Making a living teaching others to live NOW….

I often  ask myself why I teach the Alexander Technique – sure it can’t be to make a living only, I reflect. It must be more, because after all, it is a radical, non-mainstream, underfunded, under-advertised, unknown and a largely unsung area of understanding for most of the population. I’m not mad (probably) or willingly contrary, so there must be another good reason, I assume.

Well, the truth is that I do teach its principles because it is important to do so. Because it feeds into much of what I think has value and because it has helped me enormously in a number of areas. Those of us who teach for a living of any kind will recognize this particular reasoning.

However, recently I have been assailed by doubts as to the sensible nature of my campaign to re-educate and to sing the praises of this most important self- educational tool. The difficulty arises because many of our most needy, potential pupils are simply too bound up in the relentless race to ‘get on’ or  to have a ‘good time’ that the call to come for  lessons: the stimulus to a more balanced self and life  is simply not strong enough.

Or, should I say that the stimulus to make more money (at the expense of many other less definable goals), to enjoy the future is the main overriding interest of many. Again, picking up on the practical financial aspects of life, it is of course a  consideration when deciding to take up of Alexander technique teaching.

One of the things that concerns me and affects me in my own battle with habitual thinking is the seeming ease with which teachers are happy to turn the technique into a business using the same management lexicon that has engulfed-no sabotaged much of contemporary culture. Nowhere, it seems has been spared when it comes to the ‘bottom line’ and ‘outcomes’ mentality. I’d suspect that fitting in or not with this business ‘interest’ provides the biggest stimulus for many AT teachers in their own quest for psycho-physical harmony!

With price indices on various fronts increasing with alarming speed, including those for the basics of life, food and fuel, it seems doubly difficult to rationalize the teaching of a technique aimed at  growth of the self. After all, it doesn’t pay does it? Well, not in the way we might recognize….

However, the main means I use – embody – to assuage my anxiety in this regard and to keep my feet on the ground is simply this: to know that when I fail to inhibit this financial anxiety and fall in with a general siege mentality I do not enjoy myself. It’s a reasoned response to this particular stimulus rather than a burying of the head. After all, I do make a living teaching this work along with another less-than-highly regarded vocation – that of professional classical music.

Indeed, if I were to extend my anxiety and decided to do all I could to make more moolah -  then it might take me so far away from the present moment that I might not be able, when I FINALLY achieve my financial goals, to enjoy it – I would have had much practise in not being present -i.e. enjoying myself, because my whole life, or at least a seminal part of it has been devoted to a future time which is always, NOW!!

I wrote elsewhere about the necessity of inverting Maslow’s pyramid of needs so that we put self realization at the bottom and the achievement of life’s basic necessities at the top. As I now see it, if we neglect this ratio in favor of the imaginary future we will not find a life worth living (when we ‘get’  there) and will be eternally restless.

It seems to me that we can be more effective in advertising the fierce truth of this view of reality so that value becomes, in its own way a less abstract commodity than money, which is in fact a most imaginary store of value – as many of have seen recently – value bestowed by a people beset with attitudes that have not been questioned in this regard, seemingly at all.

There is still much work to do!!

Making your own teachers

In Alexander circles, so it seems, any mention of hardware – furniture, seat shape or height, computer monitor height, piano stool height, computer layout, shoes, etc tends to stimulate the teachers amongst us to frown, on the one hand,  become very enthusiastic on the other, or, to provoke a healthy disinterest on the third hand.

My response tends to be towards the frown, though admitting that in some circumstances, ‘good practical use’ is very, very dependent on the nature of the hardware with which we interact.

Take my own specialty,  playing the violin. It’s quite clear that for many violinists the set up of chin-rest/ shoulder rest (especially)  is hugely important not only in using oneself well, but in being able to play, conventionally speaking, at all.

I remember being part of a group who  played a joke on a very, very fine violinist just before a recording session in which he was to play a tricky solo. We (for it takes a few to generate the courage, though only one to commit the treacherous act) lowered his rather high shoulder rest about 1/2 inch on either side.  Looking back it was a silly and rather childish prank to play on our very much liked and respected colleague, but I remember well the pandemonium it caused.

