In the News (from Panorama.it): “2012 will be very difficult for the global economy.

“BRICS countries will be in the most unfavorable situation mainly because a currency crisis may break out within their borders, which has been underestimated for too long.

“To counter the financial crisis of 2008, central banks in developed economies eased their monetary and fiscal policies, and most of the “hot” Western capital has been directed to countries with emerging economies in order to support their growth. But now there is a danger that that old credit bubble will burst.

“The financial balance of BRICS can fail because the dollar continues to rise and the credit institutions of the Old World are suffering from poor liquidity.

“What’s more, the Chinese real estate bubble may implode, causing the fall of commodity prices, which so far were moving the growth of emerging economies.

“The crisis will break out when they run out of foreign currency reserves. If the global recession brings energy prices down, it will adversely affect the national economy of Russia. For China, the biggest danger lies in the real estate bubble that can burst at any moment. If the U.S. and Europe fail to cope with the situation, the world should prepare for the worst.”

My Comment: The crisis will force us to rethink our attitude towards ourselves and the world.
[65462]

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Economics is a science about our egoistic relations, which today is gradually transforming into a different kind of economics—the economics of altruistic relationships.

When we solve our family’s economic problems, we usually sit down around the table with our spouses and children and think together how to best use our limited budget. We take into consideration the needs of each family member: the youngest wants a toy, the older child wishes to attend classes, the oldest requires medications, we need to buy food, and so on…. We structure our budget according to everybody’s needs. We have to arrange the world’s budget the same way.

Generally, we bring to our families everything we earn; we don’t automatically set aside part of the salary for ourselves exclusively; for example, we don’t from the start put aside for our own sake 30% of our earnings as regular enterprises do.

Let’s say, a factory produces cups and sells them for $10.00 each; the owner keeps $5.00 for himself; the remainder covers salaries and other production expenses—amortization, insurance, etc.

Why does the owner earn $5.00 per cup above everybody else? He should receive the same salary everyone else does. We are within a single system where everybody should receive in equal proportions and interact with others in a fair way.

If we stick to this plan, each item will cost 50% less because the price of all components would also go down—machinery, materials, transportation, etc. Each person will receive a decent salary to maintain a decent way of life; it won’t be even close to a beggarly salary!

A huge surplus of goods and resources will emerge in the world. Every year, humanity is throwing away a half billion ton of good food. That’s enough to feed another Earth!

It turns out that our wrong egoistic relationships bring disequilibrium to the entire globe. If we strive for balance in the relationships between us, then naturally this will lead to values of peace and harmony, and we will end up with a huge excess of materials and natural resources. We’ll stop wasting the earth’s resources and we’ll stop eating chemically grown vegetables and fruit because all systems will be in balance.

We don’t have to enhance industry. It is enough that we correct the relationships between us in order to provide the world with everything we need: food, clothing, shelter, etc.—all at a normal level. We’ll get there by changing ourselves, rising from the egoistic to the altruistic level.

In the past, this sounded like science fiction: The City of the Sun, communism, utopian, etc. But today we have no other option. Nature forces us to act accordingly.
[61421]
From a “Talk About the Integral World” 10/20/11

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Opinion: (Henning Meyer, a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and managing editor of Social Europe Journal): “As 2011 draws to a close, it is fair to say that this year has been one of the most disastrous for the European Union in its history. The eurozone crisis has spread from the periphery to the core and all political and financial rescue packages were too little, too late.”

My Comment: Apparently, a European sense of superiority and stubbornness do not allow the EU to come to unity in a short and easy way, but only through the path of suffering.

“The inability to move beyond the perceived short-term ‘national interest,’ at the expense of what is better in the mid to long term, has been a key reason for the EU’s powerlessness to respond adequately to the challenges it faces. We are moving towards political deadlock in a severe and worsening crisis and the forecast for next year doesn’t look good either.

“Last week Christine Lagarde of the IMF issued a warning not just against the looming downturn but against 1930s-style policy responses of protectionism and isolation in the name of the ‘national interest’ (here it is again). …Protectionist policy measures will trigger defensive responses, which will worsen the aggregate situation further so a depression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The world has been in this situation before – and it did not end well.”

