Richard Lloyd Jones: It's a philosophy deeply entrenched in our North American way of life. Make your money work for you. Leverage your investments. Make money while you sleep. But hidden behind these strategies is a massive trap. Money, which is supposed to be a means, has become the ends. Today, capital is more important than your mother. Today, I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, redefining the relationship between work and capital.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. One of my students, a director of a large European supermarket chain, was lamenting the plight of human beings after returning from his summer vacation in Europe. People seem lost, he said. They seem very far from the basics of life. Then he went on to make an interesting parallel. When he was a boy growing up on the French island of Martinique, he became fascinated with beekeeping.
He learned the basics from his dad, then began to branch out to develop his own beehives. Marked by a strongly competitive nature and beset with the rivalry that commonly springs up between sons and fathers, he set out to see if he could overtake his father's honey production. He researched and studied the latest bee breeding techniques to learn how to maximize his production, to do more with less, to ramp up his production to steroid-high levels without increasing his investment substantially.
He imported queen bees from France and America, bred them with his local product, and very shortly achieved impressive spikes in production levels. He admits to feeling a certain power in this, a sensation that he was creating some kind of super bee that would lead the way to continually higher quantities of honey. But his success was short-lived. Hybrid bees, it turns out. Are much more fragile than natural ones.
They bred quickly and produced a big jump in honey output over the short term, but they were genetically weaker, more sensitive to fluctuations in environmental cycles, for example. What's more, their breeding cycles were totally out of sync with nature's. The bees would breed robustly, then fly out of the hive looking for flowers to pollinate, and the flowers wouldn't be out yet. Over the long term, my student realized, mucking around with nature had disastrous and expensive side effects.
In our discussion, we were making the connection between the philosophy underlying his desires to outproduce his father's bees and the mania in business today to produce ever-increasing profits based on projections and stockholder demands rather than natural business cycles. If I am to have any possibility of meeting those imposed financial goals, he told me, something's going to have to give. I'm going to have to take shortcuts somewhere with employee relations or salary limits or even business ethics.
So look at that dilemma. We're all twisted up inside because of exactly this struggle. Our megalomania causes us to impose our will on natural cycles, bending and twisting and changing everything to fit with our getting more for less philosophy, that we completely screw up the greater system. And then, oh, do we suffer. Because it's hard, sometimes impossible, to find our way back.
Wasn't that lament exactly what Dante Alighieri was articulating when he said, halfway upon the journey of our life, I roused to find myself within a dark forest, for the straight way had been lost. This program, based on Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist Dr. Norberto Keppe's Science of Analytical Trilogy, is an attempt to help us find the straight way again. I'm always open to hearing from you about these themes.
Drop me a line anytime, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Today we'll focus on how much we've strayed off the path and gotten all twisted around in economics. My colleague and fellow teacher, Sofie Bergqvist, joins me today to provide some illumination provided through Dr. Keppe's profound book, Work and Capital. So, we've both read this book. How many times have you read Work and Capital?
Sofie Bergqvist: I don't know.
And I don't know how many percent I understand.
Richard: Exactly. I've read it a couple of times and now I'm working on the corrections of the translation in English because there's many mistakes in the book, I've noticed. But I don't think that I really understood what you were saying the other day for us, for all of us, as well as you explained it.
Sofie: Well, I hadn't understood either for all these years.
Richard: What did you understand about it?
Sofie: I understood it suddenly when we were there in our project that we were doing there in Cambuquira in this little countryside city here in Brazil.
Richard: Which we're going to explain in a minute, just so if you're listening, wondering what project are you talking about, we'll explain that. But first, it's important to have your insight, Sofia, I think.
Sofie: Yeah, I think it became much clearer there. Because it was that day that we were serving food for poor people. And I saw these lines and lines of people. I think we served 3,000 meals.
Richard: 3,000 meals in one day.
Sofie: And I was so surprised and a little bit shocked about that because I thought, how is it possible? We are actually in one of the richest areas in the world in terms of natural resources and plantation, coffee fields.