At the appointed time, with the solo nearly upon him, he had to stop, and, noticing that something was wrong with his set up, asked the conductor if he could take a five minute break (costly in the recording studio..)  to re-adjust. It was the familiarity that he missed, and whilst he probably would not have been quite the fine player in his solos we all recognized (though probably still fine enough!) , his response was to stop and re-adjust to something he knew and felt comfortable with. Perfectly understandable.

Chairs, too, often make good ‘use’ seem impossible, though rarely do we have a chance to change to something ‘better’ in the course of a day, to the extent that we might say that we have no option to give in’ to their wayward and often troublesome design, with a sense of exasperation.To this day I still choose a coffee house with this fact in the back of my mind.

However, we can still allow ourselves to maximize our experience or at least limit the damage in a variety of similar situations by not trying to be right in the face of what might seem to be overwhelming odds. In the case of playing the violin at least, it can sometimes lead to a discovery that completely changes our conceptions of how to play. And,  if you’re interested in the development of skill, to consider what ‘good use’ really means.

On this point, I’d suggest that good use is simply an openness to learn in this moment. …..when I first joined the professional music freelancing circuit I often used what I considered to be a ‘cash cow’ date to deliberately try something out that I knew was not ideal and to see why that was. I think it lost me work in the short term (!) but it provided sufficient reflective head scratching to enable great strides to be made subsequently.

Non-engagement, with situations like the above is, conversely, one of the most pernicious problems that we might face in our journey to be less constrained…. It’s hard to identify this opportunity, though, because it is definitely the case that ‘no reaction-doing nothing about it at all -’ is sometimes the best response, if not the easiest. Doing what we know, perhaps even more attractive!

So, what I’m saying is that to inhibit well is to engage with what is before us (or underneath us) and to decide on the best means of engagement for learning, rather than to bring our own  design,  Alexander habit or prior habit with us, to make it feel better. Skilled performers, musicians etc  might well know about this and ‘Alexander habits’, can, strangely, allow us to miss an opportunity in just the same way as shown by my violinists friend. I’m talking about just going with it – saying ‘No’ and also being able to say, YES!

Indeed, remember it was FM Alexander himself who warned against the over use or mis-use of inhibition – if I can put it like that…… so that it too, becomes a kind of ‘doing’ or ‘drift’. NOT reacting should not be confused with not caring!

What does this mean in practise, then? Well, not to try to get anything that you know about – to inhibit your desire to be somewhere (or on something, in the case of our chair) else, for a start and to learn to work with and not against the forms (physical or organizational) with which we interact

I’d say that it was good practise and a chance for the comfort of familiarity to give way to the focus that issues from un-familiarity. When giving a concert, for example, it is often the case that the familiarity of the practise room will give way to a quite different focus and that how we listen can be rather different (and unsettling) and require a different response in the way that we handle or ‘direct’ ourselves.

So, in one sense, hardware, furniture or external forms are important, and I would not recommend practicing too much in a straitjacket just for the chance to inhibit, but it’s wise to remember that forms we might otherwise depend on to function (in our own comfy image) can be  friend or foe depending on how we view them and allow them to teach us.

Doing the drains….

The drains get clogged periodically. This demands a response. It is dirty work and, to be honest, I’d rather not do it. Or think about it. Yet, I find, rather surprisingly, that when I get into it, after quite a lot of faffing around, I actually enjoy it. I want to remove the blockage; get rid of it. expunge it; flush it out – get to the crux of the matter and blow it out……

I’ve been thinking about this job for a few days now. Nothing much works around it – not really an option to practise during a drain clearing operation or, to go for a walk in the sunshine. On the surface of it would be much more appealing  to do either, for appealing is something that drain clearing is, most certainly, not.

Yet, as I get to work, I’m finding a strange obssession gripping my soul…….I am actually begining to relish this task. Might it be an option in the future to create a blockage deliberately so that I can get a ‘fix’ whenever I want one? But that I worry would land me in the planet of the weird and unlovable- both categories that I would not like to find myself in, at least this side of the divide.