My Comment: Specifically in the name of national interest, it is necessary to establish a close relationship and comprehensive program for merging the EU into one whole!

“If we continue on current trends, I predict more than one riot for 2012. One of this year’s novelties, stemming from junctures such as the Arab spring, the ascendancy of the Occupy movement, and the massive protests against economic policies in Spain and Greece, was the rise of new social movements and the widespread use of communication technologies to co-ordinate civil unrest. Once the genie is out of the bottle it is almost impossible to put it back in. So unless the protest causes are addressed effectively, which seems unlikely, civil unrest is set to continue and grow next year.

“But unless EU leaders completely change course and overcome political and legal obstacles to install the European Central Bank as a lender of last resort, draw up plans for a real fiscal union, introduce eurobonds, devise a strategy for new growth, pursue necessary structural reforms in surplus as well as deficit countries, and finally reform the financial sector, there is little hope the current malaise can be overcome.”

My Comment: If the ECB knew what it needs to do!..

“And a mixture of disappointment and outright anger could also tempt other countries to reassess their membership, sending the EU into a process of disintegration, which would spell further economic and political disaster. It is not too late to change course, but the window of opportunity is closing very fast. If we continue down the current path, the Unwort des Jahres 2012 will not be ‘national interest’ but rather ‘return of nationalism.’ We are on a slippery slope and EU leaders would do well to fathom the long-term consequences of their actions.”

My Comment: The fact is that only the understanding of the plan of our evolution and following it will allow us to take correct steps; otherwise, the corrective forces of nature will cause an even greater crisis to show us the correct path, but this is the path of suffering.
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Question: The idea of self-fulfillment isn’t prominent enough in our message. When a person hears about connection, he is afraid to lose his “self”.…

Answer: On the contrary, today a person is enslaved to the modern destructive environment, and on this background, we offer very sensible things: Let’s work according to every individual’s abilities and provide every person with the normal basic necessities. Then we will not have to waste our resources on wars, conflicts, and credit bubbles. Besides, we will finally have some free time.

It is true that there is a problem here: What are we going to do with the spare time we will suddenly have? How will we fulfill ourselves?

But just a minute, how exactly do we fulfill ourselves today? Is it at work where we grind away ten hours a day for the landlord? On the contrary, when a person has free time, he will be able to finally reach self-fulfillment and to fulfill the human in him.

Today, because of the distorted habits we’ve acquired, we don’t know what to do with our spare time. We are simply programmed like robots: After working for many hours sitting in front of the computer, we come back home and sit down…in front of another computer. Look at how cunningly society has implanted the program of slavery in us. I eat what everyone eats, I sleep when everyone sleeps, I do what everyone does, and this is—my “free” life.

Do you think that there is no life without filling the egoistic desires? How can you get up in the morning and not chase another portion of pleasure?

But who told you that you wouldn’t be able to do that in the new society? Run, do whatever you feel like, just don’t use your ego.

The moment we understand that the ego is destructive and that it leads us to ruin, to a collision with nature—what will we have left? We will only have to balance it.

Today it is burning in you in the wrong way. You get up in the morning and you think about how you will “fix” others today, how you will use them in your favor. But you can use your desire differently, without hurting anyone. If you don’t intend to harm others, if you think positively—it isn’t egoism in its present form anymore.

Here we come to the communist view. The Soviet Union gave communism a bad name; they used it as a cover up for its unsuccessful attempt to build a new society. Still, communism in its true meaning is the best and most advanced social structure.

“But what will I do with my communist freedom,” you ask? “What will I ten hours a day?” By this you already admit that now you are a slave. After all, only a slave doesn’t know what to do if the master doesn’t tell him anything.

We actually want you to have all this free time, so that you will be able to create the human form in you. And you are saying: “I don’t want to! What is this is self-fulfillment? I understand if you tell me to run to work in the morning”—and so the merry-go-round of work days and evenings in front of the screen go by, until life is over. This is understood. You have gotten used to this slavery.

But a free society will intentionally leave you with spare time and tell you: “Give your body all that it needs and beyond that—build the human in you.”

