About The Four Quadrants

In this blog, you will read a summary of Chapter 4 from The Fourth Scenario, about the four quadrants, that is.

In its deepest sense, a society is always founded in an image of man.

In the extreme case of Hitler Germany, the blue-eyed, blond, white, athletically built man or woman was the ideal. Anyone who deviated from the norm could be rendered infertile or even killed at any time. In Stalin Russia, too, it was clear who you had to be and how you had to behave, otherwise you would be slaughtered or carted off to a re-education camp. The difference between the person you have to be in a Jewish Orthodox community or in a fundamentally Muslim community is not that big, only the religion is different. But Joris Luyendijk has also exposed the human image underlying the so-called free West: male, white, heterosexual, completed VWO and a university education, native and rich or highly educated parents. And furthermore materialistic, in possession of a nice house, preferably several, a fast car, preferably several, amply insured against all kinds of calamities, pension well arranged, the Zwitserleven-feeling and a nice capital with a bank that invests it for him in profitable funds and real estate. 

True, people in the free West are not carted off to re-education camps or killed outright. The punishment for not meeting the norm is having to sell yourself in a job market, a small house, a cheap car, not being insured, having a substandard pension, not being taken seriously, not having a voice, not being able to get a mortgage or credit and not being able to find a job or even being fired. If you don't meet the standard, you make less money, live less healthy and die earlier. When I ask people how they should be at home, or how they should behave at school or at work, they know very well. Whether it is at a football club, in a party or church, among friends or with the whole family at parties, everyone always knows exactly how to behave and what the norms and values are with regard to dealing with each other in those different situations. In short: as soon as two or more people are together, a very specific image of humanity lives more or less consciously in their midst.

How do the different human images express themselves socially? Does it have something to do with economics and money? With politics perhaps? According to Karl Marx, science and art are superstructure, and religion is opium for the people. As the basis of a society, what Marx refers to as substructure, he understands socio-economic reality. By this he means the productive forces or means of production of land, labour and capital as well as the relations of production, the ownership relations of those means of production. Marx is a materialist, we know. For him, only matter exists. And so Marx sees means of production and relations of production as the basis of every society. But are those means and relations not also an expression, an expression of concepts and ideas, of a view of man?

Adam Smith (1723-1790, Scottish moral philosopher and political economist) also talks about the factors of production being land, labour and capital. And about privatising land and introducing money. You can earn from land by charging rent, from labour by receiving wages and from capital by making a profit. But then you need a legal system that determines exactly what belongs to whom and how it can change hands. According to Smith, an invisible hand ensures general prosperity when individuals pursue their self-interest. Is the basis of coexistence Smith's invisible hand?

As far as I am concerned, Smith's idea the invisible hand is like Immanuel Kant's idea "thing an sich":, both are invented. They are un-ideas that can in no way be related to a perception. For when individual people strive to maximise profits in a competition of all against all, the result is not general prosperity, but a widening gap between an ever smaller group of rich possessors of capital, labour and land and an ever larger group of poor idlers.

Do human images socially express themselves in means of production? Or asked differently, is there a connection between the essence parts of human beings, body, soul and spirit, and the input factors of the economy, land, labour and capital? And if so, which ones?

In the book's introduction The invisible hand writes Bas van Bavel: ‘Everything necessary for human life comes about through an interplay of the factors of production of land, labour and capital.’ And a little further on: ‘The foundation of every society is formed by the organisation of the exchange and allocation of land, labour and capital.’

My heart made a little hop when I read that. Because it is! The foundation of any society is the organisation of the exchange and allocation of land, labour and capital. Ever since my student days, I struggled with the means of production and ownership relations. And with the workers from all countries, who had to unite. And the capitalists, who were the actual culprits. But surely all men become brothers and sisters according to Ludwig van Beethoven's ninth symphony, with lyrics by Friedrich Schiller? I had also been wrestling with the role and meaning of money for decades. Of course, I knew the opposition between communism and capitalism. What was the essence of both systems? Were there not more alternatives? 