As I write, the task is as yet unfinished. I have not had that satisfaction of clearing the impeding mass of unutterable horror that defies conventional chemistry let alone biology. But I find myself gripped with determination in the face of this thing such that it becomes a battle between an unseen ever unknowable foe and myself, who only several hours ago had designs on a rehearsal for an upcoming recital and only last night after giving several lessons in the awareness expanding discipline of Alexander Technique gave in to the delight of gentle imbibing – now finds his horizons in the bowels of the earth wrestling with the  detritus of life lived.

Perhaps it is this unconscious clearing that is the lever for such an unblocking- a metaphor for essential therapy. Just one way, perhaps, and not without rewards, of coming to terms with the past before it engulfs and constipates future plans

Man and horse in accumulation

Spending some time at the Royal Windsor  show today I’m reminded that the condition of freedom and joy is dependent on not a few factors. Freedom of thought, that many of us know only too well is dependent on many factors, also, but the condition of freedom in thought and action is dependent on a vast multitude. Especially when it is a co-operative activity with an animal. This is  especially apparent, even to a layman like myself, in the spectacle that is the joint venture existing over time between rider and horse, in anything resembling  purposeful and deliberative riding. Like jumping or the co-operation of riders in a group – witness the skill of the mounted games performed by the children of the Pony Club!

It’s apparent that this type of  competitive riding requires not only judgment and a cool head, but also an apprenticeship, probably consisting of years honing skills and refining rough edges.

As any skilled sportsman or musician will tell you, you can never start at this end, where skill rides on this dimensional and more useful, freedom in thought. Though with a trained eye it is discernible, too, that this quality, however admirable in embryonic form -and it was there in some of the younger riders- has a range that further extends its meaning.

How does a horse know where to go? How does the rider know how to make a horse go anywhere? It’s simple, and, (with a licence available only for a layman’s suggestion), I would suggest that they don’t and neither does the horse….. But together, there is a truly fearful multiplier at work – a condition culminating, in the best hands at least, of apparent perfectabillity of freedom, by thought, that has presumably cost little less than a lifetime of trust with not a small dose of courage thrown into the mixture. Just like a giant wave bearing way more amplitude than the combination of its contributors the energy arising out of the collaboration between horse and rider is a potent mixture of two currents leading to a greater charge  that possibly takes  the horse and rider by surprise and on a delicious adrenalin-fuelled journey.

Inside Job

‘Where there’s a will there’s a way. And where there’s no will, there’ll never be a way.

Such was the conclusion to be had after seeing this powerful film/documentary about the provenance of the global economic crisis.

The Film

The narrative was presented in a series of short, cameo-style interviews with the main players in the crises (culprits) who denied repeatedly their culpability and were unable to admit  but a modicum of reckless behaviour. It was a staggering expose of a world gone mad, of  testosterone wreaking havoc on a public naïve enough to think that they too could have the trappings everyone else seemed to be enjoying. To quote George Bush in a speech some time before the first derivative domino was pushed, ‘even those on modest incomes could now afford to have a nice house (if not 5 private jets, and two helicopters, owned, we learned by one of the directors of a well known financial organisation)

Crap Loans

Little did anyone know that sub- prime or not, it suited the biggest players to dish out those dodgy deals (crap loans, the revealed in-house terminology) – the dodgier the better, so they could multiply the benefits of a wager on the negative outcome – the  default setting (no pun itended) that many (though not all) could see was the only possible outcome for agreements that, in former, saner times would have not been worth the paper on which they were written.

We learnt, surprisingly, about academic economists and business teachers in some of the most prestigious US universities reaping rewards not too far removed from the bonuses of the bankers who were paying them…… to perpetuate,  rationalise and promote financial, economically unsustainable manoeuvres. To the rest of civilised life such theoretical economies of scale and return would have seemed absurd, distressing, deeply anti social and, in the normal way of things, criminal.

