William Powers (WP): What is “globalization”? What’s wrong with it?
Helena Norberg-Hodge (HNH): Globalization is the progressive de-regulation of global traders, including banks and financial institutions. It’s a process whereby these actors have been given more and more freedom to go in and out of what previously were more democratic nations and localities. We used to have more tariffs on currencies, and countries were better able to manage their own economic affairs. With globalization in the modern era, those and other protective barriers have been removed, and protectionism has become a nasty word. So, globalization is a process of deregulating global traders who already have near monopolistic power, stretching all the way back to colonialism and slavery. These are big companies creating wealth on a scale that has increasingly made it near impossible for local or national businesses to compete. And since the mid-1980s, a whole series of new trade treaties, both bilateral and multilateral, have continued this process, and it’s become more of a relationship between giant, mobile transnationals and nation-states than a relationship between countries.
In short, we’ve ended up in an absurd situation where— because we’re not shedding light on it— we as individuals are more and more squeezed for taxes along with small- and medium-sized, regional businesses, and those taxes are used to basically subsidize global monopolies. One of many ways we subsidize is by building up a global infrastructure, including ever bigger ports and airports.
WP: So, the deregulation of global transnationals has been accompanied by ever greater regulation of local and regional businesses?
HNH: Yes, and this is a vital issue because from our point of view what’s happening is that the smaller businesses are becoming more and more angry at government because of what they see: over-taxation and overregulation. And as a consequence, they vote into the hands of neo-fascist leadership because they become convinced that the laissez-faire free trade economy is the way out of our situation, not understanding that there is this greater injustice that began centuries ago, and kicked in in a much more extreme way since the mid-1980s.
They then keep voting for smaller government, not realizing—and this is where progressives really need to help us out—that yes, we do need to look at what some of these regulations mean and how virtually impossible it is to survive as a small business in this unfair playing field. We need to spell out how and why it’s unfair because we need government to regulate and tax the giants. We need, urgently, new trade treaties that are about re-regulation instead of deregulation.
WP: It makes me think of two gigantic companies, Exxon and Mobil. They fused into something even more gigantic.
HNH: When you are the head of Mobil, that isn’t big enough, so you merge and become ExxonMobil, and in that merger, it means that two CEO positions are cut back to one CEO post. Everybody’s job is on the line in this competitive mega-merger economy. Are we headed toward one Food Inc. company for the entire globe? How might we wake up to the madness of these mega-mergers and understand how and why it is that the voters around the world, as they become more frightened and insecure—both psychologically and financially— increasingly vote in the direction of cut back or even no-government and make the situation worse?
WP: The fight against the Transpacific Partnership, with labor unions and everyone else involved globally… Is that an example of a kind of citizen-driven success story?
HNH: It’s a start, but we still lack clarity about unemployment in a broader sense—not just sectors like labor unions, and those concerned with climate change or extinction of species or democracy—but more importantly a coming together in broad alliances and understanding that this is not a them-and-us issue. This is urgent. There is a way in which the whole discussion can be shifted out conventional left/right and them/us politics into a movement for a human and ecological wellbeing and democracy.
WP: Imagining a genuine alternative to corporate globalization is difficult for people who have only known a “modern” way of life.
HNH: Yes, it is a bit like trying to imagine a new color. People who have their eyes open to seeing another color are usually those who have had multiple experiences, particularly those with exposure to less modernized, less urbanized, less technologized-and-industrialized ways of living, and—and this is key—also at least some exposure to living in the heart of the urban, speedy, competitive industrial world. That’s the sort of experiential base that helps people look at a more life-affirming culture and to start understanding how destructive this urban-industrial way of life can be.
WP: What about people who haven’t had such cross-cultural experiences?
HNH: There are other entry points. Great suffering, for example, like losing a child, or other deep, deep suffering that forces people to go inward can help in being dramatically eye-opening in terms of questioning the dominant path, which we also have to recognize centers on a fundamentally unsatisfying consumer identity.
Another entry point is a deep experience of nature—perhaps very profound relationships with animals, people who have farmed and know the language of nature—where one ends up beginning to recognize how this consumer path, this so-called “modernizing” path, is taking us away from nature.