We have all this crop everywhere and
Richard: minerals and
Sofie: precious stones, perfect climate for agriculture.
Richard: And we produce for the whole world here in
Sofie: exactly this part of Brazil, the best mineral water in the world just coming up, popping up from the ground naturally. And I couldn't believe my eyes. How is it possible that we have families here, thousands of them, without food?
And they are hungry. They are starving, these people, and they don't have food, and they are staying here. It was this sunny, hot day, and I saw this family standing there for hours. I think they were there 8 o'clock in the morning, and we served for hours.
Richard: And some people were taking like 12 meals, Sophie.
Sofie: Yes, back home to the family.
Richard: To feed the whole family.
Sofie: And I don't know, I saw, because this was one part of the project that we are doing for the city, right? And I don't know, I started thinking a lot about how is it possible? This is not a phenomenon just in that city. It's the whole world, right? It's the same thing. And then together with these other projects that we are doing in the city, I started to ask my students here at our school here in São Paulo.
I started to ask my students what kind of richness exists in a city like Cambuquira, In a little city, countryside city in the south of Minas Gerais, in that agricultural district of Brazil, what kind of richness exists in a city like that? What potential does it have? And my students, they came up with many things, like the workforce. In the city, I think there are 12,000 inhabitants and many, many of them are unemployed.
We have all this food production, food industry. We have agricultural lots of agricultural everything there. Yeah,
Richard: it's beautiful,
Sofie: very rich soil. The year all the year around you can plant many times a year. The climate is perfect, one of the best airs in the world probably. You have this number one mineral water, medicinal mineral water in the world, number one, it's considered the one of the best, and so on and so on and so on.
They also talked about tourism because it's a touristic area, also because of the resort is mineral water resort. And um and I asked them, but how is it possible you see this enormous wealth that this city has and if you talk about money, reais, Brazilian reais, it doesn't even exist in the city. There are like just a few reais circling around in the city.
People don't have money, they don't have anything. It's like there if you have a bill of 10 or 20 reais you can't change it, you can't buy anything because they don't have change for it. It's true, it's and and what is happening, how is it possible that the the amount of richness that exists really in the city doesn't correspond at all to the amount of money that circulates.
It's
Richard: rich in a real way and completely poor in our current economic
Sofie: system, totally poor, totally. And then I asked him, but look, imagine that you here you have a shoe store and I I really need to buy shoes for me and for my children. But I don't have a job and I don't have money to buy the shoes. So I can't buy them.
And what happens to you and your store? It's kind of closed too, like most things do they close down there in the city. And both of us will have problems with buying basic needs for for example food or everything that we even housing and everything stops. It's totally stagnated. I can't open a store, I can't sell anything, I can't do anything, I can't get a job.
And the city hall can't invest in the necessary things because they also they don't have money because
Richard: there's no money, there
Sofie: is no money there. And they are waiting for money to come from I don't know where but it won't come there because it's in the middle of the countryside. And what happens is that you have the city hall needing to improve a little bit the infrastructure of the city, there are many holes in the streets.
It's a beautiful originally very beautiful city but nowadays it's partly very decadent, it needs to be painted, you need to.
Richard: Thank
Sofie: you. Restore the schoolhouse. But they can't do it. So there are lots of people unemployed, doing nothing.
Richard: The houses are falling apart. The stores are closing.
Sofie: Nothing is happening in the
Richard: city.
Sofie: And there is no hope for the future. People are starting to leave the city.
And then I ask my students, so where in the world do we have a concentration of money? Where is the money, the currency? Where is it? And they say, well, in financial centers. Yes but where are those financial centers? Yes you have New York, you have the stock markets, bank institutions mainly in big cities, multinational
Richard: corporations, their headquarters
Sofie: around the world, around the world.
