...Chesterton, along with his collaborator Hillaire Belloc, perceived a deep alignment between the two main ideological parties of his day (and ours), capitalists and socialists. Both were hostile to a society grounded in stability, continuity, and piety. Both sought the liberation of people from constraints of traditional society. While they apparently differed over the means – the one preferring the expansion of the market and its detachment from traditional norms and limits, and the other preferring the crusades of the reformer state – they saw that the two would become blended while maintaining their apparent hostility, becoming what Belloc called “the Servile State.” Centralization of both political and economic power was the inevitable course of such a purported division, with the loser being the decentralized system, the small shopkeeper, the town, the Church, and the family.
...Perhaps we might not call this a “free market,” but what we have achieved is a market of increasingly “free radicals” – people unmoored from contexts of meaning, communities thick with inheritances, practices born of limits, exercises in self- and social constraints. Above all, we have created a national environment hostile to the natural conservatism of “the people,” destroyed by a combination of private and public powers aligned to encourage social disruption, financial instability, and economic insecurity.
...A true alternative requires moving beyond the debates over socialism vs. capitalism, and instead asking and answering the question: what will allow the building of ordinary lived human knowledge and common wisdom that arises from the bottom up, essential for building stable and flourishing communities that are resilient and can survive the various global shocks that daily seem to accelerate? Why should we remain invested in and loyal to a system that has to be bailed out at least once a decade by massive creation of fictive money because the cessation of “growth” built on debt would instantaneously collapse the entire global economic, political, and social order?
The answer is not merely to get the right national economic plan in place, but to make sure any policies have as their “compass” the creation and preservation of human communities that are built from the bottom up, and can thus persist for a long period of time. There needs to be a consilience between broad national policies that inevitably shape the political order, and the kinds of bottom-up local resilience that arises from the unplanned, the tentative, the slow building-up of communities in ways that allow for adaptation and even the possibility of local failure that does not result in systemic collapse....