WP: What about people who live in cities, far from daily contact with nature?
HNH: Urban experiences sometimes force folks to start deeply examining what has meaning for them, leading to a search. The archetypical urban industrial high-rise experience can generate a thirst for connection because it’s nested in a consumer path which is fundamentally alienating from nature and community.
At the time I came to Ladakh, India, in the mid-70s, almost half of the dwellings in Stockholm were inhabited by just one person. Depression and alcoholism were rampant, and even then there were studies that showed that even if you had a goldfish it could spark a bit of connection to life and more joy.
So, you see this across the world today, even in Beijing, in New Delhi, in places where the modern consumerist path is relatively new, you still see people who want to evacuate! Many want out, wish to live in smaller cities or towns with more community. They want their feet on the ground. They’ve basically developed a thirst for nature and community.
It’s encouraging, and it’s instinctual. If it weren’t for the fact that we’re still allowing big global financial interests to continue to escalate the current economic development path— and it’s more and more dangerous; the potential for more extinction of life is there— I’d feel quite confident that we’d be instinctually moving back towards a balance with nature and recovering community.
WP: Many of us would agree with your diagnosis—we not content, we feel the system is broken— but to get from point A to point B feels so difficult that it’s debilitating. What do you say to people who feel the change you are talking about is just too huge?
HNH: Recover sanity and joy and physical health and emotional health by staying right where you, but explore how to consciously connect more deeply to others and to nature.
In my work with Local Futures, we help to create this through bringing together in our ongoing “Economics of Happiness” conferences like-minded and mature people in your proximity with whom you start a process of reconnection. We create settings where people can learn to be more vulnerable, to be more deeply honest about their deepest fears and move away from the mask of perfection undergirding consumer culture.
WP: What do you mean by a mask of perfection?
HNH: We’ve been taught to pretend: I’m absolutely fine. That is the mask of perfection, and it keeps us isolated and separate. It’s particularly painful to see it among young people where they are isolated into their peer groups; it’s one of the crueler structures that we create. The fact that I might suffer from anxiety or I have an eating disorder, or I’m still wounded by my relationship with my mother is something that I cover up, and it’s something that we allow, some of us, and in our commercialized and rather individualistic way, we tend to gain some help through therapy, but it’s not the deep help that we need.
My friend Jane Liedloff, who had spent some time with in indigenous tribes in South America – she wrote The Continuum Concept – did effective therapy based on what she had learned. Our conferences, too, provide a type of “therapy” and that is holistic because of lessons we’ve learned from a deep immersion in a native-based and community-based culture. There’s more and more coming out about the number of people who’ve had immense benefits simply from being sure that they have activity on the earth—like outdoor exercise and gardening— rather than on asphalt. Another aspect is a very conscious attempt to rebuild deeper intergenerational relationships.
WP: In the conferences you have been hosting in places like Vermont, Ohio, and New Mexico, and also globally, what would you say has been a take home message for participants?
HNH: What we hear quite often is people saying, “Thank you for this bigger picture which puts things together into a web that I haven’t seen before, one that feels uplifting.” Another take-home is that people are not realizing the extent to which – not just in the mainstream but also in alternative and progressive circles – there is this dominant sense that human nature is all wrong. In other words, that it’s in our nature that we all are greedy and aggressive. That is a deeply depressing message, and I do see a lot of people, especially people my age, are saying that they’ve given up on humanity, alas, that we deserve to extinguish ourselves.
No, there is actually a cultural story here. It’s not human nature, but rather the culture into which we’ve been subtly manipulated, to the point where we cannot see that recovery from this sad and addictive culture can be surprisingly rapid. We face climate chaos, too, and things that are very alarming, and of course there’s great reason to be concerned. But there’s simultaneously a deeply uplifting message in realizing that not only can recovery happen faster, but it is happening.
WP: What are some examples of how it’s happening?