As a child, I was in primary schools both in the west of individual free people and in the east of people in solidarity with each other. I experienced both sides of the Iron Curtain. At the Karl-Marx-Schule, I was raised to be an exemplary GDR citizen, worker and member of the party. At the Protestant Karresschool and the Catholic Zonneberg to become an exemplary Dutch citizen, selling myself as expensively as possible on the labour market, or making as much profit as possible as an entrepreneur. But the basis of coexistence is the way land, labour and capital are exchanged and allocated. And the way capital, labour and land are exchanged and allocated is determined by how people understand themselves in reality.

If I want to get to the heart of the matter, it is in thinking. And that is what ‘I’ do. Not I insofar as I am the knowing subject versus the other as the object to be known, but the subject/object-transcending thinking I that considers itself in situations. Thinking I am both the cause and the solution of all issues, including that of the growing gap between wealth and poverty.

For years, as Economy Transformers, incubator for a new economy and society, we have been working on scenarios, evolving existing and possible societies. Damaris Matthijsen (1971, transition facilitator) gave me Adam Kahane's book, Transformative Scenario Planning. Working Together to Change the Future. A way in which people can work together to transform themselves and their relationships with each other and their systems. In the book, Kahane explains his method and how to use it. It is relatively simple. Basically, I had to find two axes to put perpendicular to each other, to form four quadrants representing four scenarios.

We had the ashes pretty soon. I say ‘we’ because Damaris is a so-called learning journey had organised on contemporary ownership of land. Between 2018 and 2020, a group of people met intermittently to explore new forms of land ownership. Throughout that period, I was mostly concerned with those future scenarios. I got the axes pretty quickly, but what did the quadrants actually represent? 

Bas van Bavel gave the answer: four possible ways of exchanging and allocating the means of production of land, labour and capital.

But first the axles.

Since the early 1990s, I have been studying the development of societies and money systems in relation to human consciousness development. I discovered that sometime in the fifteenth century, two processes started, the individualisation and globalisation processes. 

Whereas in the Middle Ages individual people were still in (blind) awe of the spiritual leaders (the Pope and his cardinals and bishops) and the secular leaders (the nobles), from modern times onwards individual people wanted to know for themselves, do for themselves and determine for themselves. Individualisation means emancipation, learning to act from insight, thinking and doing for yourself, taking initiatives, setting your own goals and striving to fulfil them. Alone. Or together with others on the basis of common intentions. During the course of modern times, European man went through Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation and revolution. Enlightenment!

At the same time, a process of globalisation was taking place. If people in Europe during the Middle Ages had no idea about the shape of the earth, let alone the existence of other continents with other peoples and entire civilisations on them, from the beginning of the modern era, ships were built to sail the seas, to discover and map the world. Also to take over the rest of the world, looting it and murdering or enslaving local populations. Globalising means turning all these separate economies into one global economy.

Both processes had a kind of initial culmination point at the end of the nineteenth century, when individual economies coalesced into a global economy and all the individual people (at least the white men in Europe and America) wanted to co-determine how the society they were part of would develop. In between there were the revolutions. The American one in 1776: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ And the French in 1789: ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’. These were also symptoms of the fact that people (initially only white men) no longer wanted to be under the authority of church and/or state, but wanted to decide for themselves what they believed and how they would like to organise themselves in a society.

Both the processes of individualisation and globalisation are still in full swing. The ideals of the American and French revolutions have not yet been realised.

To obtain the four quadrants, I used an ‘individualisation’ axis and a ‘globalisation’ axis.

On the individualisation axis, individual people, regardless of origin, belief, sex, orientation or skin colour, develop themselves from externally determined to self-determined, from unfree to free. On the globalisation axis, the Earth evolves from a collection of separate economies to one global, joint economy, from segregated to together. The latter unfortunately lags behind the consciousness of many individual people, because many people, including the leading people and those who call themselves economists, still think in terms of separated rather than together. You can also see the second axis as a ‘consciousness’ axis, from segregated (everyone for themselves) to together (together for each other), from fragmented thinking to thinking from the whole.

Placing these two axes perpendicular to each other creates four quadrants.

I draw the individualisation axis from externally determined to free (left to right) horizontally and the globalisation axis from segregated to together (bottom to top) vertically. Draw.

What exactly do these four quadrants represent?

Bas van Bavel: ‘The foundation of every society is formed by the organisation of the exchange and allocation of land, labour and capital.’ The four quadrants represent four different ways of exchanging and allocating the means of production of land, labour and capital, the way human beings express themselves socially: as only body, only mind, or simultaneously body and mind, or as soul between body and mind.

