Absolute Carmel

Neo-capitalism: Stop building it, and they will come

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I sold my car today and I don’t intend to buy a new one, although I can afford it. I’m giving up my car because I came to trust the notion that abundance isn’t to have and hoard, but to have exactly what you want when you need it. No more, no less and no longer than you need it. No need to own it or hold on to it, it’s just a matter of flow, access and flexibility. That is why in addition to public transportation I shall occasionally use car2go, a car sharing service which is a new concept in Israel.

Having your own stuff is so industrial-revolution

Many services we use are based on shared resources. Take Internet bandwidth for example. We live under the illusion we “have” a really wide bandwidth because we paid for it and it’s ours, trapped in our cable modem. Well, we know it isn’t. The bandwidth is a shared resource automatically diverted to different people on different hours according to their present use. It’s the same with cashing money from the bank and many other less tangible services that flow as long as we don’t panic and try to hoard “the more the merrier” at the same time.

But here’s the thing: In the post-industrial globalized world we’re required to take this one step further and start sharing our material resources too. Having your own stuff, units of manufactured products, is so industrial revolution….Our next evolution stage is to transcend our obsessive possession fears and start trusting the idea that if we take other products the same way some services are allocated automatically to us – only what we need when we need it – others will do the same and abundance will flow. That is how car sharing and other sharing services work.

After a history of zigzagging between inequality and a twisted oppressive concept of equality (socialism), we are about to learn real natural sharing and the Web is our lab. We practice on non tangible copies in order to gradually trust this principle on consumer goods.

Lions don’t keep deer in the fridge

That’s how nature works too: Lions don’t hunt all deer and put them in the fridge. They take only what they need for dinner trusting Mother Nature to send something else next time they’re hungry. Now that is the real “jungle law” and anyone who uses this metaphor to describe cannibalistic competition misunderstood nature, and should reread Adam Smith too.

Smith was a medic and a religious man. He had great instincts about that ‘invisible hand’ – a harmonious force that auto-balances the flow into function- but it worked for body cells, not for people with free will, who still search their true place within this “organism” and need to overcome many fears. However, after hardcore capitalism gets a ‘green wash’, human nature might get closer to nature.

We’ll call it neo-capitalism or eco-capitalism, probably. Just like we finally realized what the Web was about in the first place, so when it started living up to its potential we had to call it “Web 2.0″ to mark a new generation.

This reminds me of the biblical story of the “Man”, that special food God dropped from the desert sky and warned us not to hoard it. But we didn’t believe there’ll be another drop tomorrow and tried to take some more for breakfast. Have we evolved since? This entire global resources crisis may be our second chance to trust the abundance jungle law. And maybe, just maybe, this abundance realization will gradually help us release our hold on territory too and stop fighting for it.

Carless but not careless or how I almost blew up on a bus

On that note, giving up my car and going back to public transportation is a unique leap of faith for me, given the circumstances that led to my having a car in the first place. This is the part where we move to the unique Israeli experience and tell a story I never told:

I was an undergraduate student at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem in 1995. It was a few months before PM Rabin was assassinated, but what people tend to forget is that the other side’s extremists were terrified of this peace too. That year, Palestinian terror organizations hit Jerusalem on a weekly basis, normally blowing up a bus.

One summer morning I stood at my regular bus station wondering if I should go to the municipality office for an errand about my city tax or go to campus first and do that later. I decided to decide according to the first bus that’ll come. Bus 26 to campus came first and I boarded it but before I bought the ticket I had a quick thought: there’s going to be a crazy queue at the municipality and they might even be closed by noon. I should really get this over with and go there first.

So I stepped down and told the driver I’m sorry but I got another errand to run first. I took the other bus to city center and by the time I got there everyone spoke about bus 26 that exploded a few stations before reaching Mount Scopus campus.

Later I saw the driver on the news and I realized it was the bus I was on. I would have been dead for sure. This wasn’t the only time I was close to blowing up in Jerusalem but this was the closest. And after this one, my parents decided to buy me a car. I’ve had a car for 14 years now and it’s very hard to give up the freedom it enabled me and trust the safety of public transportation again. But if people don’t take a chance and try to practice what they preach, how will change happen?

I always assumed there’ll be a great economical or ecological crisis that will destroy the foundations of our society and force us to build a more sustainable one. But maybe Mother Nature still has patience for us to gradually evolve, regulate consumerism and change the way we use what we already have. Sharing services are a great start. Stop building it, and they will come.

Tags: abundance, adam smith, bus terror attack, car sharing, consumerism, eco capitalism, jerusalem, new capitalism, post industrial society, sharing culture, sustainability, the law of the jungle