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In the Fall of 2010, Joseph Lee, a young man I'd become acquainted with through a meditation group, suggested we get together to discuss our mutual interest. I had been telling Joseph about my deep interest in economics and in the causes of dysfunction in our economic system. He said he had been thinking about these matters as well.

When we got together, we chatted for several hours at a local coffee shop.

Joseph graciously invited me to speak first. I gave him the short version of my understanding of an alternative paradigm to our current economic system - a paradigm I have been studying, speaking about and teaching for the last 37 years. The paradigm isn’t my invention. It's a way of looking at land and taxation that originated with Henry George and has been further developed over the last 50 years. The ideas have a small following in the US and around the world. Almost anyone familiar with economics knows something about them, but few have taken the time to study the ideas in depth.

Sharing these ideas over the last 37 years, I have felt poorly. The ideas haven’t been well received - at least that’s been my experience. In fact, my experience has been difficult enough that it allows me to relate easily to the anger and frustration of oppressed people in the Middle East, exploding in regime changes in recent months. I also relate emotionally to the Tea Party folks in the US. The Tea Party’s ideas for change are abhorrent to me, but the people’s anger and frustration at feeling exploited, marginalized, ridiculed and looked down upon is familiar to me. I would like to be heard and taken seriously too.

I think Joseph heard what I said during our first conversation, although I don’t think the ideas really impressed him as much as they have always impressed me.  At least he didn’t push back in the way that I have become accustomed to receiving push back. I came to understand that he didn’t push back because he didn’t need to. His thinking seems to have led him to a way of looking at things that he considers even further out-of-the-box than my out-of-the-box ideas.

What was really interesting to me was where Joseph seemed to be coming from.  In all honesty, I don’t yet understand and do not feel able to articulate everything he told me during our first conversation - or on successive occasions. The best I remember is that he envisions a world where there is no government at all - or at least not in the way we think of it now.  He also sees the disappearance of rights since he says all rights have been imposed through warfare.  

I believe there is a libertarian strain in Joseph’s thinking, but it goes far beyond that as far as I can tell. He seems to be coming from a place I would like to relate to because it sounds like somewhere I always thought I was coming from - but it’s different. In fact, the world Joseph envisions has nothing to do with ordinary reality as I understand it.  It takes my breath away how utterly ungrounded it is - at least in my opinion.

Others I have spoken to in recent years,  culminating most recently with Joseph, have seemed to consider things I care most about to be irrelevant.  I don’t know if that’s how they really think, but it’s been painful to feel unheard by others for decades. These days, the pain is exacerbated by the fact that I’m no longer so “far-out.” Now I’m an old fuddy duddy who’s not even up with the times. Wow, did that transition zip past me!  Sometimes I’m feeling even farther on the outside...looking in.

I remain disturbed by what appears to me to be a rampant misunderstanding of fundamental economics.  This includes humanity’s alienation from the earth which has given rise to a grotesque disparity of wealth and environmental destruction.  I do not think that an Earth in the hands of and under the control of a tiny fraction of human kind is consistent with a life-giving system of economics or governance that the idea of the “Oneness of Humanity” implies.  I don’t think “New Consciousness” has come to grips with this issue and I do not expect it to go away as if by magic without at first being consciously acknowledged.  Maybe that’s all it will take.

On the other hand, I am also open to the idea that my economic thinking is still limited by the paradigm from which the existing economic dysfunction comes, per Einstein’s often quoted bit of wisdom.  My ideas may, therefore, be of little use, even a waste of time. This is possible, but I am not yet convinced.

I still see the economic paradigm I speak about as well beyond even the coming transformation in consciousness that young people like Joseph are envisioning.  I think it is still well beyond the folks who speak of “the commons”  these days.  I still think that our legitimate and life-giving economic connection with Earth is yet to be discovered or imagined - even by the “new consciousness” folks.   

But I don’t know for sure. And I am more than willing to really look at what is going on and engage in conversation about it.

So what do you think?