How is the exchange and allocation of the means of production of land, labour and capital organised in the lower right quadrant (‘free and segregated’)?

The Market. Right. The exchange and allocation of land, labour and capital in the lower right quadrant takes place in the market, land market, labour market and capital market.

Through money.

If a young person wants to become a farmer and take over a piece of land, she has to buy it from a farmer who wants to quit. Similarly, if someone wants to build a house, she must first buy a piece of land. The land passes from one to another, an exchange of land takes place. In exchange, money goes from one to the other. If I want to buy a piece of land and I don't have the money for it, I have to go to a bank with a good business plan or salary slips to get assigned a credit or mortgage. If the credit or mortgage is allotted, the land can be exchanged.

And conversely, if I own a piece of land, I get credit more easily.

Leaving aside the fact that farmland prices are so high these days that even the most industrialised farmer cannot afford the interest and repayment of the credit he got to pay for that land.

This quadrant Economy Transformers calls the ‘false free’ quadrant. In it, the exchange and allocation of land, labour and capital takes place in the market. We talk about capitalism, the free-market economy. The free-market economy is not so called because ordinary goods and services are exchanged in a market, in fact this happens in all quadrants. It is so called because the means of production land, labour and capital are freely exchanged in the market and allocated, usually to the highest bidder. As if they were ordinary goods and services. But it is false freedom, not real freedom. 

The freedom to buy and sell land, labour and capital in a market has nothing to do with the freedom to set your own life, learning and work goals and strive to achieve them. Or the freedom to be yourself, regardless of origin, belief, sex, orientation and/or skin colour. The only freedom you really have within capitalism is the pursuit of as much property as possible with which you can then do what you want to the exclusion of all others. And what do you do with the profits? Consume. But even if you have four houses, twenty cars, several yachts and a plane, do you bring yourself to fruition that way? Are you expressing yourself socially that way or are you just taking up more and more space? I know, these are rhetorical questions. Because the freedom to exchange land, labour and capital in a market has nothing to do with the fulfilment you feel when you strive, alone or with others, to achieve self-established goals and common intentions.

Underlying this handling of land (the Earth), labour (each other) and capital (yourself) is the materialist view of man. This is the view of man that reduces everything to physical and chemical processes, to real or imaginary material events. Just as the materialist understands himself as mind, his inner life and life at all as matter, he exchanges and allocates capital, labour and nature as if they were consumable goods. He reduces everything to transactions involving money. Money is central to this quadrant, rather than human development.

When American presidents talk about freedom, when the West talks about the freedom to be defended against the East by any means necessary, they are not talking about the freedom to be the human being you want to be, but the freedom to exchange land, labour and capital in the market. Think of the slavery past, think of institutionalised racism, think of all those people who end up on the wrong side of society. 

Liberalism means free exchange and market allocation of land, labour and capital.

What happens when individual people and groups compete for as much ownership of land, labour and capital as possible? Right. Then a gap is created between fewer and fewer ever richer people and more and more ever poorer ones. Capital accumulates in an ever smaller group of capitalists, as it is called. Nothing wrong with that, says Mark Rutte.

Are there any alternatives?

Back in the nineteenth century, during the Industrial Revolution, even before separate economies coalesced into the one global economy, there were several people who saw that the exchange and allocation of land, labour and capital in a market would lead to human- and Earth-unworthy scenes.

Just search the internet for pictures of workers in the nineteenth century. See their living and working conditions. Or look for pictures of the workers who produce our mobile phones or make our jeans. See how people are treated in those industries and what they do with their waste. It is discharged into water and air, put underground and burned. A lot is passed on to fellow human beings and the environment by the owners of land, labour and capital to cut costs.

And we ‘ordinary people’ just let it happen, because we also have a mortgage to pay off, because we also want to drive a car and go on holiday, because we are essentially no different from the owners of land, labour and capital. We also think we are ultimately a complex of physical and chemical processes. Created by chance. We still want as much interest as possible on our savings. And when interest rates are too low, we invest our savings in funds, in real estate or in crypto currencies. Secretly, we dream of being big land, labour and capital owners ourselves.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were just a few who saw that exchange and allocation through the market did not work. They came up with an alternative. The means of production were not to be exchanged through the market, but allocated by the state. Workers of all countries unite.

