Inching up on empowerment

I spent the morning talking with a friend on strategies for economic empowerment that can lead to economic development. One of the issues in the conversation was the old canard of what comes first saving money or spending it. Now while it may sound obvious to you when stated that way it is not always as clearly identified or addressed in real life.

We seemed to focus on the role of percevied reality and the internal emotional imaginings that movitate our actions and define our behavior. A major contradiction (possibly) or condition (definitely) that we rubbed up against was the idea of whether the purpose of economic activity was to generate consumables or to create assets. Now this again may sound obvious to the casual observer. But should we throw all of our actual and ideological energy into the efficiency basket or does it have a false bottom through which inevitably falls effectiveness? Again, can we be effective if we are not being efficient and lose the access to the additional output, income and accumulative opportunity?

The discussion gave me the opportunity to pause and reflect on the many initiatives that were started and withered on the vine from lack of sustenance (sometimes financial, sometimes emotional, all the time spiritual) and dried up and died from limited interest. One of the things that I noted was my attempts to revise each plan to respond to the factors that seemed to contribute most to the previous failure. The learnings were important but I think I might have been missing out on the understandings. While I was able to observe and include or remove elements of the plans that seem to contribute to failure or limit success, I don't think I really understood what was going on.

Thinking about my reflections on the observations I had made regarding past efforts to foster and develop an approach that would both empower and enchant the participants I now realize that what I thought was a mathematical formula for engaging self-interest to establish enduring involvement was really a cry for spiritual guidance from souls wandering in a thicket of barren promises. The idea that having defines humanity, that money gives meaning, that economics equals insight into the souls of wo/men is the fiction that covers the page of most of our lives. Our friend Weber talked about how this notion was tied up into theoretical propostions that had material correlates in the logic of capitalism tells part of the story. Sombart's connection of the cultural practices of Jews and the economic outcomes of every day life contains another hint of the truth of the matter. We are all today like the drunk who dropped his key upon exiting his vehicle and went down the street to look for it under the street lamp because there is more light there.

The current cultural and intellectual world we currently live in is dark and there are spiritual values we have lost that we cannot find by going to where the money is. The mere thought that accumulation might not be the motivation of our actions is often derided as backward and non-modern. It is thought that poverty exists through a lack of ability or unwillingness to innovate and to sacrifice while holding to oneself the benefits of our effort in order to accumulate. We need capital to compete in a capitalist society but what if the society is spiritually bancrupt? You can't get there from here.