And these are like concentrations of billions of dollars that most of it is actually virtual money, it's just inside the computer systems and it's not going anywhere else, it's there, it's concentrated and it's not it doesn't have a correspondence to production. It's it's not linked directly to anybody working there or producing anything but the money's there. And I said wow so this book working capital when Dr Capi says that work produces capital, work produces the richness and they need to be correspondent, they need to correspond to each other and be together.
I said well we live in a schizophrenic world. The money is where the production is not and people produce and try to work and try to survive all over the world and they don't get a cent for it because there is no money there, no currency, no paper, no. And I said "wow so this project now that we have in Cambogia if we go back to that is a project to start to see well they have started this in many parts of Brazil it seems in small cities.
But we have a little bit more interesting project in terms of consciousness and education and culture and everything. But to together with the city hall to put people to work do things like things that need
Richard: to be done that people want to do and that need to be done, grow food, yeah,
Sofie: grow vegetables."
I think there will be a common vegetable garden
Richard: in a land that the city
Sofie: hall has and
Richard: start a
Sofie: market, start a market and kind of put people to service to produce, produce the food. Even they have small factories that have closed down with bricks factories and and construction material for houses. Many people they don't have a house and there are many things that the city hall together with the work of the people the production you could create a real richness in terms of exchanging services and the city hall together and our project there together to create educational cultural programs together with production.
Because work and production is is the richness of a city of a country.
Richard: There's so much richness there and people don't as you said don't have anything to show for it. So they have all
Sofie: this richness. And this is the thing that staggers me. If you go to any of the big shopping centers
Richard: in São Paulo, we have some very wealthy shopping centers here. You can see jewelry, beautiful jewelry made. And
Sofie: it's all made with precious stones from that area that the people don't have.
So they're taken out of that area, used to make very beautiful
Richard: jewelry that then is sold for thousands of dollars in these shopping centers. And the poor people have nothing, nothing.
Sofie: It's totally absurd isn't it when you think about it. Yes what did your students have to say, did
Richard: they did they perceive, did they see the the schizophrenia of this
Sofie: situation? Yes they they uh got very very interested in this project that we are doing because they started to see that actually you don't need much to save people in the world, you don't need much to liberate people from this situation.
You what you need is just to put people to work and have a decent return for this work. If you work you also have the right to have a salary even if it's not in a currency mainly maybe not but um you also have many many cities around the world with this. I also told my students about this, many cities have something called a social currency.
Yes it's just a city currency that is used only for exchanging services and participating
Richard: merchants accept these as money,
Sofie: as money. Yes and the difference is just that it's easier to change the thing. So I work for example I work at the common garden there at the common vegetable garden and and the city hall will give me one of these coupons, I don't know what you call it,
Richard: it's it's like a social currency, a social currency
Sofie: showing that I have actually worked.
And with this I can either go to your shoe store and maybe you will accept it, will you accept this, and I can maybe buy the shoes that I need for me and for my family. And you can also continue, you can use this money to buy the food that you need for your family, you can maintain the business in the city.
And I can also go to this marketplace place and buy the things that I need, because there are many people producing now things for the city. So the thing is that in the city like Camboquira, everything exists. It's kind of self-sufficient, self-sustainable in terms of food and products and clothing and most things. But nothing circulates because people are unemployed, people are waiting for the money to come.
People are asking, begging for food or begging for other things, but nobody's working. Instead of producing food, having the stores, selling products. Yeah, they only work
Richard: if there's a big corporation there that hires them to do the work. So they have
Sofie: these enormous farms there that are run by these big farm syndicates, you know, that control all the farms. But if the people begin to take back the control of that, imagine how it could happen.
Sophie, we have a shoe store there and they're selling shoes that are made in another city. Well
Richard: why don't the people of that city take the leather that they can get freely from their areas, lots of cows there, they can create their own shoes. Yeah that they create their own factory, they get paid with these this social currency that they then use to buy homes, to build
Sofie: their own homes, to buy food as you said, to educate their children, all within that self-contained because it doesn't need the shoes from outside.
