Thought economy

Two men routinely sleep on the pavement outside my practise. Yesterday I saw them lying side by side wrapped together in a dirty cocoon of faded clothes. One side of their three-walled shelter was a branch from the palm tree, another was the wall, the third a Democratic Alliance poster with the smile of a cherubic faced politician offering shelter from the first bite of Autumn.

Keep Capetown D.A.

I dropped my eyes and noticed a bee struggling flightless on the tar and I walked away with fear in my heart.

I worry about what is to come in the next months. The global geo-political situation will guarantee massive increases in the cost of food in our country. This in a place that the U.N. has found to be the most unequal in the world and where almost 50% of the population is unemployed.

Phrases like “failed state” caption photographs of burning shopping malls in my mind’s eye. I hear a sound byte of that sideways smiling politician droning on about the urgency of the economy. Only in my imagination he’s speaking in the tone of the school chaplain blankly reciting chapter and verse of a tired dogma almost irrelevant to the lives of the congregation.

Is it an article of faith that economic activity is the panacea for all social ills? Is it heretical to question this? Is it really so that the plight of the men sleeping on the corner is most efficaciously addressed by more economic activity?

I find it difficult to understand how the endless stream of speeding delivery vans, aggressive taxi drivers and expensive cars that roar past this corner in suburban Cape Town on errands of commerce is in any way addressing the situation.

Stereotyped repetition of a behaviour is termed perseveration. It is typical of people who have head injuries. We all do it to an extent when confronted with a situation we feel unable to deal with. We dip into our bag of life strategies and play what we believe is our strongest card, irrespective of its applicability to the stressor.

The result is invariably a deepening of whatever crisis we are facing.

Usually the crisis has its roots in the unreasoned application of this strategy. In effect we can be caught in a cycle of doubling down because it’s all we can think of to do.

In this sense to rely on economic measures to resolve issues emergent from the repetitive application of economic thinking is destined to deepen our collective crises of inequality and environmental collapse.

I have no doubt.