Systemic scapegoats and political taoism

The credit crunch and global warming is prompting many to suggest that democratic capitalism has failed as a system. People are looking towards alternative financial systems and governmental systems as potential solutions to these problems. I think that it is not the systems that are at fault but our tendency to frame our decisions in terms of the system. Let me explain.

An excellent illustration of the dangers of relying on systems and rules to make our decisions for us is the town of Drachten. They removed all road signs, speed limits and road markings. They also removed all barriers between the road and the pavement so that the street became one space shared by motorists and pedestrians. You might expect this to have created chaos but in fact the opposite happened. Accidents and crashes fell dramatically.

At first people worried that when they removed the rules or made them less absolute then people would exploit their new freedom. What they found was the people that behaved recklessly with out the rules were the same people that used to break the rules when they were in place. The sum of recklessness remained the same.

People have compared driving in the town to driving in a camp site or village fête. When cars share their space with pedestrians it encourages both to be more cautious. Decreasing the rules and giving people more freedom and responsibility creates an uncertainty that people are scared to embrace. It's frightening to face the true existential anxiety created by measuring each decision on it's individual context and consequences. The drivers in Drachten were forced to slow down and take more notice of their surroundings. With out a system dictating exactly what we should and shouldn't be doing we tend to be more careful, considerate and forgiving.

Many people seam to have the attitude that "If it's legal it is OK." It is common for companies to behave in entirely unethical ways just so long as they stay within the laws. This reliance on laws coupled with the idea that is OK for people to exploit them creates a constant need to update the laws into an ever growing complicated mess. This creates the need for lawyers.

Another example of laws and convention blinding people to their responsibility is the concept of ownership. It seams common that people think "This is mine so I can do what I want with it." I don't think it is OK for me to waste something just because it's mine. Just like I don't think it's OK to spend my money in any way I want just because I earned it.

Just like there is no ultimate description of mathematics (see Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem) there is no system with enough rules that would cover every situation. This also similar to the Taoist idea that the Tao is ultimately indescribable.

The problem is that obeying or exploiting the laws becomes a substitute for making responsible context driven decisions.

It is about time that we faced up to the fact that we live during a time of massive freedom and massive personal power. As voters we have been given the power to choose any government or leader that we'd like. The internet has given us incredible powers of communication and huge potential for mass organisation. As consumers we have been given the power to destroy any retail corporation by boycotting it's products.

We complain about inequality and blame the system. Perhaps we should give more money to charity. But why should we? The system doesn't demand it.

We complain about the government. Perhaps we shouldn't limit our political involvement to making one vote every four years. Some of us don't even manage that.

We complain about pollution. Nobody forces us to buy things we don't need and to live in a wasteful manner. But why shouldn't we? There is no law against it.

It's not the system it's over reliance on a system for decision making. While we hand over the responsibility for our decision making to any system we will fail to live in harmonious and just society. Take for example the bankers that sold each other the toxic debt and made huge profits. They were acting within the law and so felt no need to question the morality of what they were doing. It seams now that the politicians are planning to throw more regulation at the banking industry in the vain hope that they will not learn how to exploit it. I think that until we address the underlying attitude towards rules more regulation won't achieve anything.

Communism, capitalism and even anarchism would work if everybody acted in a responsible ethical way and made their decisions not in terms of the laws of the particular system but by the real consequences. It's not the system that's at fault; the system is just a scapegoat we blame when we should be looking at ourselves.

Uncertainty breeds caution and consideration. Certainty breeds conflict and violence. Behind most certainty is a law or system - religious or legal. Central to Taoist teaching is the concept of wu-wei. It is often translated as merely non-action. Wu-wei means lack of wei, where wei refers to 'artificial, contrived activity that interferes with natural and spontaneous development'. From a political point of view, wei refers to the imposition of authority. To do something in accordance with wu-wei is therefore considered natural; it leads to natural and spontaneous order. It has nothing to do with all forms of imposed authority.

Thousands of years ago Lao Tzu - in the Tao Te Ching said

The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men's weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.

Never have we lived in a time with more laws and restrictions.

Lao Tzu was not the only sage of old to address this topic. Jesus broke the laws of his time. He healed people on the Sabbath. He consorted with prostitutes, Samaritans and lepers. He taught that it was the spirit in which the laws were intended that was important not the blind strict obedience of them.

I'm not suggesting that we give up systems entirely and revert to anarchism. I believe that anarchism is the base state that exists simultaneously with systems. We are fundamentally free. When we forget this fact we hand over control to an unmanned machine. The most destructive myth of all is the myth that we are powerless to choose our own fate.