They can make their own shoes. They can make their own clothes. They can have their own teachers. They can have their own everything. They don't need anything from the outside. Yeah. And then my students, now I remember one thing. My students had one big question about this. But what will be the money reserve? What about, because if people start producing and they start, what will be the, how would, who would administrate this kind of city invented money?
And then we understood that from from seeing the real wealth of the city and the real production of the city, what is really the wealth of the city, this should be the as a kind of a money reserve, this is the reserve of the city. All this infrastructure that exists, all the production of the people, the workforce, the richness of the city that exists really, the money has to correspond to that reality.
Richard: This is interesting Sophie, so the work then goes to enrich the city. Yes not the money, work doesn't go to create money that sits in a bank somewhere or makes money
Sofie: for somebody some shareholder somewhere. The work that
Richard: you're just like on our company in Millennium we we work and then the the money that we make goes to make a better life for everybody who works within the company.
So we can
Sofie: buy properties in other places, we can improve
Richard: our schools, we can develop new technology, we can
Sofie: do these radio programs
Richard: from the work that we do.
Sofie: Because now it's the opposite right, in the world people are way we are we limit our production to the amount of money that exists. So if there is no money in the city I'm sorry we can't do anything.
Richard: Yeah and I give a price value for what your work is worth based on what I the
Sofie: owner of the company think it's worth. So you're limited to the amount of money you can make based on what I think because you if you're working you have to make money for me first and then I'll pay you the minimum I can. I have to pay you to get away
Richard: with it to keep myself competitive in the marketplace.
So the students were impressed by
Sofie: this, very impressed, they all want to
Richard: move to Campbell, they
Sofie: all want to move there, they all want to move there because they saw that actually this is a question of giving people a kind of liberty, real liberty of growth. We think wrongly, and this is what I understood now from this book Working Capital. We think that our modern capitalist system gives us freedom to grow as much as we wish.
But it doesn't really because you you may have talents, you may you may be you could do things, there are many things needed to be done everywhere, everywhere in terms of even beautifying places, make it more beautiful, make it more comfortable. And it's just not possible to do it because we never have enough currency, enough money in terms of dollar or reais or printed money.
It's it we don't have, I'm sorry so we can't do it, we can't do
Richard: it, we can't do it. And you have to do work that the corporations want you to do. Yes so if you're an artist now you have to if
Sofie: you want to use your artistic ability it has to be used in something that's going to make somebody make money for somebody.
I was one of my students was telling me a story of a young guy from India, very poor guy but he developed a new
Richard: text messaging.
System that can be used in all cell phones. And so all the cell phones are buying this. And this guy is a sort of multi-billionaire. And now this young guy was really poor. And my students were saying, so you see, there's that possibility.
You can invent something. I said, yes, but you can only invent something that's going to make money for the people who have companies. What about creating a new form of education, where's the money for that? What about finding a way to educate people about what it really means to be a human being? What about an
Sofie: opportunity to work that gives value to the human being as a human being, not just as a money producer, a money earner?
Then they got very quiet. Yeah the the
Richard: big companies they they eat us for breakfast. They take those talents and use them as they need to for them to make money. And we receive a salary and hopefully some benefits, and it can be very rewarding for certain people. But the majority of people, there's other work that needs to be done, like to improve a city, to clean up this mess of a river here.
Sofie: I am totally thrilled because for the first time in my life, I see in practice that it's actually very possible to change this situation, this terrible miserable situation of the planet. And I understand now that this book is absolutely outstanding, it's something this working cap, this idea of working capital, it's it's really the the third way is really the solution. It's not it gives people enormous freedom to grow and to do and to do even things more beautiful and better for the community and better for everybody.
And it will pay if you do something that is good, it will pay like you said. So is this something good for the community, okay it's worth this little money that we have here in the city, the city will give you this so please continue. Dr Keppe
Richard: says in the work in capital he says that our present economic socio-economic system forces us to live in a continuous web of lies because it defines financial profit as pretty much the only aim of work.