Tented communities

Indeed, it was the human cost of the crisis that brought home just how ruthless, stupid and above all greedy behaviour can destroy humanity and make a mockery of relative values. A crises for those on a modest income presents a narrative profile very different from  those on a  six and seven figure compensation package. It’s a  strange alchemy that allows  risky loans to  boost the profits of a lender on the one hand (morally ruthless) yet renders the recipient, homeless, on the other (morally unacceptable), those that had been bitten by the get rich quick bug only to find themselves in poverty just a little less quickly with no roof over their heads, but one must hope, a relatively high grade of canvas equal to the task of protecting the urbn camper; its as if a mad despot had got hold of a quadratic equation, tried to solve it in a fairground mirror and when,  this treatment fails to provide the answer in his chosen direction, holds it to ransom: the saga becomes more  or less a song without words, (for no one could ever be composed enough to sing such a sad song), but a story for which words fail and a play  about the cumulative and perhaps inevitable  tyranny of the computer’s binary system, when most people who operate them were born into a world just recovering from the trials of base ten……

Wall Street Government

It’s chilling to realise that the US is really a Wall Street Govt. and that many of the arch –itects of the crises are still at the helm under Obama.. Perhaps this explains to some degree at least why change and reform in the banking sector has all the determination of a parent who given a choice or not to indict their errant children promises that their behaviour will ‘get better in the future – and aren’t all teenagers the same?’

Years to come

Why a financial engineer selling dreams and invisibles should be paid 300 times more than a real engineer (who makes touchable artifacts) must be a wonder of this brave new world –  in which the actions of so small a group globally speaking can create a nightmare that has devastated and will continue to cause devastation for years to come. The question we must all now ask is this: ‘has anything changed in the banking sector or, like the fashion victims amongst us, has the emperor just changed into his summer outfit?

On teaching and saying ‘no’

I wrote this response to Michael’s original post but didn’t send it, probably because it seemed obvious and perhaps a bit old fashioned! John’s post  was I felt a little blunt in assuming experience to equate with knowledge of how best to teach. Good teachers usually have some experience, bad teachers sometimes have a lot!

The benefits of saying ‘no’ to a pupil in my experience depends on many things, not least the trust that is built up over time, the stage at which a pupil has arrived, the concept they have of themselves, how delusive that may be (often handed down by a parent) the measure of the students’ ambition and what they hope to achieve. This in turn is tempered by the pupils’ age and emotional capacity.

Each pupil is different of course and whilst there are certain important principles involved in being effective- lets say broadly that your pupils’ progress is a function of  their (and your) ‘use’- it remains clear to me that a teacher is only as good as the quality of  the  pupils’ perception.

What seems important in general terms is to respect your pupil, to give plenty of praise – there is always much to praise, every lesson, to listen intently and to be present with your pupil- call it inhibition if you like-then correction will be respected because it is honest. The discipline involved and the satisfaction gained in playing well and progressing is a function of frustration. It’s a tension that has to be maintained by the teacher up to a point – because of his/her experience in the past.

When I was at college some years ago (I am a violinist) studying with a ‘celebrated’ teacher myself I often despaired at the seeming lack of praise (not getting what I wanted) holding me back I thought, perhaps concentrating on ‘just a few notes’ for one reason and another. When the praise came though I knew that it was meant and that rather than relying on my natural talent I was going someway to the actualisation of it; and so, in the end, lots of ‘NO’ was a good means- whereby for me. It’s possible (although by no means certain!) that my teacher knew that I could take it and that I needed to do more than rely on my feelings of ability in myself-my ‘delusive’ self appraisal.

Where and when correction of detail-notes, intonation, rhythm etc takes place, is not
important- it needs to be in the right place. Lots of ideas applied or copied or even inspired, say from another teacher- Casals perhaps- or maybe someone elses method, will not be properly effective because they are not authentic- your pupil will sense  this and communication will suffer. Casals was able to teach effectively as he did – saying NO sometimes, with ‘expansion,’ because he had ‘done’ his time; his whole person would have spoken to his pupils as a background against which they could assess whether or not he had their best interests at heart. When there is trust then many different approaches can work well.

