logos and nomos.

# 4015

the Greeks, who sought clarity in thought, created these words:

logos means the structure of reality, logic, and what is in nature that can be thought about.

Nomos is about naming things created by humans.

Economics, thus is about thinking about what is humanly created, not natural systems. The Industrial Revolution gave new credibility to the mechanical, treating nature as a nonliving system, as a conglomeration of dead pieces. Economic thinkers have tried hard to root economics in the natural world but the result has been to support, not nature, but the extraction of wealth from land and people. Nature, instead of being for itself, or shared with us, was there for us. The depletion of the planet, and the given world became the main project of a capitalist society. (After all, it was all free for the taking.)

Palm oil, a naturally occurring plant has been coopted by commercial society to help the extraction machine turning oil into products like toothpaste and deplete the soil we have forced it to grow in. The separation of Economics from ecology was an irresponsible mistake allowing Economics to swallow up the ecological world.

Like so many of these notes, which each could be turned into a book, in their current shorthand form their hope and mine is to nudge you into thinking through the implications. We do not have the time to write the books. When Freud finished a manuscript it was in the bookstores in six weeks. Now a finished manuscript can take two years or more, to become a force in the public conversations.