The current crisis is meant to bring us to the right recognition of the mutual connection and dependency between us. And it is not this economy in the modern example. After all, a real economy is without “bubbles” and excessive luxuries. It is a small percentage of the world’s population producing the basic necessities that we all need: food, clothing, housing, etc. Everything else is not the economy, but rather, additions to confuse people so that others can profit from them. Only a small part of the market provides the basic necessities for everyone’s existence.

But now the truth is being revealed: People are jobless, especially the young. They don’t know what to do with themselves and they acquire a distorted perception of life; after a short while they lose the ability to work. What’s more, they can’t build a family and lead a normal life. Instead they are creating a new culture with new types of recreation.

In short, there is a worldwide social disaster. Today it is being revealed very acutely in Europe, but there are billions waiting in line in other countries including China and India. The US is not an exception either; for example, we can see Detroit, which has become a kind of “ghost town.”

All this brings us to a new society, and if we don’t correct it, if we don’t explain to people how they should organize and what they should do, then they will live in an urban jungle, like animals in the woods. Then humanity will reach correction not by the path of the integral education but by the path of suffering.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/7/13, ”Introduction to The Book of Zohar”

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In the News (from The Wall Street Journal): “It has been nearly five years since the collapse of investment firm Bear Stearns, the first of the dominoes to fall in the 2008 financial crisis. It is now abundantly clear there was too much risk-taking and too much borrowing, particularly by big financial companies. The global economy is still suffering the hangover.

“Too much finance can be dangerous to economic health. But too little finance hurts, too. Promising investments are starved. Consumers can’t borrow for homes or education. Growth is slower. …

“As a share of the world economy, the global stock of debt, both private and public, and equity peaked in 2007, plunged and has now recovered to 2000 levels, according to a McKinsey Global Institute database of 183 countries. …

“The social value of finance isn’t to fuel Wall Street’s casinos or make traders and hedge fund partners rich. It is, rather, to deploy the world’s savings in investments that pay off in the future. …

“Rich-country banks have pulled back. European banks increasingly are reluctant to lend across borders. Jitters about the durability of the euro and the stability of national governments have reversed a decade of financial integration. In emerging markets, the growth in stock and bond markets—which had been a welcome sign of economic maturity—has largely stalled.”

My Comment: Everything goes according to the plan of nature to force us to adopt a new attitude towards ourselves, society, and the world as to a single global dependent system.
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In the News (from Euronews): “Only a few weeks ago, EU officials were patting each other on the back and declaring that the euro crisis is over.

“Now the European Commission’s own forecasts published on Friday say the continent’s economic woes will continue. …

“Their latest study predicts the eurozone economy will shrink by 0.3 percent this year.

“That’s revised down from November’s outlook, which saw growth of 0.1 percent.

“If politicians and bankers think the single currency crisis has been consigned to the history books, try telling that to unemployed people in heavily-indebted EU countries.

“Greece has an employment rate of 27 percent, whilst Spain is closed behind with 26.9 percent.

“One economist says the EU needs to rethink its economic policies.

“Hans Martens, chief executive of the European Policy Centre, stresses that Europe has taken the wrong way to recover.

“’This is a disaster not only for let’s say the European institutions but also for member states because this is a reminder that they have not done enough they have simply not done enough to stimulate growth and jobs,’ he told euronews.”

My Comment: It is necessary to agree psychologically to the new state of the world (integral, united), the new economy (only reasonable consumption and equal distribution), and new social relations (equal rational consumption). This is what awaits us, regardless of our desires. In this case, ladies and gentlemen, the statistics will not shock you every time.
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Opinion (Gavriil Popov, President of the International University in Moscow): 
“As it is known, the model of the Soviet and Nazi state socialism ruled out unemployment. There is nothing more difficult for a person than the impossibility of finding a job, that is why unemployment during crises is the main factor of people turning to socialism, national socialism, fascism.

“The experience of Soviet socialism has shown that providing all the members of society with work creates social stability, but reduces the average wage because the output should be divided among everyone; the desire to work effectively is diminished, and society heads towards a dead end.

“Unemployment is inherent in the modern postindustrial formation. But it is intolerable in comparison to the benefits that post-industrialism gives the employed. The solution must combine rewards to those who work efficiently and provide employment to everyone who wants to work with reasonable salaries.

“Therefore, it makes economic sense to have two systems of work:

“The sphere of competitive employment, based on competition, where high earnings stimulate efficiency;

“The sphere of social employment, providing jobs and wages sufficient for life to those who cannot work in a competitive environment (the elderly, the disabled, women with children, the unemployed in the sphere of efficient economy). Social employment must be self-supporting. And there is plenty of work in the social sphere: the collection and recycling of waste, remediation of forests, road repair, remediation of wasteland.”