HNH: So many examples. Near where I live in England, we have a project with prisoners where they come and learn how to grow food, learn how to cook, to sit down around a table and eat in community. Hardened and bitter, these people are sometimes afraid to sit down around a table and eat together because it’s something they’ve never experienced: the type of conversation that is about connection and sharing. It’s a beautiful project that demonstrates how in just a few weeks you can begin to see a transformation in people.
There are also projects with delinquent teenagers that have only ever known anger who are helped by going out in a group, aided by people who are encouraging community forming and sharing, and deep connection to nature. And of course, they’re also moving their bodies, they’re out hiking, they learn how to make a fire, they learn how to cook simple things. It’s astonishing how quickly they can be turned around from just anger and violence.
Other aspects of the “economics of happiness” includes using our hands more and becoming more deeply creative with simple things, beyond a kind of contemporary “creative consumption.”
WP: What do you think of the popular documentary film “Tomorrow”?
HNH: It’s very good, and very grassroots. I would have liked to see it more clearly spell out the key differences in the dominant culture versus all the beautiful examples they highlight. That is to say: the global culture – meaning, inevitably, monoculture – and the local, meaning the restoration of diversity. They could have made a clearer link to recovering a hope of democracy.
WP: “Tomorrow” gives all these positive examples from Normandy and Finland, from inner city America… whereas your film, “The Economics of Happiness”, on the other hand, dives first into the critique of globalization and only then builds solutions out of the deeper critique.
HNH: Around the world, most of these positive examples are by their nature smaller and community-based. So, by definition, most of them—if they really are on this path that we feel is essential because they’re holistic—solve many problems simultaneously. In other words, they are genuine systemic solutions, and the big question is how to make them visible. Solutions from the film like the incredible organic farming and cradle-to-cradle businesses in Finland and national “alternative” education in Finland.
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WP: Right now, few people seem to be thinking about structural economic shifts, such as the big issues of global trade like they were around 1999 during the WTO protests. In the U.S., progressives are in more in a defensive mode with Trump.
HNH: Understanding the phenomenon of Trump – where he came from, how it can be that people voted for him, and that he still has high approval – shows us this trend in other countries. It’s neither about reacting against particular demagogues nor just creating local alternatives. We need to get active building up bigger movements, educating with a bigger picture to get more people to wake up to what we’re facing, and to wake up to the benefits that they themselves could experience by opening their eyes to the global picture.
So we need to talk to people who are worried about their children suffering from anxiety and depression—it’s an epidemic now and it’s across the world—and say: It’s not just in your family. And this message in itself can be so liberating because so many people end up blaming themselves by not seeing the bigger consumerist, mono-cultural, alienating context, and once you recognize that this is bigger you don’t need to feel so personally guilty. That can be extremely liberating.
WP: For those who nevertheless say, ‘It’s about stopping Trump’, how concretely could they stretch beyond that? What are some specific organizations or movements?
HNH: Some progressives, ourselves included, are reaching out to the right-wing, to Trump voters, and building alliances that show very clearly the real causes of their poverty, at how this over-regulation they’re concerned about is absolutely true, but that the type of over-regulation is what needs to be reassessed. Our “Planet Local” series features some of the American groups that are beginning to see the need to link hands across left and right, and that’s happening in various other countries as well.
On the flip side, there’s a danger that the polarizing anger from many progressives toward the Trump voters has increased because of limited understanding. In our conferences we try to raise awareness of this danger, and one way to put it is understanding the economics of it, but it’s also about understanding men’s psychological insecurity. Often if you take away men’s identity and their means of earning a livelihood, you create a recipe for violence and anger, and you create the more shortsighted, violent response that in the less-industrial world has led to more extreme ethnic cleansing and violent conflict.
WP: Like what’s been happening in Burma?
HNH: Yes, Burma is part of that, and we had a period of that in Ladakh and in Bhutan, and the effects there are born of the fact that there is still a community identity in such places, which gives a context of greater empowerment and more control over your life and a secure identity; it is very healthy and helps to provide a sense of security and self-reliance. But then the corporate globalization culture intrudes, and you’re suddenly pitted against your friends and neighbors for artificially scarce job opportunities.