Accordingly, I am mindful to relate to my students as people who differ from me only in organisational ways, – but in terms of basic ‘drives’ are somewhat similar and are sometimes clearer about what’s really going on – if I teach in the ‘now’ and am not too concerned with my own worries etc and see my ‘authority’ only as a mirror (tarnished as it is) for my student-then my pupils show me how to teach them. Then saying ‘no’ even a lot can be fun- because it is right. If I say ‘no’ and its not right and I’m not giving any constructive help then I’m setting a student up for failure and its a drag for my pupil and for me  – something else is at work- ‘pulling down’ will tell you. Of course though, that’s how we can learn to be better teachers next lesson and so on.

With more advanced students, ‘correction’ (being associated with the development of   skill) is less important than ensuring that your pupil has something to say that is honest, purposeful and from the heart. Talent cannot be taught as such, but if it is present it can be uncovered; then demand for detail and ‘no’ as an admonition can be tolerated. Being a skilful musician is not the same as being a ‘creative’ one i.e. not being too worried about getting what you had yesterday! Skill though, needs a certain repetition and ‘no’ used correctively as a standard of rightness can be useful to help a student develop critical listening.

Saying ‘no’ too often to a pupil as a kind of authoritarian habit by the teacher is definitely not what is wanted though and it needs to be realised that ‘forced’, bullying and repetitive verbal correction–as in Michael’s example is obviously counterproductive.

Pedagogy that survives by means of this stick- wielding modus operandi proves that experience can sometimes be the worst teacher even if the teacher is a fine player and ‘produces good students. Survival in musicians is dependent on a thick skin to a certain extent and such ‘survivors’ are often the exceptions that prove the rule.

It is certainly the case that a teacher’s reputation is built up by way of the results s/he gets with pupils in certain identifiable areas that are commonly regarded as such. It is by no means certain to me that teaching (to cite the opposite approach) that gets such results by constant positive reinforcement is always good. It too, is often mechanistic and narrow despite the avoidance of the word ‘no’.

To sum up, good teaching seems to result from the teacher having gone through the process themselves first. This takes a long time in terms of years. Then, for the student it takes a  long time to learn a difficult instrument. There seems to be no substitute for this process – not even the avoidance of the ‘no’ word. I think we can get into a muddle as teachers because there are just so many ideas that are head-based and  that  precede or are outside our personal experience. When experience has been properly gained however – eg Casals, and when you want to teach for good reason then the question of whether ‘no’ as a corrective or whether to let someone play despite literal mistakes  as a means of achieving a purpose via this route or that doesn’t  really need to be asked. There are times to be strict and times just to let someone play.

“Riding Out the Credit Crisis” (Arthur No. 29/May 2008)

Here’s a timely piece on the credit crises-already a year old……makes a great case for local economies and for ending the sorry-go-round of the banking system.

Let it Die
by Douglas Rushkoff

March 15, 2009

With any luck, the economy will never recover.

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.

I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It’s not just that I saw the downturn coming—it’s that I feared it wouldn’t come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. It’s like arguing to Brooklyn’s latest crop of brownstone buyers that they’ve invested in real estate at the very moment the whole market is about to tank. (I did; it wasn’t pretty.)

Now that the scheme we have mistaken for the real economy is collapsing under its own weight, however, it’s a whole lot easier to make these arguments. And, if anything, it’s even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.

Chartered Corporations

Back in the good ol’ days—I mean as far back as the late middle ages—people just did business with each other. As traveling got easier and people got access to new resources and markets, a middle class of merchants and small businesspeople started to get wealthy. So wealthy that they threatened the power of the aristocracy. Monarchs needed to come up with a way to stabilize their own wealth before the free market unseated them.

They invented the corporate charter. By granting an exclusive charter, a king could give one of his friends in the merchant class monopoly control over a region or sector. In exchange, he’d get shares in the company. So the businessperson no longer had to worry about competition—his position at the top of the business hierarchy was locked in place, by law. And the monarch never had to worry about losing his authority; businesses with crown-guaranteed charters tend to support the crown.

But this changed the shape of business fundamentally. Instead of thriving on innovation and progress, corporate monopolies simply sought to extract wealth from the regions they controlled. They didn’t need to compete, anymore, so they just sucked resources from places and people. Meanwhile, people living and working in the real world lost the ability to generate value by or for themselves.

