THE AWARE SOCIETY   page 2
So are we then just going to walk around all our lives in our story world and not do too much. What do we want to do? What are we going to do? This is the second thing that we need to be aware of. What are we going to do? This is the social system. The social system is what we do. So what do we need and want to do? We would like to eat, drink, live in a house, swim, fish, play tennis, go boating, dance at the disco, eat a fancy meal at the restaurant now and again. These are things that we want to do, and this is our social system.       But these things are not a reality yet. Or most of them. We can always go swimming in the stream in the natural environment. However, we need to produce most of those things. How are we going to get these things, to do what we do, in what we live in. How we get these things is the economic system. We are going to make clothes, make tools, chop down trees,build machines, build houses (ecologically), grow food. Build and work in a restaurant. We are going to do all these things in order to get what we want so that we can do what we want. So now we have worked out in this little story what the economic system is: how we get the things ..... to do what we do ..... in what we live in.       It is easy to say that this is an economic system. But in order to perform a function such as build a house, we have to learn how to build in general and then decide how we are going to build this next house. And this is the same in relation to all the other economic activities. We really need to work out how to go about it all. What we really need is the awareness of how to get the things to do what we do in what we live in. These awareness systems are made up of education and politics. We have to learn how to do it all. We have to learn how to do it all in general and then use this knowledge to decide how to plan and regulate our actual activities within a naturally functioning environmental system. The learning is education, the decisionmaking is politics.