My Comment: There will be a need for work in the social sphere for many years ahead. In any case, it is necessary to combine work in both spheres with integral education.
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In the News (from The Financial Times): “Germany’s president appealed on Friday to the people of the United Kingdom to remain members of the EU, in a speech intended to counter euroscepticism across the continent.

“’Dear people of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, dear new British citizens!’ declared Joachim Gauck. ‘We would like you to stay with us!’

“His appeal to British pride and patriotism – ‘During the second world war, your efforts helped to save our Europe, and it is also your Europe,’ he said – underlined a deep concern in Berlin that a referendum in the UK, promised by David Cameron, the prime minister, could see a British vote to leave the EU.

“We will only be able to master future challenges if we work together. More Europe cannot mean a Europe without you!” …

“He dismissed accusations that Germany was seeking to intimidate its EU partners, or force its ideas on them, in laying down the rules to recover from the eurozone crisis. …

“’This is not just a struggle for our currency,’ he said. Europe was facing more than an economic crisis. ‘It is also a crisis of confidence in Europe as a political project.’…

“’We stand together . . . for peace and freedom, for democracy and the rule of law, for equality, human rights and solidarity.’”

My Comment: Isn’t it too late to appeal for solidarity, and not even complete solidarity at that, just financial? The root of the problem is a gradual shift in the program controlling humanity. The program is gradually changing from egoistic to altruistic and requires humanity to become similar to it and to participate in it actively. Inconsistency with the program is manifested as a multi-faceted crisis.

Humanity has a method of retraining itself to become similar to a new program. The method is called integral education. As long as humanity is stubborn, the program is being introduced more and more in our world, in all its forms, and that is why the crisis is felt stronger from day to day. Let’s wait when the words about equality, rights, and so on will become significant and desirable, instead of empty.
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Question: Will there come a time when wages will be linked not just to results but to the needs of the worker as with Marx, “To everyone according to his needs”?

Answer: This is the way it will be. However, it will happen when a person is satisfied with normal material needs only, without luxuries. This will be when he no longer receives satisfaction from the thought that he owns factories and businesses. This desire will disappear from within him.

We need to reach this kind of state. Thus, either we have to wait for it or we educate the nation. With the help of integral education, we accelerate the movement and quickly pass through these stages, although we don’t delete them as Russia tried to do by moving from serfdom to socialism bypassing capitalism. That is why Russia is now experiencing a reversal.

The next state of humanity is to provide the normal level of the material and all the rest is spiritual development only.

A maximum of 10% of humanity will work to supply all that is needed: food, clothing, building houses, etc. And the rest can be called, in modern language, unemployed. They will be closely involved with the integral law of nature and together with this will constantly feel a vast emptiness and great, new fulfillments inside. They will gradually cross over to the integral connection between them, will feel the Noosphere (the sphere of human thought),  will develop within them completely new habits, new inner feelings and emotions. They won’t have a need for telephones, cell phones, modems and other computer connections. They will be connected internally.

It is not telepathy that we imagine to ourselves as something supernatural. This is an extra sense that will develop in us under the influence of the integral mutual cooperation between us.

This is so because we constitute a single integral system. Only we don’t feel it. In nature everything is necessarily mutually connected to everything, but these laws are obligatory at the levels of inanimate, vegetative, and animate. And at our level they need to be recognized. And then we will feel the entire universe from one end to the other; we will feel internally how it breathes and lives.
[101053]
From KabTV’s “Professional Secrets” 2/6/13

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Opinion (Robert Skidelsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, member of the British House of Lords): “What impact will automation – the so-called ‘rise of the robots’ – have on wages and employment over the coming decades? Nowadays, this question crops up whenever unemployment rises.

“In the early nineteenth century, David Ricardo considered the possibility that machines would replace labor; Karl Marx followed him. Around the same time, the Luddites smashed the textile machinery that they saw as taking their jobs.

“Then the fear of machines died away. New jobs – at higher wages, in easier conditions, and for more people – were soon created and readily found. But that does not mean that the initial fear was wrong. On the contrary, it must be right in the very long run: sooner or later, we will run out of jobs. …

For those who dread the threat that automation poses to low-skilled labor, a ready answer is to train people for better jobs. But technological progress is now eating up the better jobs, too. A wide range of jobs that we now think of as skilled, secure, and irreducibly human may be the next casualties of technological change.

As a recent article in the Financial Times points out, in two areas notoriously immune to productivity increases, education and health care, technology is already reducing the demand for skilled labor. Translation, data analysis, legal research – a whole range of high-skilled jobs may wither away. So, what will the new generation of workers be trained for?

