Customer Reviews

The Invisible Player: Consciousness as the Soul of Economic, Social, and Political Life

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Stimulating reading about humankind's future. Kamenetzky, former Science and Technology Specialist for the World Bank, has ample experience to speak authoritatively about our global economy. As a scholar and poet he also has the inspiration of a hopeful visionary who can't help but notice that the human powers of conscious awareness, attention and compassion are still spreading and advancing.

"The Invisible Player" traces the historical development of human consciousness, parallels it with 7000 years of modern human social and economic development, and shows how these, in turn, have structured today's world, ultimately affecting how children grow and develop (enculturation). He sees two basic forces vying for human attention and investment since neolithic times - amour de soi (love mastering traditions: art and science) and amour propre (power controlling organizations: institutional theism and the nation state). From these he lays bare three fundamentalisms that interlock and reinforce each other to create our modern "rational" world view: scientific fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism and nationalism.

Thoughtful readers will find Kamenetzky's concept maps fascinating: "What We Need and What We Recieve", "Programming People for Violent Behavior", "How Men Percieve Women Under the Power Paradigm", "The Economy of Sexuality Pervades All Other Economies". Our separation from Nature and our own bodies has a history and is achieved economically.

Kamenetzky has the scientific chops and economic experience to explore hopeful new bio-social territory credibly. He sees a new, emerging phase of human economic organization based on a "integrative-harmonic" consciousness. His book cites ongoing experiments and historical examples from around the world that demonstrate alternative ways to organize human needs and efforts, and he speaks level-headedly about adusting to nature's capacity so we can integrate and harmonize mind, society and nature. Highly reccommended and amazingly overlooked in the four years since its release. I hope he'll be encouraged to follow this up. Absorb these ideas and see what you think! Then compare them to Jane Jacob's two moral syndromes in "Systems of Survival".