The term “human” is love of others, and you don’t want to raise that in you. During all the time that you could devote to that—you are busy destroying the world. After all, beyond the basic necessities, most of our resources are spent on ammunition and other destructive “toys.”

Marx, the founder of communism, understood this. He was a true scholar, an economist, and he had a deep understanding of the system. We, unfortunately, don’t understand him. Eventually, however, even the bad example of the Soviet Union will help us acknowledge the good in it. People are beginning to understand now that the whole story of the “victory of capitalism” is not that simple.
[65081]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/2/12, “The Freedom”

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Question: How detailed and broad should the basic course on “Evolution as Development of Egoism” be?

Answer: It should be as detailed and extensive as possible because all the other courses will stem from it and will be parts of the main course.

After this follows a course on the freedom of will: Does it exist, what it actually is. This course is very broad and contains many topics. We don’t just study whether or not free will exists and how and where it can be realized, but also precisely in which elements of nature it exists, does a human being have it, on what level of development, how to tell the difference between freedom of will and its absence, and so on.

After all, we don’t know where our desires arise from. It seems to me that they are my own, but in reality they come from outside. Where from? Why? Desires arise within me under the influence of the surrounding society: I watch TV and suddenly begin to desire what is being shown to me, and this is unconsciously perceived by me as my own desire. The next day I already want to acquire that which I saw on TV yesterday, and I believe that I’m realizing my own desire. We all understand that this is how we get bought and how things are sold to us.

All this must be explained because it’s tied to decision-making, to awareness of where my freedom of will lies, and whether I can be free from all the possible ideas and values imposed upon me, which in truth are neither values nor ideas, but simply business.

Every topic that we develop and teach provides a person with a vast realm of activity, and that is why the information has to be conveyed using a lot of examples and discussions. Sometimes when you just offer the material to a person from the lectern and head-on, he doesn’t absorb it. However, through some explanations, games, and situations he begins to understand what he was being told then.
[64701]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” 12/12/11

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Question: What message should we convey to people in a course of rational economics?

Answer: We must relay very interesting statistics to them: the amount of resources humanity must spend, the efficient way to use natural and human resources, energy and so on. In other words, we teach people a course of harmony with nature, when we don’t take anything unnecessary from it, like animals.

After all, in our regular lives we are no different from animals. So why should we take from nature more than we need? An animal digs a hole for itself, stores food, procreates instinctively, raises its offspring, kills other creatures and eats them—but never in excess of its needs. And we must act the same way.

Everything must function only in harmony with nature. The only difference is that in our case this harmony must be something we achieve consciously, as opposed to harmony on the still, vegetative and animate levels, which is maintained instinctively. We must create harmony ourselves.
[64970]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” 12/12/11

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Question: The extremist right wing movements in Europe are getting stronger. In general when a person doesn’t see a solution to a problem, he tends to accept the apparent simplicity of radical claims. How can we present our message in contrast to that?

Answer: First, there are many scientific facts. But scientists cannot provide a serious platform at the moment, and so we have to organize it in a way that will show the rational “grain” in our recommendations.

Besides, we shouldn’t forget that radical trends unite people on the one hand, but on the other hand lead to conflicts and wars. Here we have to explain that these tendencies are in contrast to nature. In the present conditions of total mutual connection, any conflict will lead to serious implications.

This is why Europe cannot break apart now. First, it isn’t in Germany’s favor. The Germans are ready to pay billion of Euros only to prevent that from happening. After all, they see where this will lead to: to losing their market. If you seclude yourself, the next day your economy will begin to suffocate. So everyone will lose as a result of the disintegration of the EU.

Day by day it becomes clearer that protectionism isn’t the solution to the current problems. It is used in a very limited manner, but on the whole, everyone already understands the fact that we are all mutually connected and that this connection cannot be broken. It can only be destroyed by war, meaning by extreme actions, but there are no intermediate ways.

