As the ‘credit crunch’ develops, at last attention is beginning to be focused on the financial system, even in the financial press and popular media, though there is as yet little recognition of the fundamental problem. The Web is another place of hope, with many sites exploring the developing situation.

The quote below is from ‘Monetary Dynamics: in tune with a Dynamic Gaian World’:

"DT Suzuki, a Zen philosopher at the turn of the previous century, wrote:

Man makes many tools and uses them effectively in various fields of his activity, but he is always exposing himself to the tyranny of the tools he has made. The result is that he is no more master of himself, but an abject slave to his surroundings, and the worst thing is that he is not conscious of this fact. This is especially noticeable in the realm of thought.

"Suzuki’s observation summarizes one key characteristic of humans that may lead to our demise: our general inability to see beyond beliefs by which we have become mentally entrapped. People can believe the most amazing things regardless of hard physical evidence to the contrary. The amazing belief that this paper hopes to address is that the vast majority of humans in the developed world believe that economic growth – translated as human activity growth - can continue exponentially forever on a finite planet, even as our collective human activity destabilizes the natural Gaian systems that sustain us plus we currently experience peaking of the primary energy supply that launched our excess activity. The wolf is at the door, and yet we fail to hear the howls!!

"Our written rules for money, economics and corporations evolved over time, including rules for feedback linkages/loops between us humans and the physical world of minerals and other animal life. But it is these human fabricated feedback linkage/loops that fail us today because they evolved in another era, before and during exponential growth in human activity, enabled by fossil fuels. But changes to these feedback loops are inhibited by blind adherence to our current paradigm’s top ideology of economic growth forever. In his book Designing Freedom, cyberneticist Stafford Beer wrote:
"I am proposing simply that society should use its tools to redesign its institutions, and to operate those institutions quite differently. You can imagine all the problems. But the first and gravest problem is in the mind, screwed down by all those cultural constraints. You will not need a lot of learning to understand what I am saying: what you will need is intellectual freedom. It is a free gift for all who have the courage to accept it. Remember: our culture teaches us not intellectual courage, but intellectual conformity."

This paper was presented at the October 2008 meeting of the Bromsgrove Group of UK monetary reformers, by the visiting Canadian, Don Chisholm.

I recommend a look at the whole thought-provoking paper, though it is long (too long to reproduce here), and it contains some debatable ideas . It can be viewed at http://www.gaiapc.ca/PCD/BromMD

Two other articles on the Web to be recommended, though also too long to copy here; the first showing the criminal collusion of the Bush administration and the financial ‘industry’ in handling their bail-out:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/All-Is-Well-in-Stepfordvil-by-Ellen-Brown-081103-575.html

- and the other applying systems theory to the world financial meltdown, to advocate the importance of multiple complementary currencies, though it does not address the basic problem with the present system: the exponential growth of debt due to the way the money is created:
www.lietaer.com/images/White_Paper_on_Systemic_Bank_Crises_Nov08.pdf

Finally, see my new ‘vidcast’, at moneymyths.org.uk