”. (Though I would prefer to say “which reduces its role to the defining of a rights framework and, beyond that act of empowerment, relinquishes responsibility for the success of society, leaving that for its members).

4. One the underlying messages of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ is that it is ultimately not the plans and policies and strategies, the presidents and kings and generals who determine the direction of the world, but the swarming minds and hearts and countless small actions of the millions on the ground, beyond the plans and the policies. (‘War and Peace’, Leo Tolstoy, 1865).

5. When the French philosopher and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited 19th century America, he attributed the country's vibrance, dynamism and forward momentum to its tremendous range of civic and cultural engagement. And he predicted that should that participation one day cease, we would see in its place “an immeasurable multitude... all equal and alike”, above which “stands an immense and tutelary power which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular... It would be like the authority of a parent, if like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood - but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood”. ('Democracy in America', Alexis de Toqueville 1835).

6. See ‘The Renewal of the Social Organism’, Rudolf Steiner, 1921. (In English 1985)

7. See ‘Essays in Philosophy, Politics and Economics’, F. A. Hayek, 1967

8. Jung believed that the future of humanity depends entirely upon the inner transformation of the individual - which can take place only through true culture. Thus Jung stated that “Future generations will have to take account of this…. if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science… So much is at stake and so much depends upon the psychological constitution of the modern human”. I will note that the currently widespread obsession with top-down ‘social engineering’ can do nothing but disrupt and destabilise that process. (‘The Undiscovered Self’, Carl Jung, 1958).

9. James Hillman, a former head of the Jungian Institute in Zurich, wrote extensively of how society, as well as the individual, benefits from the fulfilment of individual calling and creativity. (‘The Soul’s Code’, James Hillman, 1997).

10. Psychologist Robert Sardello is a founding member of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, whose mission is to “enrich and deepen the practical life of the city with the wisdom and imagination of the humanities”. (See also ‘Money and the Soul of the World’, Robert Sardello, 1983).

11. Carne Ross is a former British diplomat who resigned his post in 2004 over what he considered to be immorality and dishonesty on the part of the British government in relation to the Iraq war. He has asserted that in matters of international geopolitics, the standard analogy of a chess game is ridiculously inadequate, and that a Jackson Pollock painting is a better one, but still inadequate. And that that the only structures which will really work are ones with power more evenly distributed among the base. The problems of our society arise, he suggests, when ´individuality´ has no legitimate way to help shape society. (‘The Leaderless Revolution’, Carne Ross, 2011).