All animals with backbones have a brain with two separate halves. This is because they have to do two very different things to survive. They have to eat, so they have to be able to grasp and control specific things in their environment. This is the job of the left brain. They also have to keep from being eaten, so they need to be on the lookout for unknowns around them. They need to understand how to work with allies and avoid enemies. To do this they have to understand others, not just themselves. This is the job of the right brain. The left brain develops and stores skills and knowledge, it understands parts, inert details that don’t change. The right brain knows how to perceive and understand the larger world we live in, it understands wholes, living beings and systems.

When we are functioning well our awareness oscillates back and forth between our left and right brains. When our awareness is in our left brain we work on developing and using skills. Make the bow and arrow. We need to get these jobs done to survive, so the left brain, which can’t actually understand the outside world, makes up stories and tells itself everything is fine out there. Just keep working on the bow and arrow. While this is going on our right brain is constantly scanning the environment.

When it detects something important the right brain breaks in and pulls our awareness out of our left brain and into our right brain, so we can evaluate what is actually happening in the world around us and respond to it. Are we dealing with a tiger, a possible mate, freezing temperatures tonight, or a slowly developing crop failure? How is this related to everything else happening around us right now? The right brain has many ways of perceiving the world and develops wisdom and the ability to understand, anticipate, and work with others who may not be exactly like us.

This system worked well for millions of years. Everyone lived immersed in the natural world, which always presented a steady stream of events we needed to respond to successfully in order to survive. So our awareness oscillated between our left and right brains and we developed skills and knowledge, wisdom and perception that allowed us to thrive in harmony with the larger world that sustains us.

Around 500 years ago the scientific revolution gave us new tools to understand the world. This quickly lead to the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism, which gave us enormous power to manipulate the world and structure our relationships. We used these new abilities to separate ourselves from the natural world. Now the vast majority of people in the developed world never have to worry about tigers, freezing, or crop failures.

An unintended side effect of all of this comfort is that our right brain is no longer regularly pulling our awareness out of our left brain. As a result most of us are becoming trapped in our left brain, where we happily make up stories about other people, instead of actually relating to them, and where we tell ourselves how fine everything is in the world around us. We do this so we can focus on what the left brain considers to be important, which today is largely interacting with glass screens that give us a flat and simple view of the world.

As technology and capitalism advance, and our right brain goes into a deeper and deeper trance, we are rapidly loosing our ability to understand the world we live in. This is not an accident. Capitalism seeks to make a profit by selling a commodity at a higher price than it cost to make. In order to accomplish this capitalism is always seeking to become more efficient, so it can reduce the cost of production and make a larger profit. The cumulative effect of this is destroying humanities ability to function effectively in the world.

How so you ask? Capitalism is constantly breaking work up into smaller and smaller tasks to improve efficiency. One way work is broken up is to separate the planning of what tasks need to be done from the labor of doing the tasks. Then both the planning and the labor are broken up into smaller and smaller tasks. This systematically deprives people of skills, knowledge, insight, and the ability to understand whole living systems. It forces our awareness to focus on smaller and smaller details, without understanding their overall effect on ourselves and the world we live in.

In terms of left and right brain capitalism is strengthening our left brain and weakening our right brain. As we lose our right brain ability to perceive and understand the world around us and we become trapped in left brain stories that no longer serve our best interests. For example, while capitalism was a vast improvement over feudalism, and has performed better than socialism and communism, it is no longer progressive. Yet we believe it is the only path forward for humanity.

Capitalism actively seeks to create disruptions in the relationships between humans and the natural world in order to generate more profit. It does this by disrupting material flows in natural cyclical processes - soil exhaustion by modern agriculture is an important example. It shifts waste away from its point of generation - dumping your trash on others to minimize disposal costs. And it shifts the cost of waste to the future to avoid having to pay for disposal entirely – CO2 emissions and climate change. Capitalism also seeks to compress space and time in order to speed up return on investment. All of these things increase profits and all of them destroy parts of the living web of natural relationships that sustain human life on earth.

In its quest for infinite growth on a finite planet capitalism is destroying our life support systems, destabilizing human civilization, and systematically reducing our intelligence. Yet we look to it to solve our social and political problems. Capitalism is a powerful and able servant, but a terrible master. It has no moral compass. It can’t tell the difference between improvement and destruction or separate progress from waste. It only knows the maximization of profits.

So how can we maintain the benefits of capitalism while recovering our full intelligence and regenerating our life support systems in the natural world? We can ramp up a local regenerative economy to meet many of our needs as we ramp down the time we spend participating in the capitalistic economy. We can structure this local regenerative economy so that it strengthens our right brain and generates mutually beneficial relationships between people and between humanity and the natural world. As we restore the balance between our left and right brains we will resume the development of human wisdom which will allow us to restore a balance between efficiency and exploitation with our economic activities.

