Recently I’ve been struggling with the idea of the steps required for peaceful transition into what I would like to refer to as “producerism”. Producerism meaning the the new aspect of society that sees us making more of the things we use in our daily lives. We’ve been promised independence through prosperity, through economic growth, but all we have received is dependence on people we’ll never meet and separation from the people around us. Our health is outsourced, our innate desire to interact is outsourced, our food production is outsourced and our preparation of that food is in the hands of others. We have no need for the people adjacent to us and in this result, our lives have lost their luster, we lose our fulfillment. I’m not talking about a post-apocalyptic scenario where the monetary system collapses or anarchy ascends. This is simply the next step to recovering from the over-consumer economy. As the made-up numbers driving our financial system continue to be exposed as meaningless, true value must be created by humans to ensure survival and fulfillment of human potential.

As I watch the people in the cars around me, the people in the bus every day and the people I walk by on the street, I’m struck with an unsettling notion of automation. Try this thought experiment: imagine the people around you as unconscious, as merely reacting in response to varying stimuli. Ask your self: would you know the difference between this imagined reality and how the world actually exists?

I think others are aware because I am aware. Perhaps this is not the case as often as we thought.

Many branches of psychology have embraced the reductionistic principles that have dissected the human spirit into pieces susceptible to easy manipulation through marketing. Hence the power of brands in our world. We flock towards brands, hold faith in them and our world is altered by them in mysterious ways. Our perception of taste is altered by the branding on the package we received it in.(For more, see Malcom Gladwell’s Blink, starting on p. 176) Despite the illusion of variety, the brands around us are controlled by a few large multi-national corporations. As those brands dissolve we must face the reality behind the promises we trusted. We will lose the promise of job security, we will lose the promise of retirement, we will lose the promise of independence. Now is the time to consider other ways to live other than depending on the invisible hand of Adam Smith as invisibly wielded by faceless globalizing forces. When Adam Smith wrote his theories that revolutionized economics he wrote them as applicable to the community he knew, not a world where each society becomes a specialized actor, reduced to a single set of expertise.

In helping me to think about the issue at hand, KMO of the C-Realm Podcast was kind enough to allow me to sit in on an interview with Charles Eisenstein of Reality Sandwich and author of Ascent of Humanity (yes, the book I’ve talked about so much recently). At about 21 mins in I ask Charles about how our society can make the transition into more of a producer economy. He answers by saying that we shouldn’t judge those around us. Humans cannot be fulfilled by conforming to the conditioning we’ve become comfortable with and our world will seek new options as current paths come to an end. Everyone is here for a noble reason we may not be able to understand. This transition is the journey we are all experiencing.

Could producerism be the quest of my generation?