For example: In the 1700s, American colonists were allowed to grow corn but they weren’t allowed to do anything with it–except sell it at fixed prices to the British East India Trading Company, the corporation sanctioned by England to do business in the colonies. Colonists weren’t allowed to sell their cotton to each other or, worse, make clothes out of it. They were mandated, by law, to ship it back to England where clothes were fabricated by another chartered monopoly, then shipped back to America where they could be purchased. The American war for independence was less a revolt against England than a revolt against her chartered corporations.

The other big innovation of the early corporate era was monopoly currency. There used to be lots of different kinds of money. Local currencies, which helped regions reinvest in their own activities, and centralized currencies, for long distance transactions. Local currencies were earned into existence. A farmer would grow a bunch of grain, bring it to the grain store, and get receipts for how much grain he had deposited. The receipts could be used as money—even by people who didn’t need grain at that particular moment. Everyone knew what it was worth.

The interesting thing about local, grain-based currencies was that they lost value over time. The people at the grain store had to be paid, and a certain amount of grain was lost to rain or rodents. So every year, the money would be worth less. This encouraged people to spend it rather than save it. And they did. Late Middle Ages workers were paid more for less work time than at any point in history. Women were taller in England in that era than they are today—an indication of their relative health. People did preventative maintenance on their equipment, and invested in innovation. There was so much extra money looking for productive investment, that people built cathedrals. The great cathedrals of Europe were not paid for with money from the Vatican; they were local investments, made by small towns looking for ways to share their prosperity with future generations by creating tourist attractions.

Local currencies favored local transactions, and worked against the interests of large corporations working from far away. In order to secure their own position as well as that of their chartered monopolies, monarchs began to make local currencies illegal, and force locals to instead use “coin of the realm.” These centralized currencies worked the opposite way. They were not earned into existence, they were lent into existence by a central bank. This meant any money issued to a person or business had to be paid back to the central bank, with interest.

What does that do to an economy? It bankrupts it. Think of it this way: A business borrows 1000 dollars from the bank to get started. In ten years, say, it is supposed to pay back 2000 to the bank. Where does the other 1000 come from? Some other business that has borrowed 1000 from the bank. For one business to pay back what it owes, another must go bankrupt. That, or borrow yet another 1000, and so on.

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money—capital—is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

The biggest wealth generator of all was banking itself. By lending money at interest to people and businesses who had no other way to conduct transactions or make investments, banks put themselves at the center of the extraction equation. The longer the economy survived, the more money would have to be borrowed, and the more interest earned by the bank.

Financial Meltdown

Which is pretty much how things have worked over the past 500 years to today. So what went wrong? Nothing. The system worked exactly as it was supposed to. The problem was that after America’s post WWII expansion, there was really no longer any real growth area in the economy from which to extract wealth. We were producing and consuming about as much as we could. Almost no commercial activity was occurring outside the corporate system. There was no room left to grow. Sure, outsourcing, lay-offs, and technology created some efficiencies, but wars, rising costs of health care, and exchange rates essentially offset any gains.

Making matters worse, all that capital that the wealthy had accumulated needed markets—even fake markets—in which to be invested. There was a ton of money out there—just nowhere to put it. Nothing on which to speculate.

The dot.com boom seemed to offer the promise of a new market, but it fizzled almost as quickly as it rose. So speculators turned instead to real assets, like corn, oil, even real estate. They started investing speculatively on the things that real people need to stay alive. What real people didn’t understand was that there is no way to compete against speculators. Speculators aren’t buying homes in which to live—they are buying houses to flip. Speculators aren’t buying corn to eat or oil to burn, but bushels to hoard and tankers to park off shore until prices rise. The fact that the speculative economy for cash and commodities accounts for over 95% of economic transactions, while people actually using money and consuming commodities constitute less than 5% tells us something important. Real supply and demand have almost nothing to do with prices. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Luckily for us, the banks, and the speculators depending on them, made a bad wager: they bet on our continuing capacity to provide a reality on which to base their highly leveraged schemes. We just couldn’t do it. They put us between a rock and a hard place. With George W’s help, they sold us on the notion of home ownership as a prerequisite to the American dream. And they created a number of loan products which made it look as if we could actually afford over-priced homes. The banking industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for laws making bankruptcy difficult or impossible for average people to accomplish—while simultaneously selling average people loans that they would never be able to pay back.

