lgstarr: C. S. Lewis

THE FREE MARKET SYSTEM AS AN ECONOMIC BIOFEEDBACK MECHANISM

A Holistic Approach to Economics

Linda G. Davis

July 2, 1982

Los Angeles, California

Biofeedback is a process whereby Cause and Effect (information) is made visible to an observer by means of certain monitoring devices. It therefore becomes possible to alter the cause (i.e. the specific thoughts of the individual) in order to change the effect (i.e. the biological feedback—such as an illness—reproduced in the monitoring device). With practice, this process can become as smooth and sophisticated as our modern radar guidance systems. (Suggestion: It is the measure of the mercy of our Creator that we’ve been allowed this distance between cause and effect—i.e. Time—and that this distance is decreasing at a pace that will allow us to re-enter Simultaneous Information Exchange*--S.I.E.—as smoothly as possible).

Since all products and services are, originally, the result of a single thought in a single human mind (collaborations always follow this), the Free Market System functions as a biofeedback mechanism. Intervention in this system will spoil the integrity of the information, and, since the quality of the information is directly related to its growth, affects the well-being of the individual. Many people die trying to preserve or to achieve this economic life-support system.

If this system is allowed to function naturally, it becomes a constant source of quality information—food for growth—because survival within this system demands (1) a constant search for better ideas (e.g. products and services) for (2) the lowest possible cost (i.e. the highest efficiency). A Natural Monopoly may occur, but only as long as (1) and (2) are serving the needs of the people. A Coercive Monopoly can exist as long as there is intervention (which we have) in the natural free market system.

The government of any group of people who enjoy and employ this system should function as a good gardener who, watchful and attendant, pulls the weeds of corruption and deception so that the people may eat and enjoy the fruits of the garden.

*Eternity: Love looking in a mirror.

(C.S. Lewis, who held the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge University until shortly before his death in 1963, discussed the phenomenon of Simultaneous Cause and Effect in the chapter entitled “Good infection” from his book, “Beyond Personality: The Christian Idea of God.”)

...Too many business people "have cut short their careers just before breaking into senior management in order to ‘serve God full time,'" Tonkowich notes. Despite their talk about all work being sacred, their own decisions deny their words.

How do we get back a biblical view of work? We can start with an essay by Dorothy Sayers entitled "Why Work." As Sayers writes, Christians "must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true a vocation as though he or she were called to a specific religious work."

One thinks of a good friend of Sayers, C.S. Lewis, whose "secular" work at Oxford included writing a series of children's books that have for generations pointed children to Christ: The Chronicles of Narnia.

Sayers believed that work "should be looked upon—not as a necessary drudgery...but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God."

This is why it is so important that Christian young people find out what their vocation is—whether it be law, medicine, ministry, or some other field—and do the work that God designed them to do.

How do we figure that out? We should ask ourselves what we are good at, what we have a passion for, what God has gifted us in. In what kind of work do we find great spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction?

That, Sayers says, is a good indication of the work we should seek out.

Finding the work that God intends us to do may protect us from one of the great temptations of our times: consumerism. Doing our work well, and finding great satisfaction in it, Tonkowich notes, will "keep us from the need to drown out our unhappiness in...[all] the assorted amusements our paycheck can purchase."