And that we lose a lot. We don't enjoy the actual work that we have an opportunity to do because it doesn't go to the benefit even of our city. Especially in a country like Brazil, you see this all the time. The multinational companies come in here and the money leaves the country. It doesn't stay in the country. The minimum stays in the country to keep the company going.
And
Sofie: maybe they make a few investments in arts, things, you know, to make it look good. But the majority of money is leaving the country for other people. So all of that work that's being done by the people doesn't go for their benefit. Yes.
Richard: Dr. Keppe calls this capitalist or socialist parasites sucking the blood of the people.
Sofie: And we don't notice it.
Isn't that amazing? We simply accept that the modern world is like this. Economic systems are like this, let's try to recover this terrible crisis, let's try to recover everybody, let's go back again, let's give more money to the bank system, to these financial centers. The financial centers are suffering so let's give them more money because we need them. And we are so blind to what's really going on and we don't see that in in this way that money is being used it suffocates people.
Yeah it stifles all kind of production that is the real richness of a country or the real richness of of the world. Yeah because if you
Richard: you know if you want to do something here in Brazil I ask my students what's needed in Brazil and they say education and I say and why don't we educate people, because we don't have the money.
It's the always why don't we clean up the river, because we don't have the money. What do you mean we don't have the money, there's lots of money around you
Sofie: know and millions of people without a job and always
Richard: we're trying
Sofie: to force the people to stop working. Yes you
Richard: reached 60 years old you got to retire, you got to stop working, you know everybody's got to put away money for their retirement so they can stop working.
And there's all these things to be
Sofie: done in our society and millions of people to do them and none of it gets done because we don't have money for that. It's incredible Sophie and and all these the dreams that we have of of doing things in Cambokira if we could liberate ourselves from the question of the currency of the country, if we could do that you have amazing things to do.
You can you can build a castle if you want you if you if you put together if you have a bricks factory and you have the material that you need and you have a workforce available and you have the land because the city hall is is giving even to this project land that they haven't it hasn't been used ever because nobody has had money to employ anyone to do anything there.
So let's start, okay let's everybody instead of just giving money to people for doing nothing because they are poor and miserable let's let's work together, let's do something, let's produce something good for the city and let's have everybody get a get a share of this of this richness.
Richard: Let's develop the people's talents in ways that uh reward them for the effort of doing something and also give them the means to survive.
You know Dr Keppe says the money produced by companies should not all be used just for the satisfaction of their owners, but should principally be used for the development of those who work in the company.
Sofie: And this is a totally different idea. We're doing this in our trilogical companies here, in our language school, in our translation company, and all those things. But it's not practiced in the world.
And now this can start
Richard: to happen there in a town of 12,000 people in the interior of of Brazil. So the money that
Sofie: you're talking about that is going to be traded for
Richard: this this work that people are doing, what is it, how does it
Sofie: work? Well this is actually I have heard about this long time ago and I never understood the idea.
I heard about it after in a story from the second world war. When a mayor of a small town in Germany after the war when everything it was this high inflation, people were totally miserable and hungry, the city was bombed, it was destroyed and everything was everybody was unemployed, it was a miserable situation. And this mayor he decided to start printing his own city coin and he invented a coin and he started to employ people and he just printed the coin.
He gave to people in the city and he said work for me please, restore this house, do this and he paid people in the city coin.
And the people went to the to the marketplace and they paid in the city coin, it was the only thing they had and people accepted this coin and it started circulating in the city. And it's it's interesting the result because the city got back to its feet very fast compared to the other cities, it started to bloom in terms of of food products.
And the city was rebuilt again very shortly because he understood that if he used the potential of the people, the production of the people, the work of the people, the skills of the people, then he could come back faster to what the city was before. And this has also been tried once in my country, in Sweden, in a city. And they started showing it on the news.