The banks didn’t really care, anyway, since they never meant to keep these loans. They simply provided the cash to mortgage companies, who then packaged the loans. In return for putting up the original cash, the banks also won the right to underwrite the sale of those mortgage packages to investors—investors like pension funds, retirement funds, or you and me. Get it? The banks get all the interest, but we put up all the money. Our retirement accounts and pension funds invest in the very mortgages that we can’t pay back. The bank collects any interest, playing both sides of the equation but responsible for neither.

And when the whole scheme begins to break down, what do we do? We try to bail out the very banks that created the mess, under the premise that we need these banks in order for business to come back, since only banks can lend the capital required for businesses to flourish.

Yes, It is Wrong

President Obama may be smarter than most of us, but he’s still attempting to rescue the very institutions that robbed us in the first place. He’s not a socialist, as conservatives may be arguing, but he is a corporatist. Using future tax dollars to fund government job programs is one thing. Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor.

As painful as it might be to watch, and as irritating as it might be to those with shrinking retirement savings, the collapse of the centralized corporate economy is ultimately a good thing. It makes room for a real economy to rise up in its place. And while it may be temporarily uncomfortable for the rich, and even temporarily devastating for the poor, it may be the fastest and least violent way to dismantle a system set in place for the benefit of 14th Century monarchs who have long since left this earth.

If the corporate supermarket chain’s debt structure renders it incapable of stocking its shelves this spring, this may be the wake-up call that consumers need to finally subscribe to a Community Supported Agriculture farmer. If the former associate fund analyst at Lehman realizes that he is unable to get a job not just because his industry is contracting but because his work day creates no real value for anyone at all, he will be forced to learn how to do something that does. If an urban elite parent realizes he can no longer pay private school tuition for his kids, maybe he’ll consider donating to public school the time he would have spent earning that tuition.

In short, the less we are able to depend on business-as-usual to provide for our basic needs, the more we will be forced to provide them for ourselves and one another. Sometimes we’ll do this for free, because we like each other, or live in the same community. Sometimes we’ll exchange services or favors. Sometimes we’ll use one of the alternative, local currencies coming into use across the country as Central bank-issued currencies become too hard to get without a corporate job.

Deprived of centralized banks and corporations, we’ll be forced to do things again. And in the process, we’ll find out that these institutions were not our benefactors at all. They were never meant to be. They were invented to mediate transactions between people, and extract the value that would have passed between us. Far from making commerce or industry more efficient, they served to turn the real world into a set of speculative assets, and real people into debtors.

The current financial crisis is the best opportunity we have had in a very long time for a bloodless revolution against the faceless fascism under which we have been living, unaware, for much too long. Let us seize the day.

(UPDATE: “Hack Money, Hack Banking” by Douglas Rushkoff, the March 20 follow-up

Longtime Arthur columnist Douglas Rushkoff has just finished his life’s work, “Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back,” to be published June 2, 2009 by Random House. (Pre-order info: Amazon). His live talk radio show, Media Squat Radio, airs Mondays 7-8pm EDT on WFMU. Streams at www.wfmu.org and iTunes.

Previous Rushkoff columns on the economy:
“No Money Down” (Arthur No. 31/Oct 2008)
“Riding Out the Credit Crisis” (Arthur No. 29/May 2008)

Maslow and all that jazz

One thing that strikes me in the current climate and world economic recession is how predictable we become when the chips-economically speaking, are down. When we perceive threats to our basic wellbeing we batten down the hatches and remove ourselves from anything that might seem like luxury – like having Alexander lessons for instance… It’s the classic case of Maslow’s pyramid informing our behaviour, of theory limiting and informing practical choice.

I’d like to propose that we start at the top of the pyramid and that all that follows: things like food and shelter, happy family relations etc will manifest in due course. After all, it is the perversity of seeking out more than we’ll ever  need, or pursuing externalities – excessive travel or entertainment (entertaining ourselves to death as Neil Postman says)  not to mention nourishment way beyond our needs, that got us into to the present mess. The eat, drink and be irrational mode of being is, it could be said,  starting to rock the boat for us all…..