It’s not as though this competition is being set up consciously. There’s a systemic driver that’s pushing in this direction of larger-scale, more speed, more monoculture, and ever greater intensive competition for both scarce livelihoods and power positions. When you still have a group or community identity—and this going on right now particularly throughout the Global South—the leaders of different groups, whether they be religious or ethnic, are encouraging their own numbers, first of all, to proliferate. It’s linked to consciously driving up population.
Even Buddhist leaders are encouraging people to abandon practices that previously kept population stable so that with their numbers going up they can get the vote; they can then be in charge and provide jobs for their group. Having seen that in many non-western cultures I noticed the pattern very clearly in the West as well. The rise of Christian fundamentalism and more frightening and extreme neo-Nazi groups, even in Scandinavia, is also part of that pattern.
WP: Basically, it helps us when we see the bigger picture?
HNH: Going as I am from examples in the Global South to Scandinavia – and remember the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon before Trump was on the scene? – if you basically look at what those folks are saying, what they represent, it is anger against big government, at the way ‘they’ are squeezing me for taxes and over-regulating me and making it impossible to provide a livelihood for me and my family.
Into that framing come these lefties and greenies who are then posited as responsible for the problem because they pushed for more and more regulations, whether it’s handicap ramps or environmental laws.
So progressive social do-gooders are seen as the ones who helped to build up this big government. That’s part of the mentality that leads to the votes. If we don’t get the bigger picture, and see that the bigger picture offers an incredible opportunity to create alliances for a genuinely healthy way forward, we’ll get much worse than Trump.
WP: Your relationship with Noam Chomsky was pivotal for you, but you came to him and MIT indirectly.
HNH: At the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, I was doing graduate work on what was going to be on Ladakhi, and I was very fond of my professors there, but they were completely uninterested in the cultural transition that was going on in Ladakh just as I was becoming more and more concerned about that. I learned a lot of the Ladakhi language, collected stories, and one of the things I did in the early years was going through the region collecting folk stories.
I became more and more fascinated by these people, their worldview their whole way of being, and I found this radiant joy that I had never experienced anywhere else, just this absolute light and joyous way of being. People who have met the Dali Lama will have felt that, and I found that in most people there, that same sense of humor and lightness. I was so drawn to that, and I saw the change coming through the Indian government to bring in mainstream fossil fuel-based development, so I became concerned and involved in trying to present an alternative.
At SOAS, my professors were narrowly focused within their disciplines, so I sought out Chomsky and began research at MIT and had him as my main supervisor.
WP: You applied Chomsky’s linguistic theories to the Ladakhi language?
HNH: Yes, and in the meanwhile I became more and more convinced of the need for more interdisciplinary, holistic thinking. In the 1970s there was huge pressure around the world toward more holistic knowledge, and so there were various departments set up. At MIT, my favorite department was the Systems Analysis Group, where Dennis and Donella Meadows did the Limits to Growth work. I found there the brightest and most interesting minds, and there later on I was invited to teach at Berkeley in a department called the Energy and Resources Group, one of numerous departments emerging at the time from disciplinary bubbles and heeding Rachel Carson’s great reminder to avoid the narrowly-focused scientific approach.
For me, maybe the most important lesson of all this—and it’s a lesson that was particularly brought out in Ladakh, but I realized it has come from broad international experience— is the combination of the need for more holistic knowledge and decentralized political and economic structures. That’s because it is that combination which can provide us with intelligence, humility, and an awareness of the incredible complexity of life, of its constant change, and of our ability to grasp the feedback loops.
WP: I hear you saying that the act of connecting with other people and nature is an antidote to “Bigness,” and in this it’s implicit that the human being is a fungible creature. That is, we could be many things, and if you put us in the right kind of environment, we respond to it and we change, positively. But if you put us in a hyper-competitive environment we become unmoored, as we are today. You don’t subscribe to any fixed view of humans?