I hope that we will be able to prepare our method and wrap it up in a way that will enable people to understand the basic idea. We offer, “Let’s check its effectiveness together,” “Let’s continue to develop it together,” as a result we need to create a platform that will lead the mutual connection among people to a new qualitative level, which is the basis for all the changes that will take place in the world, in humanity. [Read more →]

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Opinion: (Andrey Milovzorov, from utro.ru): “Saxo Bank predicts that wheat prices will double in 2012. But what will change in the lives of European or Russian consumers if a loaf of bread costs twice as much? Nothing. The average European spends on food 20% of his income, and the average Russian 50%.

“However, there are countries where people spend 90% of their earnings on food. In Somalia, a quarter of a million people could die because of a severe drought. No one hurries to help because it is a market for western farmers.

“Large-scale deliveries of food aid feed a huge army of stock market speculators. The market is not interested in developing agriculture in the starving countries.

“It seems that to change the logic of the markets, we need more serious arguments than a rise of the price of bread in Europe. For example, a mass exodus of refugees from Africa to Europe, who are fleeing from hunger (there may be up to 150 million of them), or food riots that could affect the entire world trade and cut off oil supply to the West.”

My Comment: Mass famine will have unpredictable consequences, and mainly they will force the world to reconsider its disdain for their neighbors and take care of mutual guarantee.
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Opinion: (Olivier Blanchard, the IMF Chief Economist): “We started 2011 in recovery mode, admittedly weak and unbalanced, but nevertheless there was hope.

“Yet, as the year draws to a close, the recovery in many advanced economies is at a standstill, with some investors even exploring the implications of a potential breakup of the Eurozone, and the real possibility that conditions may be worse than we saw in 2008.

“I draw four main lessons from what has happened.

• First, post the 2008–09 crisis, the world economy is pregnant with multiple equilibria—self-fulfilling outcomes of pessimism or optimism, with major macroeconomic implications.
• Second, incomplete or partial policy measures can make things worse.
• Third, financial investors are schizophrenic about fiscal consolidation and growth.
• Fourth, perception moulds reality.

“Put these four factors together, and you can explain why the year ends much worse than it started.

“Is all hope lost? No, but putting the recovery back on track will be harder than it was a year ago. It will take credible but realistic fiscal consolidation plans. It will take liquidity provision to avoid multiple equilibria. It will take plans that are not only announced, but implemented. And it will take much more effective collaboration among all involved.

“I am hopeful it will happen. The alternative is just too unattractive.”
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Question: At the very beginning of implementing the program of an integral society we will need to somehow overcome all sorts of disagreements. For instance, how do we convince a person that he can do with an apartment that’s 500 square feet and not 2,000 square feet like his neighbor’s? What kind of arguments can we use?

Answer: As we continue to move toward integration, people will be changing their lifestyle. Every person will need their own room in order to study and not bother others. I think that one room per person is enough, plus a common living room and other auxiliary rooms—that’s a normal living area. We can provide everyone with these conditions, assuming we stop chasing after excess and adopt this standard as the model home.

The same applies to food. It’s very easy to calculate the necessary amount of food for a person. This could be a certain set that complies with one’s habits: national, cultural, and so on, but restricted in terms of assortment, meaning less than 50 kinds of sausage that currently line the supermarket shelves. All this variety is simply pointless. Presently someone is making money off you with this, but once the issue of livelihood is settled, all this excess automatically disappears.

Over the course of the crisis hundreds of millions of people will lose their jobs, and their purchasing power will take a nosedive. This will force dozens of redundant kinds of food off the shelves as no one will be buying them. These cutbacks will happen naturally, and we don’t have to worry about them. The world will naturally sever all the excess from the basic necessities for a normal and healthy life.

Comment: For people who have lived in socialist regimes and experienced the phenomenon of a growing deficit, which forced them to spend tremendous amounts of time and efforts to acquire the bare necessities, this sounds kind of scary because they immediately picture long lines.

Answer: There won’t be any lines. I think that everything will be delivered to people’s homes. You will order what you require, and an organization responsible for food supply will deliver everything to you. Similarly, other organizations will provide apartment repair and other types of services.

These are the necessary types of jobs that will remain with humanity, aside from specific industries, agriculture, and so on. Essentially, we will be spending our time and efforts on what is really necessary.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” 12/12/11

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