These days, we wake up to one new crisis every day. If it’s neither a natural nor a man-made disaster, it is a systemic one like the seemingly incessant discussion in the US Congress, while S&P downgrades the United States to AA+, and investors put their investments on hold worldwide as stock markets nearly everywhere make a deep dive.
Some have begun looking at the riots in the UK and the rallies in Syria, Jordan, Libya as part of the systemic “viral” crisis of the global economy. Where do we look for solutions to avert these crises? Can we recognize leaders when they rise up in our midst to show us the way to go?
Otto Scharmer, in his hourlong lecture on Capitalism 3.0 tells us: “We collectively create results that no one wants. If you think about the outcomes, the bigger outcomes that we create, that’s true for most systems today. That’s the absence of leadership…. But then some people say it’s not just leadership, it’s a civilization crisis, in terms of rethinking the way we live and work together…That’s a problem we cannot solve with math. That’s a problem we can only solve if we develop another muscle in our intelligence, and that’s the muscle of deep self-reflection.”
Shall we find comfort in a world leader who happens to be both an economist and a spiritual pathfinder—Pope Benedict XVI—who writes after deep reflection of the 2008 global crisis in Caritas in Veritate, “Striving to meet the deepest moral needs of the person also has important and beneficial repercussions at the level of economics. The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly—not any ethics whatsoever, but an ethics that is people-centered. Today we hear much talk of ethics in the world of economy, finance and business. Research centers and seminars in business ethics are on the rise; the system of ethical certification is spreading throughout the developed world as part of the movement of ideas associated with the responsibilities of business toward society. Banks are proposing “ethical” accounts and investment funds. Ethical financing is being developed, especially through micro-credit and, more generally, microfinance. These processes are praiseworthy and deserve much support. Their positive effects are also being felt in the less developed areas of the world. It would be advisable, however, to develop a sound criterion of discernment, since the adjective ethical can be abused. When the word is used generically, it can lend itself to any number of interpretations, even to the point where it includes decisions and choices contrary to justice and authentic human welfare.”
My take? Capitalism 3.0 needs Charity 3.0. Where Capitalism 1.0 is about free market, Charity 1.0 is more like a corrective to misdistribution of wealth, ergo, charity was giving donations. But Capitalism 2.0 came around the bend: it is a stakeholder-based capitalism, where it matters whether or not there is distributive justice to the capital that is created by multiple stakeholders inside and outside the corporation. Charity 2.0 came into the picture: charity begins at “home institutions” that must not propagate structural injustice to the last, the least and the lost. Now, Capitalism 3.0: the ecosystem—a world borrowed from future generations. What then is Charity 3.0? Intergenerational justice? Stewardship of the earth? When violence is done to nature by business and industry, is this not greed, to alter even cycles of life, the opposite of charity? Benedict XVI reminds us, “Nature expresses a design of love and truth. It is prior to us, and it has been given to us by God as the setting for our life.” Is this the charity whose face we have forgotten and must learn to listen to?
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