The great lie (and what to do about it)

My chil­dren are pretty wise to our fam­ily's eco­nomic fragility.

“Economis­ing” here on our lit­tle farm in the Pri­o­rat is a word in com­mon usage and, when we are mind­ful, it is far from de­press­ing.

We have found great good­ness in it, from har­vest­ing free (and sus­tain­ing) food in our gar­den, to ask­ing the re­cy­cle ques­tion be­fore any­thing is dis­carded, to notic­ing how much there is in our lives to ap­pre­ci­ate that doesn't have a price, to recog­nis­ing the value of look­ing for­ward to oc­ca­sional treats rather than the dead­en­ing numb­ness of too much of a good thing.

You get it, of course you do. Most peo­ple are hav­ing to. The state of things right now fos­ters this re­silience and in­de­pen­dence, the need to economise and sus­tain, even if the World order de­mands de­pen­dency rooted in rigid com­pli­ance to a self­ish he­do­nis­tic sys­tem of “growth and pros­per­ity”. It's going through one of its oc­ca­sional cycli­cal bouts of cold turkey, but after an­other shot in the arm we will all be bound­ing con­fi­dently along again soon... they keep telling us.

The power-bro­kers, ad­ver­tis­ers and bankers want you to keep be­liev­ing it is all under con­trol.

Back to the fam­ily eco­nom­ics anal­ogy for a mo­ment: None of us want to laden our chil­dren with debt. Ide­ally, we want to leave them some­thing, how­ever small, on which to build ful­fill­ing lives of their own: In­stinc­tive, log­i­cal as­pi­ra­tions of any par­ent. So we toil, burn time and try to ac­cu­mu­late, to keep pace.

But col­lec­tively, un­con­sciously (or maybe not as more peo­ple awaken from the sleep walk) we are leav­ing trust­ing off­spring with crip­pling debts, both en­vi­ron­men­tally and eco­nom­i­cally.

So, good peo­ple, 2015 is pro­foundly the mo­ment to di­gest the harsh facts and fig­ures, to con­tem­plate deeply and then to begin to change fun­da­men­tally the way we ob­sess with the pre­sent, squan­der the fu­ture, live far be­yond our means and fail to dwell in the wise and very real world.

The wide­spread dis­con­nect from our place in the nat­ural world and our mod­ern profit-dri­ven pri­or­i­ties, when you dare to weigh them, are gross. Fu­ture gen­er­a­tions will damn us for the un­truth that we did not know what we were doing to the planet, or about the fis­cal debt we were be­queath­ing.

Most na­tions have been bor­row­ing to stag­ger­ing lev­els more and more every year, tril­lions be­yond what they earn, in­sane sums that can­not be re­paid, just to per­pet­u­ate cur­rent un­sus­tain­able lifestyles and as­pi­ra­tions. This is the great lie. And to keep bank­rupt economies afloat we per­sist with the mad­ness of fos­sil fuel ad­dic­tion while al­low­ing per­ni­cious mar­ket­ing to feed our ad­dic­tion to mass con­sumerism.

But what truly stokes the fire in my belly is the way chil­dren are groomed at a younger and younger age to per­pet­u­ate this ad­dic­tion, this lie.

Are we im­po­tent? No. What we can do – must do - is turn and begin to earnestly con­tem­plate and de­bate how it can be, must be.

I so hope the new Cat­alo­nia can help de­fine how we hu­mans are able sig­nif­i­cantly grasp the need for peace­ful change; growth and pros­per­ity in the con­text of wis­dom and ful­fil­ment, with com­mu­nity and ecol­ogy at the heart.

This ar­ti­cle is not neg­a­tive but full of hope be­cause the year ahead will see aware­ness of the global dilemma heighten sig­nif­i­cantly. I have no doubt of it. Change is al­ready hap­pen­ing, eyes and minds are open­ing.

The chal­lenge is to har­ness the many good things to bring peace­ful, pub­lic re-eval­u­a­tion of what we re­ally need, and just as im­por­tantly to re-learn the an­cient art of sym­bio­sis, the sus­tain­ing close in­ter­ac­tion be­tween species on our planet.

That, after all, is how we hu­mans sur­vived in the first place.