Social and Economical Components of Sustainability 2.0
In the contemporary world most people are facing the challenge of finding a balance between the necessity of making money and the fulfillment of their life. People want to earn more money in order to have an opportunity for a better life, but if working harder for making more money is their primary focus they don’t have time and energy to enjoy those opportunities. Often their desires in their spare time are limited to only rest and entertainment. Those who are primarily focused on their life fulfillment have time and energy for what they count is the most important in their lives, but they are often very limited by their financial opportunities. “Money is for Life” or “Life is for Money”? Do we eat to live or live to eat? For centuries humanity has been trying to find a sustainable structure of functioning, a balance between a person and society. In capitalistic-type countries everything evolves around the economical aspect of life. In socialistic-type countries everything evolves around social needs, but a satisfying balance between society and a person has not been found so far. Social evolution is to be continued.
Let’s consider the dynamic of interdependence between social and economical components in the development of society. In the pre-industrial period people just exchanged things they needed for life. The industrial period brought and developed a united exchange system. Since then people use money, universal units for any exchange of foods, goods, and services. Most of our natural social connections were replaced with economical connections.
Then economical connections began to take over more areas of our social life. Education, healthcare, spirituality became businesses along with traditional businesses. Making money has become a more important goal than serving customers’ needs. Businesses’ and industries’ functions are in conflict contradiction with social functions and needs which created those businesses and industries. These are examples: food producing businesses add unnecessary components in foods to make their production cheaper; healthcare services bill patients for more medical studies and more healthcare services than needed; educational institutions combine people with different levels of knowledge and skills into one class to save money. TV companies make money by placing commercials in the middle of TV programs which were not asked for. Internet businesses place advertisements even in email boxes. Persistence of those destructive activities leads to customer’s attention disorder. Generally, those strategies of making money which grew out of natural personal and social needs turned out to be harmful for actual or potential customers and eventually lead to health disorders at body, mind and spirit levels. Business managers felt they had to run their businesses that way in order for them to survive and keep up with money flows, no matter if they liked it or not. “Do not cut the branch of the tree you are sitting on”, “Do not bite the hand which feeds you”- these are ancient proverbs of sustainable living rules businesses are failing to follow in order to survive in the business world.
Social development gave birth and growth to economic development. Since then the economic component feeds and gives opportunities for growth to the social component. However, economic life does not just keep growing on social life and feed it, but it also devalues the original customer needs. It affects the whole way of growth of social (and then personal) needs. It bends those needs in order to create money making opportunities. Farmers trim fruit trees to make them short, trim grape vines to make them grow flat along the lines in order to make picking the fruit easier and faster. Similarly, the natural growth of human intelligences got “bent” and “trimmed” by economy. Institutions which were traditionally social like education and health care get bent in the same way when they gradually became businesses.
The post-industrial period came up with a solution to this problem by spending/charging extra money for coming back to a better quality of fulfilling personal-social needs, which created a new socioeconomic balance approach for sustainability. Here are some examples: natural food stores with more expensive pure organic foods; more expensive TV channels without commercials; more expensive and advanced outdoor equipment for the purpose of getting back to natural environments from the civilized world on a new level. We can see from history that any new things stay exclusive for a while, like cars, cell phones, TV, PC, etc. and gradually become available for the general public. Hopefully the same will happen to new sustainability features. Social-personal life is gradually getting back together on a new level.
There are also other socioeconomic level approaches for sustainable living like partially getting back to barter exchange or developing communities with an autonomic economy, but they don’t seem to be able to find a desirable balance between a person and a society. An approach from a deeper personal level seems to be more promising. Please note, in addition to the dynamic of social-economical balance, there is a whole new area of influence on those matters via communication control of information distribution which interferes with those processes.
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