HNH: I do subscribe to certain deep biological needs. Whenever we talk about humans, whenever we talk about culture, we have to keep at the forefront of our mind children and infants who are completely vulnerable and dependent on a loving and caring environment. When they don’t get that, just like the monkeys experience, they can wither away and die. When they don’t get that, they get abused, and they may become extremely abusive themselves. I think this is very relevant to the creation of a larger individualist and consumerist identity. We see it for what it is: an attempt to break down the human-scale connections and create this artificial new entity, usually in the form of nationalism or empire and with empire-building, involving, in many places in the world, the violent breakdown of people’s own language and identity and access to their own resources.
What I have seen in Ladakh and in other places is that when you have that more secure people—that is, people in intergenerational, play-space, community contexts—that’s where you counterintuitively find genuine individualism, freedom to be who you are. On the other hand, it is in this competitive system based on fear that we see a herd mentality, one often created by top-down powers, by the great dictatorships, and technology has played a big role in that. Once they got a large megaphone in their hand, and later with radio and television, it has become easier and easier to forge these large-scale groups and basically now a global system, using global media.
WP: Your view on technology have been controversial. Your book, Ancient Futures, originally came out in Danish and Swedish, critiquing the commonly-held idea that the new technologies are indispensable to decentralization. When you gave talks in the English-speaking world people were infuriated by that, and your US publisher told you to remove those pages from the English version.
HNH: And I did remove them. It’s really been only over the last couple of years that I have come to see that we must speak out on technology. You see, in the 1970s, large numbers of people and organizations pushed governments to decentralize renewable energy, and governments started making these changes. But sadly, there wasn’t enough awareness of how the heavy propaganda for computers as “the” way to help us decentralize… how computers and later the Internet as the way to do it perversely helped co-opt large movements of people who wanted a more generally decentralized, and more nature-based culture and development path, people who basically wanted to go back to the land, to leave the big cities.
WP: If you had to sum it up, what’s the message you’d like to share in terms of technology?
HNH: It’s too big for a soundbite. But for now, think of how the barcode on every product is linked to the needs for a firm like Walmart in using satellites and fleets of lorries, to not even have a warehouse, and how this is linked to destroying local businesses. We should be talking about what is essential in an economy: the ways people use nature and other people to make ends meet, and basically, it should be about providing for our needs, not about a system that artificially creates needs.
Using psychological manipulation to encourage people to consume was tied to economists arguing that the only way to avoid another economic depression was to integrate economies around the world, in other words to create one system. This amalgamation was linked to the creation of the EU and so on, the idea there that to avoid another war we need one single system. Now I knew some of these people; my grandfather was a diplomat, pushing for Sweden to go into the EU, and all the while there were ecological, democratic, culturally-based arguments against it.
So here we’re getting to a conversation which would require a lot of space because most people see the EU as a relatively benign force and often as the only counter-pole to the American system. But actually, it was an attempt to amalgamate and integrate to suit the needs of big business. Big business wanted to grow beyond national boundaries, and they don’t want to have to deal with different languages, different ways of measuring, with some people driving on the left side of the road and some on the right. They needed standardization, and the computer and the internet were an integral part of that.
Now previous to that, television was a key technology to use to eradicate cultural richness, and before that, the radio was used as a way of leveling and eliminating diverse dialects, diverse senses of identity.
WP: How would you change the situation?
HNH: To paint it dramatically, what would it be like to ban multi-national companies from using the internet? (Laughter) Okay, maybe that would be a challenge. But multinationals using the internet are basically impossible to tax. Look at Apple, at Google. And these technologies are linked to massive manipulation, not just in terms of manufacturing needs, but even as seen in the voting behavior in different countries. Ideally, the change toward democratizing the internet would be in incremental ways.
I could provide hours of arguments as to why we should to get our children off the screen as much as possible, because it creates addiction and encourages the competitive, insecure self in a deep psychological way.
Using the satellites and the internet for climate surveillance, for emergency needs, and so on makes sense; having built up that infrastructure and having those tools, it would be unwise not to make use of them for many purposes. But, again in an ideal world, we’d be looking at the way that the whole weapons race is linked to the race into space, what is happening there with our governments signing on to higher and higher tech competition in space, and we would be putting an end to that. We would be looking at the ecological and social effects of mineral use in technologies. We would be talking about slowing down and shrinking our use of the internet for global business, the way that several European countries have done with bans on advertising.
