Happy American Independence Day(?) 🇺🇸

I understand that recorded history has shown that human evolution happens in stages. When the country I was born in formed, it made for an ideological leap of progress that energized oppressed people around the world. The American Revolution inspired the French Revolution.

Because the people who founded this nation were bucking the abusive constraints of colonialism, and more generally, of monarchy, people in other places believed they could do the same. A new so-called “Age of Revolution” was born.

But needless to say, the people driving these developments were almost exclusively white male landowners, and they perpetuated other terrible forms of abuse and oppression in the wake of their own relative liberation.

Black people in this country still suffer the generational effects of slavery. People of color endure the daily indignities, the subtle and blatant violence of the racist legacy of this place. Feminine energy and the people who most exhibit it are habitually and often unthinkingly denigrated. The Equal Rights Amendment still somehow isn’t a part of the Constitution (?!??) today. When Republicans blocked it, I remember this barely being news.

Just months before the signing of The Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith, the “Father of Modern Economics,” published what’s commonly referred to as The Wealth of Nations.

In the book, he espoused the idea that the highest economic benefit for all can best be reached when individuals practice self-interest.

Famously, he wrote “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”

Smith developed this philosophy, which largely governs every material aspect of our lives today, while living with his own mother….and she often cooked his dinner. Presumably, she wasn’t doing this entirely out of self-interest, and he wasn’t paying her.

The book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? by economist Katrine Marçal examines this weird hypocrisy - the total absence of an understanding of the “value” of the feminine - in hilarious and heartbreaking form.

Both “modern democracy” and Smith’s system of “modern economics” - capitalism as we practice it today - are ~245 years old. As Winston Churchill said (when citing others), “democracy’s the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried...”

I don’t see an equivalent acknowledgement of the failings of self-interest in capitalism by those at its highest levels.

This also means that modern democracy - and specifically the United States as a nation - as well as “modern economics” are moving through their Pluto Return.

The more I learn about astrology, the more I’m blown away by its accuracy. As I understand it, Pluto Returns (particularly when Pluto is in Capricorn) completely demolish what’s unworkable in a system. These Pluto Returns will be exact next year, in 2022. I can hardly wait.

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So what does this American holiday even really mean? Democracy’s a big fucking deal, a sure sign of human progress. Nearly two and a half centuries after The United States of America pioneered this particular strand of governmental design (shoutout to the Greeks), more than half of the world’s countries are democratic, according to Pew Research Center.

I’m grateful that I was born in a country that trailblazed this more humane approach. If I had lived a life to date in which I was more oppressed than I’ve been, I may not have the confidence I feel that I have now to work to build a better way.

I want everyone to have the privilege to question and criticize these systems as openly as I do, and what’s more, the resourcing they need to build improvements. That resourcing is something that the current governmental system - which is the generator and the arbiter of our current economic system - fails to adequately and fairly provide.

I see the move toward decentralization, perhaps most obviously demonstrated with the advent of cryptocurrency, as an extension of those same ‘by the people and for the people’ energies, the best of which birthed the higher ideals of this place. The U.S. has often failed to meet those ideals for many of its residents, as has its correspondent economic system. But for some reason we see those things - governing and economic systems - as more separate than perhaps we should.

And so I wonder if, because centralized governments - even democratic ones - have always minted their own money, the idea of money systems being intrinsically wrapped up in government has never been properly scrutinized. To what may be a great extent, it’s like the larger narrative depicts a sort of binary reduction of complexity - “democratic” governments are capitalistic, “communist” governments have historically engaged in more fascist practices, as fascist governments want to use the economy to “build a strong nation” via more brutal centralized control. Unless the “communists” are perceived to be a leftist threat…in which case the centralized authority will target them.

But whatever the nomenclature, the reference point is centralized dominance, and it’s as though we’re to believe that capitalism and communism will be the only two options. Ever.

But the work we’re doing at Seeds is about transcending those old systems.

I find both capitalism and communism to be problematic, at root, because of the imbalance of yin and yang in each. Whereas Seeds works to intentionally come from the basis of a healthy balance of Divine Masculine - a robust structure, a consistently reliable container - and Divine Feminine - nurturance, abundance and giving.

What if our governing systems were also grounded in that healthier balance?

What would be the shape of a new governing form, one that could walk hand-in-hand with a better economic ecosystem, grounded in giving and abundance, like that of Seeds?

I see a bold future in which the tenants of an economic ecosystem like Seeds are so widely understood to be better than that of the old systems that it’s like comparing representative democracy to authoritarianism.

The concept of nation-states isn’t very old, within the scope of recorded history. We’re living in an increasingly global world. On this Independence Day, I’m grateful to be an American, because of the privileges that’s afforded me.

But much more than that, I think of myself as a soul enduring the trauma of the human experience, like us all.

Most profoundly, I’m grateful for the privilege to be able to envision and work to create something better for myself and my peers, and for the generations after us.

This is the whole point of Seeds. 💗 I hope you’ll join me.

-Rachel