Value, and what might be perceived by us, in the longer term, as a valuable mode of being on the earth  and especially for our childrens’ children, should be our guiding principle, I’d say. Let us peer a little more deeply inside ourselves to discover what can make us be and not do, so much. Taking a moment to stop and look out of the window is something I often suggest  when people they tell me how busy they are.  Seeing what is in front of you and seeing where you are right now is a good place to start. It’s the perfect place to be for a start and one that has profound meaning in terms of Maslow and his ‘Hierachy’. For if we don’t really know where we are or what is really in front of us then how on earth can we know what our true needs are?

Alexander’s work can offer us a wholly different kind of living – conscious, creative and also sustainance appropriate to our psycho-physical needs,  not to a culture’s error and neurosis. Who indeed can be healthy in a sick society, anyway? Fascinating as I find economics (and the deep mistakes made in the manner of its evolution), seeking to maximise return on the basics – the profit motive – is as dumb as it is damaging. It’s a game that is not worth the candle. Our obsession with the base of Maslow’s structure has  inverted our true purpose I believe, and left very many wanting.

So, time to stop and look out of the window and to seek that fallow period when we can regroup and let our true needs take us in hand.

What we do now might well be what we do in the future…

One of the biggest obstacles to changing anything seems to be the idea that we can change and still stay as we are, today. Of course this has been said in many different ways before, but the persistance of habitual thinking and the comfort of same is one rather large confounding factor to our otherwise fine ambitions.

We all say to ourselves ‘ I want to be this, or that, to be like this or that’, don’t we? Yet, the very thing, the ‘psycho-physical attitude’ that makes us have such ambitions is, it seems to me, the rock upon which we can flounder.

Good intention and the road to hell and all that……but ……until we see clearly what it is that we are, do, or really think, we might be mutiplying the error and with the wrong kind of energy. Perhaps the real reason why most of us want to change or at least say that to ourselves, is that we want to escape the tyranny of the self or at least the way in which we construct that tyranny in the first place.

In this way time ‘now’ is replaced by time future. Maybe this explains the list making obsession that grips many. It gives us an illusion of control and intention that keeps us firmly within the realms of the known yet at a safe distance from real change in our action which is to embrace the unknown without any sense of the future being involved.

The tottering biped

I  took my little daughter for a walk in the park this morning. She is a fierce little walker. She’s got the type of ferocity that is common in anyone who has just learned to do something that gives them a new and complete 360 degree view on the world. Unless she falls on her face (which is very rare) she is not fazed by a collision with the planet. It’s an evolutionary adaptation, I suppose, to have a soft landing when making mistakes leading up to mastering this most important survival mechanism – and have you seen the speed of the Windsor sabre-toothed tiger?!

What is so lovely and rather humbling for me, if that is the right way to put it, is simply that her stumbles, stops and starts are an object lesson in inhibition and direction of the self. Something which I work for in myself and my students, all the while grappling with the state of not gaining as I/we discover new territories, without naming them. OK, I concede that there is not much by way of prior, bad habit to get in the way in my daughter’s case, yet she embodies inhibition and direction in a way, so it would seem, that only a little person can – with a reliance on the proprioceptive mechanisms – and little recourse to muscle strength, per se.

That step, when it arrives after another tumble comes as if from nowhere. It has no other purpose than to move her forward. She does not waste energy by going off to the side or the back, but simply lets herself be moved. She is being walked we might say.  I’m sort of in charge of the end (to go home by way of the train ride at the funfair and to get a cup of tea) but even so, she gives a good lesson in waiting and activating her innate mechanisms of guidance and control. She is a Zen artist of life!  Tired at the end of a lap of the park, her brain has made many more connections and she is ready to rest.

Old F.M. Alexander once famously and facetiously remarked that we were all perfect except for what we were doing to ourselves. I suppose that an extension to this quip might suggest that some  are perfect because they do nothing at all and have really got out of their own way…..