How can we structure this new local regenerative economy? Fortunately we have some help. We can look to the deep economy of nature for guidance. We can also remember that in ancient societies the accumulation of wealth was not the goal of production. The goal of production was to produce things people needed to survive and flourish, like food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, and ritual. Since people knew that their methods of production would shape them, like clay pressed into a mold and like capitalism has shaped us, they chose methods of production that met their needs and also made them better people.

In the natural world things are born, live and then return to source. While they are animated they perform useful services. We can base our new economy on animism, on the realization that everything is alive. All ancient cultures understood this and now physics is coming to the same conclusion. We can move away from our illusion that humans are the only important living things and that the rest of the universe is composed of dead matter whose purpose is to serve as a resource for our pleasure.

Performance is the currency of the natural economy. A song for your supper. In a ritual based animistic economy we want our means of exchange to be aligned with living performances. So we create money that is born, has a finite life, and then returns to source. Today this can be done relatively easily with an app. Say everyone in our local community gets $1,000 in their app account on the start of each month, by which we mean on the day of the new moon. We can use a lunar calendar for our animism economy to remind ourselves it is different than the capitalistic economy.

Let’s make the money decrease in value (depreciate) by 10% of its initial value each month, so at the end of 10 months the money is gone. This money cannot be used as a store of wealth, since if you put it in the bank it loses all value after 10 months and you have nothing. The only value this money has is to serve to facilitate exchange while it is alive.

The way we generate wealth in our new economy is by being part of a living web of largely local relationships that works to meet our needs. Exchange of food, clothing, building materials, labor, ritual, and entertainment is facilitated by our local currency. This can be farmers markets, craft fairs, local entertainment, home repair, whatever we want to be part of the web we develop to meet our needs. The principle tools we have are our own labor and the productive value of the soil. A guiding principle is that we ask ourselves what forms of production and exchange produce a healthy, happy and functional community that is able to take care of its members and the local natural world that supports it.

Whenever possible we work in small groups, so production is a social event. This means we want the use of our money to be limited to our local community, where we can look after the health of our soil, and our trading partners. We can organize into communities of perhaps 150 people and the app can allow each community to link with a relatively small number of other communities as trading partners. So their apps could accept our currency and our apps could accept their currency. Urban communities can partner with rural communities and develop long term relationships based on the exchange of labor and resources for the care of land and the development of human well-being. In parallel with the currency app we can develop a social engagement app, but we want it to be different than capitalistic apps. Perhaps each person in a community has an account, but they can only see the individual accounts of others in their community.

Each community could also have an account that serves as a gateway to the larger world and allows communities to communicate with each other. Everyone can see the community page of all communities, but they can only see individuals within their own community. In this way community members are not exposed to a constant barrage of unknown connections trying to manipulate their time and attention. Time on the social app could be limited to something like 20 minutes per day maximum to encourage direct person to person connections.

Over time the focus on face to face exchange and social means of production, combined with the imperative to tend to the health of the soil and natural world our community depends on, will begin to reawaken our right brains and allow us to recover our full functionality as humans. As the animisim economy grows our wisdom will grow along with our perception of our position as part of a living web of relationships, with a collective intelligence far greater than our individual capabilities.

Communities can begin to develop rituals so we can reconnect with the direct bodily experience of contact with spirit in the living world. This is especially important to regenerate the healing power ritual can have on our social and emotional lives and to provide meaning for our existence. All community activities are planned by those who will do the physical labor to carry them out. This strengthens our right brain by recovering our ability to conceive and carry out entire projects from beginning to end.

Our ultimate goal is 100% recycling of all materials used in our new economy within our local communities and those of our trading partners. For example, all nutrients taken from the soil by the production of food must ultimately be returned to the soil if we are to maintain soil health indefinitely. By custom we can forbid disrupting material flows in natural cyclical processes (soil exhaustion caused by modern agriculture); shifting waste away from its point of generation (dumping your trash in other communities); and shifting waste to the future ( CO2 emissions). The return on investment we are seeking is healthy human flourishing and stable life support systems in the natural world, so we are not under pressure to compress time and space and force ourselves to live and die like rats on a treadmill constantly trying to go faster.

Each community could have a monthly meet up with a swap meet, craft fair, workshops, food and entertainment. This monthly meeting could be the initial event that new communities use to get started. I’m envisioning we could develop an illustrated handbook that walks people through getting a community set up and starting to function. The minimum size for a community might be something like five people who decide to meet monthly for two hours to exchange things using their local currency, have a meal together, perform a group ritual (perhaps related to the full moon) and do something fun. It could be structured like a fair.

As community development continues we can grow the new economy so that local communities and small networks of communities can meet their own needs for necessities, entertainment, security and human development while simultaneously respecting and regenerating the soil and living web of life that sustains us.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, Yale University Press, 2009

Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene, Cambridge University Press, 2023

Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics, North Atlantic Books, 2021

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