The Fear

I am fearful.

The money project scares me.

I started to get fearful on the bus. I stopped my reading. What am I afraid of?

A cartoon came into my head. I saw a massive black block of stone with a little stick figure working at high speed, pushing and pushing at this big block, 200 times its own size, pushing in fast forward, pushing with the arms, the hip, pushing more, not a budge.

I looked up and saw a Take Courage sign. They're always there when you need them. I believe Life talks to me in wind and Take Courage signs.

I returned to the cartoon. What does taking courage look like?

The stick person sat down with it's back against the block, knees up, pulled out a book and started to read. Gradually lines of illumination started to appear within the block, starting to describe its internal forms and functions.

Other people started to gather around the reading stick man, interested, peering into the book, looking at the new lines of insight revealing the block.

More and more people gathered, the pieces of the block started to pull apart, different people worked on different bits, pulling them away

I smiled and felt better

and started to read again.

I am scared because I think the Money Project is economics.

I am scared of economics.

I am reading a book by an economist. It's about economics. I am enjoying it. I started to get excited about economics, because political science always stops short of that kind of tangibility. Yes the clash of civilisations might be a bit about Islamic political philosophy but isn't it more about oil, money and the enforced replacement of Iranian bread with white sliced?

I'm scared of economics because it is not me. It is not mine. It belongs to my sister. I am not the little girl who used to colour in complex geometric shapes, she is, that's what economists do when they're small. I sung and danced around. I still do. That's who I am.

I am not an economist so I can't do an economics project. Why do an economics project when all the people competing with you for PhD places will be way, way ahead of the game. It's like snowboarding goofy when actually you're normal. Which is exactly what I did.

I get tension in my jaw and shoulders because, why would you go into a race with half a leg like that? Why would you put yourself up for that kind of disadvantage?

I should have taken that place at Edinburgh and studied Psychology and by now I'd be running mental hospitals and revolutionising the way the sick are treated and they'd all be growing vegetables and making music and having proper conversations with their doctors. And life would be more comfortable and I'd be richer.

Instead I'm in a very weak and scary position competing with the economists for a training I'm not qualified to do.

My fear is bigger. Economics will trap me. It'll trap me in a conceptual land I find hard. It'll trap me in numbers and mathematics and they'll be hard and cold and I'm the kid who sings and dances around.

But.

I am also the kid who did rows and rows of sums for fun. I am the teenager whos maths teacher said, 'you won't be fulfilled unless you study mathematics.' I am the economics GCSE student whos teacher said, 'you could be even better than Romily if you would only do some work!'

So, I just googled 'therapeutic psychology' and the third item that came up was all about inequality and it's relation to unhappiness.

My first dream was to be on the stage like Annie. I wanted that really badly.

Then I was interested in psychology.I asked my mum whether psychology or sociology was best. She said, oh, sociology's boring, it's all about society, psychology's really interesting, it's all about people.

Then I saw a documentary about hte way that mentally ill people were treated. I saw a doctor engage with a woman more superficially than a tesco's check out assistant and tick some boxes; then I saw a camera man start to sing with her and she came alive.

That day up in the attic aged 15 or so I vowed to become a powerful psychologist and change the way that we relate to and treat the mentally ill.

Then I wanted to be a film maker. I really reallly wanted to be a film maker.

Then it was documentaries. I really really wanted to be a documentary film maker.

Then it was sustainability. I really really wanted to help make the world more sustainable.

I ended up studying political science. I fell in love with the subject in the first or second lecture.

She was talking about world politics. I had sworn and blinded about having to do a module in world politics, but I went along and fell in love.

I realised that politics was about everything. About how we are able, and unable to live. It is about our freedoms and oppressions, why one person lives in freedom while another lives in misery; why one person ends up with three houses and another ends up in jail.

I found the stories Big and Bold and Fundamental. I read Hobbes and Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt oh how I loved Arendt and her distinction between Work and Action - she was a great seer of the truth that the best things in life are non materialistic - and I real about Wallerstein and got passionate about justice and came out the other end still not really having a clue what Political Science was but somehow having a 1st class degree in it.

and work since then has been bitty but ok and mostly pretty good and sometimes very exciting and often quite stressful but that's as much about the biscuits as it is about the work.

but it feels bitty

and it feels like it's time to settle into One Big Focus

and really do it.

but economics feels black and heavy

and on the other hand, it feels fascinating

it feels like it opens up and takes to the next level all of my questions about how we organise ourselves, how we do stuff and make stuff and trade stuff and meet our needs in a way that most maximises our personal, social and environmental wellbeing

see, i'm still fundamentally concerned with wellbeing

but in more of a preventative way now than the curative way of psychology

let's not be zero sum; i bet psychology can be fucking interesting; the insights you can get must be fantastic. But so is economics and political economy. It's what it's all about. I have a hunch that I'm seeing something important that people aren't paying any serious attention to, and things could get much better if we do

if we had more sustainable and just models of business ownership

we may be able to work less and play more

because less of our time would be sucked up by people making profit from our consumption and labour

ha! I'm a marxist!

and if land ownership were more equitable

people could do stuff, could make Action, with less pressure, and less unsustainability in their production and consumption

that's my hunch

so I'm going to check it out

and maybe if I do some work

in some years I can become as good as Romily

and maybe my knee will heal

but at the end of the day, it's a livelihood

and I've got to be comfortable with my livelihood

with my life.

With my days, and the ways I spend them.

So here's the deal.

I'm going to try and gain some insight into that block of Big Quesions that is the money project.

I'm not going to make any dark and lonely forays into such matters as econometrics

but i'm actually pretty happy with numbers, pretty comfortable

and i'm actually pretty hungry to read these books. I'm very hungry in fact.

and if I take a political economy route, I'm not starting at a major disadvantage, especially if I do a bunch of reading. And I can learn some economics as I go if I need to.

This money project has been bubbling in me for years.

It's time to take that energy somewhere.

That urge to solve mental health treatments was a manifestation of an essential characteristic

to try to solve problems

I love, I really love

imagining solutions

I really love

understanding problems

imagining solutions

and having a go at making them happen

i seem to be compelled towards

very difficult things

I seem to get bored otherwise

but completely captivated by very difficult things

and here, in modern capitalism,

is a very complex problem in need of a bit of solving

and it's a very difficult thing

and if it works for me,

maybe one day I'll end up at a university

teaching business students and poli sci students about business models and susatinability

but the most exciting thing would be working with businesses and entrepreneurs and governements

to try to figure out how to solve the problems

and then maybe one day I can do some work on the political economy of land ownership and lifestyle

and on the political economy of mental health treatment

maybe do something about that

through the yoga and the vegetable gardens and the way we design our economic organisation

they way we organise ourselves economically

man, it all comes down to how we organise ourselves economically

so here's the deal

if it's not comfortable,

i'll stop

i'll quit

and i'll live in a yurt and practice yoga and teach people and go teach in mental hospitals - nb - I have a promise to do that by the way that I have to keep

and I'll help the FF to grow

and i'll keep up with the social shamanism

the studying of problems

the imagining of solutions

and if I really want to read psychology, I can

but right now I'm far more interested in economics!

I do feel like political economy is the most interesting thing

why do we shut out our old people and mentally ill because they are economically inefficient?

we have so much to exchange with each other!

maybe if there were more embercombes there'd be fewer psychiatric hospitals.

if economics feels dark and heavy, perhaps that is because contemporary capitalist economics is dark

so what does light economics, an economics of light, look like?

i think it's time to gather some people (in a bit) around my book by the black block and do some thinking and talking together.

and maybe we can bring forward an economics of light.

an economics of light.