And so we end up in the upper left quadrant system, externally determined and together. All land now belongs to the state. Everyone is employed by the state and the state has a monopoly on money creation and credit allocation. The state handles the exchange and allocation of the means of production of land, labour and capital.

The state allocates pieces of land to people and groups of people, including production targets. Those people do not have to pay for the land, they are simply allocated it and have to engage their labour on it to produce food for society. Others are allocated land to build factories on it. From the state, they are also allocated the capital to make machines to run in those factories, with corresponding production targets. The factory managers, prominent members of the party, are also allocated numbers of workers. Not far from the factories, flats are built where they can live. Shops are opened and cinemas where socialist-realist films by Grigori Kozintsev, Valerii Chkalov and Sergei Eisenstein are shown. So that people are fed images of socialist man by the engineers of the soul.

Economy Transformers calls this the ‘false together’ scenario. Because the ‘together’ is imposed and based on a common belief or shared ideology, peace, friendship and solidarity. Externally determined by the party elite with one particular party ideology. Or by a spiritual leader with one particular faith. I am talking about the communist party, also called socialist party in communist-organised countries. The exchange and allocation of land, labour and capital is done by the state. The workers, united in the communist party, are the state, the only party in the upper left quadrant. The party says who you are and what you should do. 

From birth to the grave, everything is regulated and determined, what your life, learning and work goals are and what resources you are assigned to achieve them. Any form of self-thinking or own initiative is suppressed. If you do secretly strive to achieve self-imposed goals, you are a criminal and sent to a re-education camp or simply killed. The only goal you can strive for is a favourable position in the party. You can strive for more and more power within the system.

Real togetherness cannot be imposed, but arises from within, from the inner connection with common jointly determined intentions. An imposed together is not a real together, a jointly created together from within is.

The spiritualist view of man underlies this form of society. All social reality is a projection from the centre, one central spirit. In the case of communist or socialist-organised countries, social reality is a projection from a mind born of material processes, that central mind believes. One ideology is central. In other centrally-led countries, one belief is central. Do you grow your beard, put on your headscarf, or else? The central mind shapes social reality through the allocation of capital, labour and land. Only those people or groups of people who have proven allegiance to the state ideology or belief are allocated capital. With the help of credit, they develop factories or farms according to the state ideology or belief.

What happens in a country where one party (China, Cuba) or one family (Qatar, North Korea) is in power, owns everything and employs all the people in the country? And moreover, decides who gets credit or not, who gets land or not? Totalitarianism. Absolutism. Think of the living conditions of workers during the construction of football stadiums for the Qatar World Cup. No room for individuality, initiative, individuality and independence. No humanity. Unworthy of Man and Earth.

There are still two quadrants to discuss, is there a reasonable alternative between them?

The fall of the Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War between a bloc that fought for the freedom to exchange land, labour and capital through the market, on the one hand, and a bloc that allocated land, labour and capital to people and groups as a unitary state out of solidarity with all workers of all countries, on the other. Since then, global society has been rapidly shifting to the lower left, externally determined and segregated.

Truly the worst of both communism and capitalism are united in the form emerging in Europe and exported from Europe worldwide as a milder form of pure capitalism. Capitalism with a green edge, the so-called Rhineland model.

Didn't we have the first so-called purple cabinets in the Netherlands in the 1990s? An amalgamation of neoliberalism and social democracy? PVVDA?

On the one hand, the exchange of the means of production of land, labour and capital takes place through the market; on the other hand, the state determines what happens to that land, whether or not a takeover or merger is permissible and who is entitled to how much income, fringe benefits and leisure time. The state determines the learning objectives and teaching methods in schools, the students strive to be as highly educated as possible in order to sell themselves as expensively as possible on the labour market.

Liberalism becomes neoliberalism, even Mark Rutte is not against big government; communism and socialism become social democracy. In between are the denominational political movements, which assume that people can only live together under jointly established norms and values.

In the lower left quadrant, segregated and externally determined, in a parliamentary democracy different parties compete for as much power as possible, and in a free-market economy fewer and fewer increasingly rich people seek as much profit as possible.

To see that even the lower left, however familiar, however logical actually leads to nothing, all you have to do is to start an initiative for your own school, where teachers themselves set the learning objectives and create the teaching materials for their students themselves, independent of the state.

