In a recent congress in Spain about the need of a new education, it was posited that it should be "from life and for life" and I think that the action of taking the phrase for the economy is not only valid, but to take that title will prove inspiring.
It is obvious that the order of the economy impairs the world so it cannot serve life and it can be argued that neither the procedes from life nor the meaning of the expression “human nature” are for us to understand. But I should have inserted the meaning to the end of the previous sentence and, as such, the majority of people will insist that our economy is precisely the expression of “human nature” so problematic that it carried Hobbes to affirm that, as humans, we are like wolves in that respect.
Then, we say that human nature is the sane condition and is virtuous and superior to the perversions of human nature that are characterized by the “lower passions”. The superior condition of human nature is known by us principally through isolated individual efforts to elevate the ordinary condition of humanity in so much of our culture, institutions, lifestyles and dominant opinions, so that the only way to account for the expression of an abnormal mentality, but for the blind, is the similarity of psychotics who believe they are normal. Our same civilization has known throughout history of the abnormal and disfunctional condition.
It is this that affirms the famous myth of the drop in Judeo Christianity—also presented in other cultures like that of India, Greece, and Mexico pre-Colombian. We can decode the implicit metaphor of the “drop,” which says that the tradition they want to communicate is a progressive degradation of the human consciousness throughout history. We have lost, according to this view, our virtue, falling into sin. We have also lost our wisdom, returning to “ignorance” of our real circumstances and confusión in a way that it should interest us to recover our same consciousness, which has dropped into a species of sleep that makes so many nightmares for individuals and the collectives.
So they thought about the old before the Darwinian view of biological evolution of the species came to serve the industrial era of the argument of the new doctrine of tecnhnological progress. That reconfirmed it to us until, suddenly, we found out about the actual crises, which at first only appeared as financial, and later economic, ecological, etc. After that, people has started questioning about the sustainability of what we have called our civilization.
But just like the individuals only are able to know their abnormal condition after an awakening of their consciousness that their time requires a process of transformation, also in the socio-cultural sphere and in our economy, we only have an imperfect perception of our collective aberration and we can less view the potential condition of the health of the collective, which makes the theme that I have chosen appear even more questionable than simple utopia.
But, can they not say other things about the economy that were coherent with the health of our emotional life and relations? First, I propose to examine a later thesis not considered in the publications of experts—that througout history we have simply interpreted how “the bad” and “the unjust” has resulted from the imbalance between the mother and the father and the son of the nuclear family. It was instituted that this imbalance in all of the villages of civilizations and in Roman law that came to formulate the institution of the paternal families, according to which, both woman and sons are property of the man and that they should be completely obedient.
Naturally, the subordination of women to men in families has had its collective echo in the oppression, exploitation and generalization of women in the economic sphere, women’s devaluation in the cultural sphere and their almost expulsion political and religious life. So what we call the “history of civilization” was, until very recently, the story of men governing societies and oriented as warriors and marketable securities that have the neglect of materal or empathetic valuesthat focus on life and the community.
Since the Bachofen Discovery at the end of the past century, the existence of “matriarchs” (as we call them now), before the establishment of the dominant patriarch of society, other anthropologies and studies of the methodology have interpreted the transition between the motherly and fatherly worlds like one of the stages of that mythical drop of the human species between a more satisfactory archaic condition. However, in view of the difficulty of being able to think of a convincing reconstruction of pre-history, it is agreed that, in speaking of the patriarchical order and disadvantages, we do not support both historical data analysis, but simply in the present, in which the prevalence of maternal and paternal spirit over us is evident from the fact taht we live in a society of minimal solidarity where compeitition prevails over cooperation affection and agression on individualism of the common good.
In addition to this predominance of the aspects of “masculinity” over the corresponding “feminine” aspects, it is also omnipresent in the life of civilization the repressive character of society, which operates as if the process of civilizing was implicitly defined as the rational control over children and animals' spontaneity.
I just called the “patriarchical mind” to that in which they occur at the same time a systematic eclipse of the maternal and empathetic aspect of our mind and the flattening of that we are able to call the “inner child” in us with the innocent spontaneity of their desires and the finding of pleasure of their satisfaction.