According to www.investorwords.com, the invisible hand is a:
“Term used by Adam Smith to describe the natural force that guides free market capitalism through competition for scarce resources. According to Adam Smith, in a free market each participant will try to maximize self-interest, and the interaction of market participants, leading to exchange of goods and services, enables each participant to be better off than when simply producing for himself/herself. He further said that in a free market, no regulation of any type would be needed to ensure that the mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services took place, since this “invisible hand” would guide market participants to trade in the most mutually beneficial manner.”
In the two previous posts, Towards a better understanding of the full life-coherence principle, and Two major blindspots in our view of the world revealed!, I endeavoured to show that our contemporary world view was incomplete, and a more complete picture of our universe is beginning to show that there is another invisible hand at work that is fully life-coherent.
In the paper, Is Spacetime Fractal and Quantum Coherent in the Golden Mean?, Ho et al. “connect the ubiquitous recurrence of the golden mean and fractal self-similarity in microscopic and macroscopic phenomena with the coherent state dynamics at the quantum level and effects at the macroscopic level.” In their paper, they state:
“In living systems, fractals must satisfy the state of quantum coherence which maximizes global cohesion as well as local autonomy, and enables energy from any local level to spread to the global and conversely concentrate energy to any domain from the entire system. Our discussion suggests that fractals with fractal dimension in the golden mean (golden fractals) might be the most effective in giving autonomy to the greatest number of cycles. On the other hand, global cohesion is also ensured, because cycles in a fractal hierarchy are quantum coherent; energy can be shared between global and local. The golden mean is also close to an infinite number of rational ratios, so special resonances or correlations can be easily established.”
At this point, we need to take stock and see from where we are coming, and to where we must go. We started off with Adam Smith, a moral philosopher, and a pioneer of politcal economy, who introduced us to the invisible hand of the free market. Through his works, he provided the analytical framework from which the fields of politics and economics have evolved and have left in their wake genocide, ecocide and the empire of chaos, completely opposite to what Adam Smith had envisioned. And fittingly, almost 250 years later, it took the insights of another moral philosopher, Professor John McMurtry, to provide us with a better analytic framework, now no longer based on the invisible hand of the “free” market, but now based on the invisible hand of the life-coherent principle, which is hoped will help emancipate the hamstrung market from its life-destructive tendencies. (Please see: The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure.)
It would be interesting to deconstruct the invisible hand of the “free market” to see where we went wrong, so that we can understand all of its unintended consequences. I submit that the general equilibrium theory is at the heart of the matter and is the engine of the destructiveness.
According to www.investopedia.com:
“General equilibrium theory is a macroeconomic theory that explains how supply and demand in an economy with many markets interact dynamically and eventually culminate in an equilibrium of prices. The theory assumes that there is a gap between actual prices and equilibrium prices. The goal of general equilibrium theory is to identify the precise set of circumstances under which the equilibrium price is likely to achieve stability.”
If we translate this into thermodynamics principles, where thermodynamics is the science of material and energy transformation, we should not be surprised that in our vain attempt to identify “the precise set of circumstances under which the equilibrium price is likely to achieve stability,” we had unintentionally created circumstances to maximise entropy or “heat death.” (Please see: Towards a better understanding of the full life-coherence principle.)
What is coming more and more clearly to my mind’s eye is that the invisible hand of the market in its present formulation is the root cause of the disharmony, disorder, disunity and destructivenss around us as it fosters a race to the bottom. Ironically, the stability that is being sought in terms of tax and trade laws, treaties and policies is the root cause of the instabilities that we see in the world today. Unfortunately, the leaders in the polical and economic spheres are life-blind to their destructiveness.
If we compare this to the invisible hand of the life-coherent principle, we would at once recognise that it is predicated on the prinicples of harmony, order, unity and co-creativenesss, and now transforms the race from a sprint to the bottom to a stroll to the top, where our individual degrees of freedom to actualise our potentials becomes maximised as we now tune into and resonate with the maximum degrees of freedom of the collective and by extension that of the whole universe.
Unfortunately, our world religions and our Westen wisdom tradtions have also lost their way. Instead of paying homage to our “original blessing” and seeing all that is right and just in this living world and building on that blessing as we help to co-create a heaven here on earth by responsible stewardship, our world religions have fixated on our “original sin” and capitalised on all that was unjust and wrong for their own sake, and became unwitting partners in enabling a hell here on earth!
In the next post, I hope to show how this life-coherence principle is the real Invisible Hand worthy of worship and adoration, and that it is in fact our Amazing and Saving Grace! It was us who misrepresented the Son of Man, and have turned our back on the Holy Spirit of Truth, the Way and the Life, and have gone astray.
I sometimes wonder if St John of the New Testament had written, “In the beginning was LIFE, and LIFE was with GOD, and LIFE was GOD,” how different the world would have been today.
That invisible hand of “LIFE CAPACITY THAT PRODUCES MORE LIFE CAPACITY WITHOUT LOSS AND CUMULATIVE GAIN THROUGH TIME” is still outstretched and willing to guide us, if we so choose!
I would now like to leave you with with some words of wisdom from Huston Smith:
“The world is perfect, and the human opportunity is to see that and conform to that fact.”
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