LESS is MORE

Wealth is a concept that refers to an enhanced perception of well-being. This experience is often mistaken as the accumulation of things and objects. In the West, the accumulation of valuable resources and material possessions equates to being wealthy. The individual’s or nation’s wealth becomes a quantitative measure of stuff. More of this for the individual is less of the same for others. Our industrial infrastructure has manufactured an incredible amount of stuff, often useless and intrinsically obsolete. This unending capacity for manufacturing surplus reflects the wealth of modern nations. But how about the wealth of beautiful pristine alpine vegetation, or the wealth expressed by brilliant ideas, or the treasures left by the Michelangelo’s and Mozart’s of Europe. How about the wealth of exchanges that bond mother and child? Wealth can also be defined as an inherent feature in the fabric of reality. With its infinite possibilities for shapes and form, the self-organizing universe is nothing but a wealth of options, teeming to become. You could also say that we humans are blessed with wealth, as we are born into this reality with incredible abilities and functionality. We do not do anything to acquire this, it’s built into the biological system. The ability to perform simple logical solutions suggests a wealth of measuring tools inherent in our sensory apparatus. The sheer size of the universe and all the stuff in it implies a bountiful wealth of energy and information spinning and buzzing everywhere. In this sense, wealth is equal to abundance.

And how would we measure the wealth of a system, say the wealth of a small community? By the size of its houses; by the relationships among its people; by the sizes of the lawn mowers; by the basket of peppers in back yard gardens; by the local farmers market or by the super-sized box store outside of town; by the giant flat screen TV or by the slow food potluck around the fire? Would we measure wealth by the 5 hours of “Nintendo” a day or by the walk in the chirping meadows with friends at sunset; by a homemade apple pie or by frozen microwave pizza; by raw milk, cheese, and custards or by the pasteurized long-shelved denatured milk? Should we measure wealth by the smiles and laughs of people at a town square dance or by the mega-surveillance TSA pat-downs at super-bowl franchises; by the rosy cheeks of country children or by the “saggy pants” of teen gang rappers of East New York? Might we measure wealth by acres of small-scale organic perennial farms or by miles and miles of parking lots?

How do we keep measuring the wealth of a nation, when it ranks 1st in cancer, diabetes, child obesity, heart disease, ADHD, and autism? When it ranks high in the poisoning of rivers, oceans and the air we breathe. How do we measure the wealth of a nation when most people work in dead end jobs and can’t pay their mortgages, credit cards and health costs? How can we measure wealth when an individual prefers a bag of deep fried chips over a nutritious wheat grass shot or crunchy seaweed? Do we measure wealth by having three jobs or by having more time with our children; by a healthy hardwood forest or by chicken coop concentration camps; by the number of strip malls or by the massive number of displaced farmer suicides in India? Is wealth what is good for Wall Street? Perhaps instead wealth measures the non-quantifiable gifts of friends and family. Maybe wealth is what’s in it for me rather than what is left for the benefit of all. Do we measure wealth by the GDP to debt ratio or by the fisheries left in the northern deep seas?

Obviously, when you measure a nation’s wealth with some of these indicators, you realize that far from wealthy, we currently consist of a collection of very poor and unhealthy nations. Crumbling before our eyes, our economic system has failed, and it does not generate real wealth for anyone. Perhaps, after all, less is more, especially when the qualitative value of less has much more intrinsic meaning than the quantitative wealth based on things and units of possession. We need the kind of wealth that can be measured as quality of our life, quality of our food, quality of our relationships, our waters and habitats. True wealth comes from the partnership with community and mother Earth; with a wealth of information at our fingertips serviced by our technology. We will calculate wealth in acts of kindness; by the celebration of our bodies and gifts in the commonwealth of knowledge and beauty; by the celebration of life, art and music and the scent of wildflowers blooming in the fields of pure potential. How about calculating wealth as the ability to love? When we love we are giving the best of ourselves. This is the kind of wealth that will knit the new fabric of the cosmic human.

To generate real qualitative wealth we need to invest in community building, with communities that meet most of their local needs, while being interconnected to the global informational village. In a system like this, wealth becomes common to everybody.

Plugged into county town jurisdiction and cooperative networks, we can begin to invest in the restoration of soil, water and forest systems.

We can invest massively in diverse cultural treasures that honor individual groups and ethnicity. We will invest in a new system of schooling that de-schools dogma out of the classroom and frees learners of grade work. We will invest local infrastructure that eliminates long distance commuting and restores the character of town and social architecture. We can invest in sharing the wealth of know-how, and advocate people’s efforts in designing perennial agriculture and Earth-friendly homes.

This is a way of redefining wealth in the laid back but efficient reality of system design. We must invest in developing creativity and leisure. A wealth of unknown forces will emerge out of this capacity for exploration. The imaginable will emerge from the unknown.

This kind of wealth system deals with maximizing the human potential of the local cooperative system of interconnected villages. Individuals, towns, and corporate sized operations are experiencing this vision unfold. Conscientious corporate leaders stripped of their unaccountable status, will promote ideas and put their energies into small community cooperative entrepreneurship. Corporations will reform their profit margins and cost benefit schemes, goals and objectives. They will not be quantifying monetized digits on a computer screen but rather measuring the capacity for self-reliance of the people.

Those of us who have not unplugged off-grid are behind the curve caught in a dying system. Communities will rediscover their center around a wealth of gifts for each other. Is this not what we ultimately long for? We long to give back to society; give back to nature; and give back to ourselves, longing to love unselfishly.