«(...)
why
we don't do the blindingly obvious things. We're
too busy keeping out the giraffes -- putting
the kids on the bus in the morning, getting
ourselves to work on time, surviving
email overload and
shop floor politics, foraging
for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping
for a couple of precious hours in the evening into
prime-time TV or
TED online, getting
from one end of the day to the other, keeping
out the giraffes.»
«"Pro-speras,"
"speras," hope -- in
accordance with our hopes and expectations. The
irony is, though, that
we have cashed-out prosperity almost
literally in terms of money and economic growth.
(...)
So
we're caught in a kind of trap. It's
a dilemma, a dilemma of growth. We
can't live with it; we can't live without it. Trash
the system or crash the planet -- it's
a tough choice; it isn't much of a choice.
(...)
it
turns out that human beings have
something of an appetite for novelty. We
love new stuff -- new
material stuff for sure -- but
also new ideas, new adventures, new
experiences. But
the materiality matters too, because
in every society that
anthropologists have looked at, material
stuff operates
as a kind of language -- a
language of goods, a
symbolic language that
we use to tell each other stories -- stories,
for example, about
how important we are.
(...)
Adam
Smith, 200 years ago, spoke
about our desire for
a life without shame. A
life without shame: in
his day, what that meant was a linen shirt, and
today, well, you still need the shirt, but
you need the hybrid car, the
HDTV, two holidays a year in the sun, the
netbook and iPad, the list goes on -- an
almost inexhaustible supply of goods, driven
by this anxiety. And
even if we don't want them, we
need to buy them, because,
if we don't buy them, the system crashes. And
to stop it crashing over
the last two to three decades, we've
expanded the money supply,expanded
credit and debt, so
that people can keep buying stuff. And
of course, that expansion was deeply implicated in the crisis.
(...)
It's
a story about us, people, being
persuaded to
spend money we don't have on
things we don't need to
create impressions that won't last on
people we don't care about.
(...)
But
other regarding behaviors are
essential to our evolution as
social beings. And
perhaps even more interesting from our point of view, another
tension between novelty-seeking behaviors and
tradition or conservation. Novelty
is adaptive when things are changing and
you need to adapt yourself. Tradition
is essential to lay down the stability to
raise families and form cohesive social groups. So
here, all of a sudden, we're
looking at a map of the human heart. And
it reveals to us, suddenly, the
crux of the matter. What
we've done is we've created economies. We've
created systems, which
systematically privilege, encourage, one
narrow quadrant of
the human soul and
left the others unregarded. And
in the same token, the solution becomes clear, because
this isn't, therefore, about
changing human nature. It
isn't, in fact, about curtailing possibilities. It
is about opening up. It
is about allowing ourselves the freedom to
become fully human, recognizing
the depth and the breadth of
the human psyche and
building institutions to
protect Rembrandt's fragile altruist within.
(...)
Prosperity
is a shared endeavor. Its
roots are long and deep -- its
foundations, I've tried to show, exist
already, inside each of us. So
this is not about standing
in the way of development. It's
not about overthrowing
capitalism. It's
not about trying
to change human nature. What
we're doing here is
we're taking a few simple steps towards
an economics fit for purpose. And
at the heart of that economics, we're
placing a more credible, more
robust,and
more realistic vision of
what it means to be human.»
Some text selected from the transcription, at TED Talks