It was in a small town in the north and they had just invented that in together with the supermarket in the city and they were doing very well. And then the government said that this was not according to the laws because you are kind of outside the tax system when you do that so exchanging services without payment can't be, you have to pay in Swedish crowns and they cancel the projects.
So here in Brazil what's happening is that several several cities around the 50 cities already in Brazil they have gotten the right politically to have their own social coin because these are places without money at all. It's in the real countryside, these places don't even pay taxes because people are miserable and just to facilitate the exchange of services. And I had never really understood this idea why just printing money would change something in a city.
Yeah and I got I only understood it this year, it was like an insight in that city when we were there that I said "wow now I understand the the real richness of the town is this, it's all of this that this real richness, the real economy of the town and the money the the eyes the eyes that is here it's totally insufficient, it's not enough to show the real richness of the town."
So the city's been restricted to a false little little small number of reais and we should actually produce or give money or print the city coin in accordance with the real richness of the town. That is a very rich town in terms of raw material and production of people and
Richard: the potential of the people, the creativity, the initiative, the energy
Sofie: of the people, this is the real wealth, not
Richard: the money, not the dollars, it
Sofie: should just show the real richness as a kind of facilitating product.
Richard: But you see how inverted economics is, economics is totally about the money that is in
Sofie: the banks, it's about how much money you have in the bank, it's about that aspect of the money which serves 3% of the world's population and all of this real economy is just left alone and people because they're not in that.
Richard: It's so incredible that somebody could have no money to buy food, and
Sofie: so they die because they
Richard: don't have money.
Sofie: And they can live in the middle of the plantation, right?
Richard: Exactly. They don't have money to buy food. So why aren't they, you know, this is really extraordinary. Dr. Keppe's book, Work and Capital, is a bomb. Because I think
Sofie: that I had understood, and I think most people when they read the book, we understand that, okay, we have to receive better salaries for our job.
That's the thing that he's talking about. But that's not the thing. He's really showing that the money doesn't have a meaning at all, if it doesn't have a link to reality. If it's not linked to the production and the real real life that exists it doesn't have a value, it's a paper. So I understand even philosophically speaking that we could even exclude money as as a thing in itself because the richness would exist anyhow, the food is there, our our factories are there.
But the problem is that the human pathology is so strong that we won't do anything if we can't show that, look, I have this and I have a little bit more than you and so on. So we have to do this. And it's a way to demonstrate my work. I have received this because I have done a good job and so on.
And I think that in our school, in our company that we have, this Trilogical company, we already have this model for years, but we haven't thought about it. Inside the company I can teach somebody's children but he doesn't have to pay me for that. Because in the system that we live in we already have everything, like the basic needs that we have, we share, we share the the income so to say.
The problem is that we still live like an island in the middle of another kind of economy. So everything else we have to pay and that that It makes it always this hard thing for people to pay all the bills, to see that they pay all the taxes, and to see that they pay the rents, and they have money to buy this and to do that.
And in the end, people are just working to pay the bills. As
Richard: one guy said to me in a seminar I did years ago, he said, hey, let me tell you how it works in my companies. I drive to work, and I'm in the parking lot. I take my brain out of my head. I put it in the glove compartment. I go and do my eight hours of work, I come back to my car, put my brain back in my head and go home.
Sofie: This is what I do. So we're not giving any benefit to the greatness of human beings, the potential, the possibility, because of the economic system, because of the way we treat money. So if we link money, again, to this question of work, this issue of work, of producing, then
Richard: we have a whole different economy around us, a whole different way of living.
Sofie: And also, like you said, a big, big part of the multinational companies that employ thousands and thousands of people, they don't do something that is useful for the community. What they produce sometimes is not useful for our world or for the community. So we have also in this book that Ukepe mentions the production of weapons, the production of pesticides, any kind of production that destroys nature, that pollutes.
And that's where you make the money.
Richard: Sad but true. But Keppe's vision offers a lot of hope. If you'd like to know more about Keppe's view of economics, just email me, rich at richjonesvoice.com. I'll help you out any way I can. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