WP: With things like driverless cars, and artificial intelligence, there’s an emerging critique that men are the ones promoting such paths, not women.
HNH: Many of my young male colleagues are absolutely convinced about block-chain, 3D printing, driverless cars, and so on, whereas almost every woman I talk to does not share such passion for these tools. I think part of the big shift that we need is a better balance between masculine and feminine.
Finding a more deeply interconnected, nurturing side, but that requires time. A genuine appreciation of the other, a genuine appreciation of the plants, the animals, and the sun requires free time we cannot get through the speed that these new technologies are imposing on us. You might ask yourself: What happens to us—as individuals, as communities—under the time pressures that nearly all of us experience today?
WP: What could men do, more concretely? Meditation? More hiking? Deeper initiation in nature?
HNH: Certainly those, and also what they are doing already in several microtrends, like getting more involved in childcare. To see fathers carrying babies on their chest, that’s a wonderful and important leap into the feminine. By the way, to this day, many young boys growing up in pre-modern cultures carry siblings on their backs. That kind of nurturing and care almost is linked to changes in their hormone structure, a deep biological effect of being involved in nurturing.
Slower caregiving is necessary, and it is something hard to deliver in a system that is so driven by speed. Take steps right now as an individual to explore what it means to be a balanced, nurturing person, but one of the steps that I hope you’ll make is to get the word out about the broader picture and help build up more collective power to change things.
WP: How are we to find the courage to take the sort of contrarian stances you are advocating?
HNH: I’m a woman saying this, but I think it’s really true of men too, that the first step is to identify like-minded people, or at least one or two. To be the contrarian alone is pretty daunting, and we can best do it if we’re part of a group.
A main reason our leaders are taking us faster and faster in the wrong direction—and I really do see most international governments going along with this utter craziness—is the desire to belong. Behind the de-regulation of finance, which should have been re-regulated after 2008, is a deep innate desire to belong, which is a fundamentally human condition, in terms of each government wanting to be part of the McWorld in-crowd.
Belonging is one of our deeper needs that was borne of the way we evolved for 99.9% of our time on this planet. And when alternative voices are nowhere to be heard or seen—since the tools of the master technologies are in the hands of deregulated capital and they continue to promote this isolating, competitive, and speed-based path—then the leaders are desperate to be in the herd. They’re told by peers: “If you don’t go along with this, you’ll be left behind.” That’s been particularly true with adopting technologies, which, as leaders blindly accept every new multinational technology that comes along, ironically takes those same leaders into an unwanted position where they have ceded their own real power to corporations.
The first step is to connect with like-minded people, and then collectively start questioning the dominant assumptions. Part of that is to be listening to what really makes your heart sing. Where were you and what were you doing when you experienced moments of deep contentment and happiness? Listen to the answer and use it as a guide.
WP: Increased confidence, then, provides the resilience to speak truth to power?
HNH: Those with audacity to play the contrarian tend to be deeply secure people, and that’s why I’m so keen to encourage people to connect to others: It can inspire the confidence of feeling appreciated for who you really are.
The typical chit chat at the cocktail party is unlikely to make your soul sing. More and more people find they prefer intimate conversation with a few people, conversations that allow you to have more of a sense of who that other person really is. Deepening the relational sense of self helps provide the confidence to also take on mainstream assumptions. Everything that I’m saying is part of a whole kaleidoscope of complementary aspects, about being part of a systemic shift where there are various interlocking changes.
That’s why our societal path has to be one that works with the natural world, not one that continues to control it. Part of confidence-building is having the ability to make something with our hands. There are so many beautiful projects. Just helping in a community effort to build a clay oven, and then baking pizzas in it, is a fine joint project. Simply being able to do that little bit of building and cooking, that too inspires confidence. Many studies show what happens to your brain when you do that, the benefits to your whole body.
So I say: start small and local. It’s a wonderful entry point into a multipronged and mutually-reinforcing path to health and happiness.