This is Part 10 of a series. Go back to Part 9.)
The financial contraction which arrives is similar to the process, in a bodily network, of "fasting" or "detoxing." Just as a person who wants to allow his body to detoxify must begin to forego synthetic, stimulating and "heavy" foods so that the bodily network can purify, so an overall economic network must forego its doses of excess credit and debt so that the network can restore itself.
We call this process an "economic depression," and just as in the bodily dimension, it is a fasting, slimming and detoxifying process which, though it can be traumatic, ultimately serves a constructive purpose.
Unfortunately, what governments usually do at this point is to apply various "economic stimulants," in the form of tax cuts, spending programs and/or more increases in the money supply (credit supply).
Like any stimulant, these usually do have a short-term effect (unless the "patient" is too far advanced and exhausted), but the short-term increase in "energy" (economic activity) is bought at the cost of making the underlying disease process (credit bubble) much worse.
Thus the deflationary depression, when it finally does arrive, is that much more severe and prolonged. This has to be so, since symptoms and not causes were being addressed, and since the natural self-correcting, self-cleansing processes of the network were being distorted and obstructed.
Notice that all networks are either self-correcting or, if the self-cleansing, self-regulating process has been circumvented or obstructed for too long, self-destructing. And even in the latter case, this self-destruction is itself part of a self-cleansing process occuring in the larger network one or two orders of magnitude above this one.
In the political sphere, we see large "great attractors," that is, large empires, rise and fall. When a large empire becomes too bloated and congested, its internal distortions can cause it eventually to contract to the point where it ceases to exist as an empire, like the implosion of a star. Examples are the Roman Empire, of course, as well as numerous others, including the Greek, Byzantine, Napoleonic and British Empires, to name a few.
Examples in other dimensions abound. For instance, cancer is primarily a cellular breakdown of the communication process within a cell, caused by internal DNA or protein distortion and pollution. The cancerous cell leaves the self-regulatory processes of the body and seeks only to aggrandize itself at the expense of the overall network (the body).
The body routinely deals with this cancerous process. We all have cancerous cells all the time. Even while you're reading this, gamma rays are passing through your body and disrupting DNA and other processes within certain cells. The body routinely identifies these small cancers, destroys them and carts them off.
If the body network degrades to a certain extent from concentration and congestion, then it cannot allocate as much energy to its constant detoxifying and self-regulating process as it would like. Consequently the body's detoxifying activity falls behind and the tumorous mass of cells grows—it becomes its own kind of "preferential attractor" in the overall network.
When this mass overwhelms the body's processes and grows to a certain size, we then say that the person clinicallly has "cancer." But actually, just like you and me, they've always had it; it's just a question of degree.
When this disease progression occurs, only the network can heal itself permanently, because it is self-organizing and self-repairing. With rare exceptions, outside drugs, herbs, medicines, radiations and procedures cannot help in this process, because 1) they deal with symptoms, and 2) further toxify the body.
Rather, the conditions for health must be supplied—fresh air, clean water, relaxation and rest, fasting and/or a very "clean" diet such as fruitarian or low-fat vegan. Then, if the disease process has not progressed too far, the network can and will restore itself and deal successfully with the cancer cells. This natural process is always constructive, though, like a drug or other kind of addict detoxifying, it's not necessarily a comfortable or uneventful one.
In a similar way, an economic network which has become too bloated, congested and distorted through excess credit expansion, wealth concentration, monopolies/oligarchies and/or neglect of its underlying ecology must at some point undergo a detoxifying process if it is to survive. This process is called a "deflationary depression," and the longer it is delayed the deeper and more severe it must be.
If an economy is not impeded by further infusions of money/credit/debt in order to stave off the symptoms of power concentration and credit toxification, then it will naturally self-correct with a series of mild recessions continually alternating with mild expansions.
The excesses of the previous cycle will be wrung out and the network can continually self-balance. In effect, such an economy weaves continually above and below the zero line of economic activity, like a sine wave, continually self-correcting itself.
Sometime in our human future, politicians and the public will welcome this, knowing it to be the natural process of a self-organizing network. And incidentally, one that will tend not to have periodic and wrenching depressions.
Because of the global economy's advanced underlying disease—the greatest credit bubble in history—the resulting self-correction process will be equally historic. And yet it will ultimately lead to another day, when the human enterprise can once again begin the expansion part of the process.
Having breathed in, we will once again be ready to breathe out, and in doing so, we will be a part of nature's majestic and self-correcting network of existence.
This is the end of Part 10. Go to Part 11.)
—jim sloman, 12.11.02 for Feb 17
|