Maybe such a school will come to life to some extent, but it requires a lot of sacrifices from individual people, who want such a school. In fact, initiatives like this are in no way supported from the government and/or by the financial system.

But we live in the free West, don't we? Thinking independently, taking initiatives and being yourself is the ideal, right?

It may be politically correct to encourage independent thinking and initiative, at the same time scientific theory says there is no self. After all, that is determined by genes and/or culture, by nature and/or nurture So. 

Meanwhile, humanity worldwide is trending towards this quadrant. The originally communist countries are becoming more capitalist and the originally capitalist countries more communist. In between, you still have a lot of countries falling back on old medieval forms, in which noble families and/or religious leaders are in charge or nationalist state societies in which certain ethnic groups put other ethnic groups at the service of their pursuit of power and profit.

We call this quadrant the ‘false equals’ scenario. Because the ‘right’, the level playing field and equal opportunities for all, is imposed from outside through increasingly strict regulations and/or the allocation or non-allocation of subsidies. State schools do get subsidies with the accompanying imposed learning objectives and teaching aids and independent schools do not get subsidies. What do you mean equal opportunities for everyone? On the labour market? In the capital and land market? Where everyone fights against everyone else to exist?

No, true rightness arises from within. From a deep understanding of yourself in reality, a deeply felt insight that every human being is a human being, regardless of origin, belief, sex, orientation and/or skin colour. This insight should be the starting point and final goal for new forms of exchange and allocation of the means of production of land, labour and capital. Because the ‘creative’ lives in every human being. In some more, in others less consciously. I see it as my deepest mission to help people become aware of the creative in themselves. Because it is from this creative nature that human- and Earth-worthy forms of society emerge, between people, from within, in good mutual consultation.

Underlying the form of society on the bottom left is the materialist-spiritualist or spiritualist-materialist view of man. Depending on who holds power in parliamentary democracy, he can impose his theory or model on society. Established in laws and regulations and by allocating subsidies or not. With a monopoly of power too. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer multinationals own more and more land, labour and capital and lobby for favourable legislation or allocation of subsidy funds. At the same time, the means of production land, labour and capital are traded as if they were ordinary goods and services on the market and a social reality is projected by the state. Ordinary people are slowly crushed between the grindstone of the free-market economy and the grindstone of parliamentary democracy.

After I got to tell my story once in front of a socially interested audience, someone asked: ‘But what if you have no money and are caught up in government rules?’

Exactly, that's what I mean. 

Is there finally a good alternative?

Perhaps the upper right quadrant, free and together, is a reasonable alternative. How does the exchange and allocation of the means of production of land, labour and capital take place in this quadrant?

The short answer: in good mutual consultation between people among themselves, from within, from love and trust, outside the market and state.

To do this, people have to develop themselves into, yes, into what exactly? Economy Transformers calls them Co-living Artists. And the forms of society they create in good harmony, from within, from love and trust, they call the free-equal society. These people immerse themselves first and foremost in the human being himself. What does it mean to be human? What makes human beings human? 

The rest of my story is the longer answer: the creative in man makes man a man who thinks and acts from love and trust, from truth and insight. And a human being who works, -lives and -lives together on the basis of understanding, of common intentions. Everyone has the creative in them, their own pure(?) true(?) fruitful(?) understanding, universale in re. While practising, you become aware of the creative within you. Practice makes perfect: the art of living together.

These people understand themselves as a whole of body, soul and spirit, as a creative, self-evolving soul between spirit and matter, as a living human being between heaven and earth.

Once one has and lives (experiences and feels through) a living notion of oneself, one can also form living notions of the means of production of land, labour and capital and, together with others, arrive at healthy healing ways of their exchange and allocation.

Yes reader, at the end of this chapter we have come to the great questions of conscience. Do you, like me, long for a human- and Earth-worthy society? And are you willing to make your contribution to that whatever the consequences? Since I take my longing seriously, I cannot blame anything or anyone outside me for the misery in the world. All I can do is take responsibility and bring myself to fruition in the service of the whole I am part of. I see myself as a teacher or maybe I can call myself a ‘facilitator’. Someone who helps people flourish themselves. How do you see yourself? What do you have to give the world? And do you give it? If not, what keeps you from living from the inside out?