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Dear All,
Dear Paul,

Thank you for starting this conversation. As I am new to the list and duly
impressed with the quality of posts and intellectual rigor presented
therein, I simply wanted to share some basic thoughts and information.

I do agree with most that has been said regarding economics and economism.
As Economics is assumption-based it resembles faith. In many ways, other
sciences operate on certain assumptions as well, consciously or not
(sociology, psychology and physics). While we sometimes call those
assumptions laws, they are more malleable than we are made to believe. The
reason why economic assumptions are so powerful, I believe, is their
simplicity and partial truth.

The ontology of the self/human as psychopathic individual accurately
describes 1-4% of the people and maybe more so those in positions of power
(those positions that social scientists tend to study). There is a
self-fulfilling prophecy at work when buying into the narrative (which I
agree most institutions largely have, including political and media
institutions).

While Richard Noorgard argues (if I understand correctly) for a new "ism"
to emerge to counter the religious power of economism, I would submit that
we may be able to build on an old "ism", namely humanism. A renewed form of
humanism which bridges the wisdom of the ancestors (say
philosophy/theology) with the insights created by science (say evolutionary
biology/neuroscience) will not be able to avoid "ontological assumptions"
about who we are as people/humans, but may be able to help transition into
a form of organizing society, economy and beyond that is more
life-conducive..

The Humanist Management Network, of which I=E2=80=99m a founding partner, h=
as been
working on reconnecting the old humanistic traditions with the insights of
the sciences to provide an alternative narrative for human organizing (
www.humanetwork.org). The baseline of this group is that to counter the
power of economism, you need to have a parsimonious (simple) assumption set
of who we are as people and what we wish to organize for. We call it
=E2=80=9Cprotecting human dignity and promoting well-being.=E2=80=9D This i=
s not new at
all, yet possibly quite relevant when examining alternative ways of
organizing (which I would submit is the crux of many problems we are
facing: poor organization).

Here is a link to a video (3 minutes) that may describe the above a bit
better:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DkRcBveTN1Y8

We therefore do not get rid of assumptions, but think we can better defend
those (see below)
1) we are endowed with dignity, intrinsic value
2) we do care about us and each other (otherwise we would not have survived=
)
3) we ultimately wish to flourish/be happy
4) we therefore intuitively understand that treating others with dignity
serves us all best (we still need to learn how: education is the humanist
theory of change)
5) and we are in pain when we destroy our life-systems.

I would argue that the notion of dignity as that which is intrinsically
valuable can be helpful. Dignity escapes the exchange and market logics and
therefore could be critical in the quest for organizing formats that
complement/supersede the market. Just a couple of ideas.

Thanks for this rich conversation and all the best,
Michael Pirson

Director for Social Innovation
Director, Center for Humanistic Management
Associate Professor, Fordham University

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Friday, October 30, 2015