A culture of health

At SVES we had a young upstart demanding that he be allowed to chew betel nut because that was his “culture,” accusing PSS of depriving him of his “constitutional” right to chew and spew!

The issue of culture is paramount in any consideration of the interaction between economics, politics, and culture (all typologies are mental creations, categories referring to the same thing, only looking at it from a different perspective).

Let us designate “economics: as that-without-which there is no life. This involves resources, production of goods, and the distribution of services.

“Politics” is relational, encompassing the decision-making process that allocates resources, designates the ways of labor and ownership of the means of production, and valuates the benefits in the distribution of goods and services produced. It is social and leads to order, justice and welfare.

“Culture” gives meaning, allocates the relative value and significance of things, society and the way life is. It encompasses individual and social wisdom, establishes individual and social life-styles, forms stories, songs, and symbols.

All three dynamics are ongoing any given time. As a rule of thumb, we designate the “real” stuff as economic, the “relational” stuff as political, and the “significating” stuff as the cultural.

In our time, cultural wisdom provides us with three perspectives: the transcendent (comprehensive view from a distance), the immanent (the impact from within), and the transparent (the view from the reflection of a mirror or an image).

Our claim is that culture is key to economic and political change.

The starting point in current economic thought is that we decide on the basis of scarcity. The notion that food production will never catch up with population growth is ingrained; since there is not enough to go around, we fall into the survival of the fittest. Thus, competition is justified as a cornerstone of capitalist economics.

Economics in Social Studies measures “opportunity cost,” looks at the value of what we did not choose. This is looking at a bottle half empty rather than half full. We also look at “marginal and sunk cost,” when one activity is repeated, along with “profit opportunities” where we seek positions of advantage through efficiency in order to be ahead of the competition.

Economics is understood as the equation of supply and demand, on the assumption that demand will always exceed supply. When need insufficiently fuels demand, we manipulate “wants,” the basis of marketing and sales procedures.

Decision-making is representational. We elect someone to represent our will and s/he decides on our behalf. This was proper when it took a month for someone to travel to the halls of deliberations, e.g., a California Rep getting to the U.S. Congress in 1850, but at a time when we can relay our thoughts at the click of an electronic digital mouse, democracy can be broader and instant.

If we decide that our cultural priority is the promotion of health of all living and non-living things on planet earth, the economic focus would be on the abundance and sufficiency of natural, human and technological resources, rather than its scarcity. We would inventory, conserve and protect ‘what is’ rather than speculate and exploit the perceive value of “what is not.” Health of each individual is the immanent perspective, the health of the planet takes the transcendent view.

What happens if we accept the interdependence of diverse interests and operate structures that honor the perspectives of all? The males of the specie still take upon themselves to decide everyone’s life, yet females produce half of the agricultural output, but only get a 10th of the profit, and own only one percent of the resource.

We need to establish glocal communities of interdependence that hopes for liberte, egalite, fraternite for everyone. Our economics no longer follow lines of the nation-state yet we are organized as if we are still entities of colonial administrations. Protectionism is passé yet it is widely practiced, legislating protection from the efforts of those beyond our national boundaries. Glocal thinking recognizes the reality of the present rather than wish for the continuation of the past.

Our common story of scarcity, clash of civilizations, and impending end times, guide our behavioral patterns. This story is humanly conceived; it can be unconceived.

We asked previously what we can do with the influence of ‘money’ as the organizing measure of our economic, political and cultural life. A lot. First, acknowledge addiction to money and its illusions of value, then, enlarge our human search for health, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual, beyond numbers in our bank accounts, and meaning beyond the adrenaline rush from Peoples magazine and the Sports pages, especially today’s Super Bowl. Second, we broaden participation in creating new communities, e pluribus unum, where we belong and everyone knows our name. Third, we heed the authority of authenticity rather than rely on the moneyed hero as leaders, or calcify our allegiance to sacred traditions for precedence.

A cultural revolution in human consciousness is needed, and it starts in each of us.

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Vergara is a regular contributor to the Saipan Tribune’s Opinion Section