Watching the world markets in recent weeks has taken on a repellent paradox of Seinfeldian proportions: It disgusts us, yet we cannot look away.

It's also prompted a question that goes beyond mere economics: How did we become so dissociated from where our money was going and what it was doing?

To the atheist, the public-market underpinning of the global economy may well have come to resemble the medieval-era church in England: tithes extracted from the masses to run a bloated, corrupt institution that was, by design, entirely opaque, and demanded blind faith – lest ye be damned.

And this dissociated manipulation isn't limited to those who own stocks. Almost every consumer gesture any of us makes is intrinsically tied to the public markets, from pumping gas to buying groceries to surfing the Web to watching TV to using your cellphone to bargain-hunting at Wal-Mart to reading this newspaper. Corporations, most of them publicly traded, own all of those things, making your everyday routine – whoever you are and whatever you do – deeply linked to a monolithic structure in which we're all entangled, and so few of us understand.

Douglas Rushkoff calls the market the dominant socio-economic feature of our times. Rushkoff, an author, cultural critic, and all-purpose soothsayer, is a long-standing critic of a value system – corporatism, he calls it – that's so pervasive now that few of us are even consciously aware of it.

"Our ability to create meaning, and create value, has all been surrendered to one kind of central corporation or another," Rushkoff says. And in that surrender, he argues, is a devaluation of what should be our priority: human-scale interaction, from the commercial to the personal, that connects us to community and (imagine) other people.

In his forthcoming book, Life, Incorporated, Rushkoff parses the unsettling evolution of humanity into corporatism's embrace. The term, not inadvertently, is a borrowed phrase from Benito Mussolini's rigidly applied fascist model of pre-World War II Italy. Except that in the world of the free market, it's massive companies, not governments, that dictate a numbing sameness to society.

"People believe they have to outsource their savings and investments to these massive centralized investment banking bureaucracies," he says. "Is it any wonder why so many of us feel so disconnected?"

Rushkoff's complaint echoes the critique of our emerging monoculture put forth by George W.S. Trow in his 1981 book Within the Context of No Context. Trow, writing about the apex (to that point) of the television industry, lamented what he described as TV's ability to destroy local context.

TV, he argued, gave central corporate authorities – in his day, networks such as ABC, NBC and CBS – the ability to dictate culture across the breadth of the country, thus erasing the local culture that gave people and places the distinct variations in expression and experience that were so vital to society.

He likened the new cultural landscape to a grid – an apportioned, invariable expanse on which this central culture was projected, flattening the textures and nuances of individuality and place.

Sound familiar? It should. Most of us funnel our money, either through the stock market or simply through what we buy, to distant, publicly traded conglomerates. For Peter Victor, an economist at York University, the shuddering market system should be a wake-up call to the costs of such a disconnect.

"Financial institutions have proven to be opaque to 99.9 per cent of the population – including many of those who felt they understood them," Victor says. "The way forward is to rethink the institutional structure of our society to be supportive of what's really important to us."

In an economic climate that has charted record growth in recent years, it's become easy to forget what that actually might be. Hard times are a potent reminder. "You don't have to scratch very hard to find out what really matters to people are their relationships – their friends and family," Victor says. "I'm talking about setting our sights on something more important than the rat race."

Victor is the author of a forthcoming book, Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster. In it, he argues that the relentless pursuit of rapid growth has served to obscure significant personal, human-scale concerns. Moreover, it's a relatively recent – and stock-market driven – phenomenon.

"Until you had something like the (public) market, which you could say was identifiable as something separate from society, there was no `economy.' There was just life," Victor says.

"The situation right now is, unless a corporation can show growth consistently, they're seen as failures," Victor says. "I'm talking about setting our sights on something more important. We have to be clear in thinking what our real goals are."

For both Victor and Rushkoff, the major market shudders aren't just grim, they're a ripe moment brimming with opportunity.

How so? As the well-known aphorism goes, it's simple – it's just not easy. Rushkoff suggests a type of socio-economic locovorism: buy close, invest in community, and know where your money is going.

"If the so-called global economic collapse succeeds, we'll return to local currency, to credit unions," he says. He describes a market correction in which we buy things made in our towns from people whose businesses are rooted there. He calls it "a social economy."

"It's real simple," Rushkoff says. "A guy in my town is trying to expand his restaurant. And he's selling what we're now calling `comfort dollars:' If you give him $1,000, he'll give you $1,200 worth of food at his restaurant. He gets money cheaper than a bank would give it to him, I'm investing in my town – at 20 per cent return, thank you very much – and I'm out of the cycle. To me, that makes a lot more sense that buying shares in DuPont. How does that improve my quality of life?"

If only it were so easy. This month, the $700 billion U.S. bailout of the status quo was set to swell by as much as $540 billion. World markets shuddered and groaned, and crept upward once again.

For Victor, that fluctuation is the wrong measure. If we can abandon the disembodied goal of high-speed growth and inflated public markets, and focus on steady, slow growth, "We can have a better life," Victor says. "We can be well-educated, well-housed and well-fed. But if we fall back into thinking that a better life is defined by how much we buy, then we're sunk."