Optimists airily assert that ‘many new types of job will be created.’ They ask us to think of the lead drivers of multi-car road trains (once our electric cars join up ‘convoy-style’), big data analysts, or robot mechanics. That does not sound like too many new jobs to me. …

“It is not true that automation has caused the rise of unemployment since 2008. … If escape from poverty is the goal, disguised unemployment is a bad thing. But if machines have already engineered the escape from poverty, then work-sharing is a sensible way of ‘spreading the work’ that still has to be done by human labor.

“If one machine can cut necessary human labor by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to ten, with each diminishing block of labor time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.

“Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.”

My Comment: The revolution in social thinking can be done only by introducing universal education for a new type of society with respect for others, work distribution, that is, in teaching the conditions of existence in an integral community.
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Question: Can a criterion of reward for employees at the workplace be not the result, but a person’s personal qualities of being able to connect people together in a team? Perhaps, they do not give visible results that could be reflected in a chart, but nonetheless, the mood of a team depends on them.

Answer: The general atmosphere and the general health of a team, which is felt as fulfillment, depends on those who can bind the team together. “Not by bread alone shall man live.” These people, graduates of training at our centers, are much needed at workplaces. A person needs emotional fulfillment.

The other day, I was talking to our representatives from Italy. Currently there is a huge rate of unemployment. What are people doing? They are gathering together, buying houses, remodeling them into apartment houses, and converting them into communes. It turns out that in this way it is much easier to survive the crisis, problems, and everything else. In addition, they experience an emotional comfort because they are together: husbands, wives, and children.

A feeling of mutual help suddenly gives a person such fulfillment that he does not need luxury items, holidays in exotic locations, etc. It turns out that in this way nature brings us to another form of contentment.

Today, workers in Spain and Italy already agree to work for half a salary, but they are more united among themselves; they have elements of the commune there.

We see that by this means, nature pushes people to unite. Integration is ahead. Either we come to it along the good path, understanding what awaits us in the future, and then we do not need problems and crises, or we will still get there through suffering, problems, unemployment, deprivation.
[101088]
From KabTV’s “Professional Secrets” 2/6/13

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Opinion (Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government): “There was a time when we economists steered clear of politics. We viewed our job as describing how market economies work, when they fail, and how well-designed policies can enhance efficiency. We analyzed trade-offs between competing objectives (say, equity versus efficiency), and prescribed policies to meet desired economic outcomes, including redistribution. …

“Frustrated by the reality that much of our advice went unheeded (so many free-market solutions still waiting to be taken up!), we turned our analytical toolkit on the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats themselves. We began to examine political behavior using the same conceptual framework that we use for consumer and producer decisions in a market economy. Politicians became income-maximizing suppliers of policy favors; citizens became rent-seeking lobbies and special interests; and political systems became marketplaces in which votes and political influence are traded for economic benefits. …

“Why are so many industries closed off to real competition? Because politicians are in the pockets of the incumbents who reap the rents. Why do governments erect barriers to international trade? Because the beneficiaries of trade protection are concentrated and politically influential, while consumers are diffuse and disorganized. Why do political elites block reforms that would spur economic growth and development? Because growth and development would undermine their hold on political power. Why are there financial crises? Because banks capture the policymaking process so that they can take excessive risks at the expense of the general public. …

“If politicians’ behavior is determined by the vested interests to which they are beholden, economists’ advocacy of policy reforms is bound to fall on deaf ears.”

My Comment: Fortunately, nothing will be left of the past egoistic economy in the age of its collapse; so, there is no point in trying to identify all the secrets of clans of the elite and how to work with them. The crisis will clean everything! What will be left of people and the world will take a new form: the necessary fulfillment of the material things and infinite fulfillment in the revelation of the meaning of life. This state can be reached through education, that is, changing a person. In an effort to soften the landing of the world to the new conditions, we have to consider integral education, proposed by Kabbalah.
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Opinion (Victor Davis Hanson, American military historian, columnist, political essayist and former classics professor): “Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?

“Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure — and who gets the most of both — more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization.

“One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city’s takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature — from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius and Tacitus — pointed to ‘bread and circuses,’ as well as excessive wealth, corruption and top-heavy government.

“For Gibbon and later French scholars, ‘Byzantine’ became a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. In antiquity, inflating the currency by turning out cheap bronze coins was often the favored way to pay off public debts.”

My Comment: Everything repeats because our egoism has reigned in us from the day of man’s appearance on earth. But today we are talking openly about a new state of development of the individual and society: the state of “one family” that will occur 1) unwillingly through suffering or 2) easily and pleasantly by realizing the necessity.
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