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Conversation on Economics |
...so-called money.....
Date: Fri, 07 May 1999 06:33:03 -0600
From: Roan Carratu [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Oh, boy, you said it! This is the hardest thing I have ever written, and I've been trying to write it for about a decade! I will try it again, but I sought to lead folk's minds from the current paradigm to the required one in a smooth way, or a million conceptual safeguards long integrated into the paradigm are 'nudged' into blocking the flow and stopping the communication. It's a rough one, for sure.
> Every time the word 'money' pops up in the course of your paragraphs, I
> feel the "conceptual baggage" stir and take hold of it again -- not in
> you, but in the mind of the world. Perhaps you should eliminate use of
> the word, after the opening paragraphs are finished...?
good idea. that's what I mean about built-in 'conceptual safeguards'.
> I find it helpful to realize what you're describing is not only money-less
> but transaction-less -- has to be, if "seeing that each one is cared for
> and well" is the underlying principle; it's a shift in focus/orientation
> from "the value of these objects here, which someone has possession of" to
> "the value of these people here, regardless of which objects they're in
> need of".
Yes, it is 'transaction-less' in terms of the old paradigm, and it's a spiritual/emotional thing, not a 'passing of something' but a 'sharing of connection in action'... But that is almost impossible to express in words... it has to be experienced. But you are right, there are no transactions in economic terms. Instead of a transaction, it's more of an 'event', I guess.
> Hi, Roan > > >-But that is almost impossible to express in words...
> >-it has to be experienced. But you are right, there are no transactions
> >-in economic terms. Instead of a transaction, it's more of an 'event', I
> >-guess. > > Yeah, we probably are short of unencumbered words that could convey this,
> today.
Hmmm maybe it's time to make up some better words... heheheh
> The point, I s'pose, is that transactions as we have known them depend on
> our having been divided-and-conquered already. > > A transaction means a conveyance of some "owned property", that in one
> second is owned by one person, then in the next second is owned by the
> other. There's never a moment when it is not "owned", by which we mean,
> under the control of a specific ego.
Exactly. The ancient tribal view that everything belonged to Nature was destroyed by the concept of 'trophies', where it behooved an older once-great hunter to have proof he was once a great hunter and was best at being the leader of the hunt. He 'possessed' the proof, the horns, head, whatever of the mighty bull or lion or something that once killed humans easily, and this wowed the younger hunters into listening and following his knowledge. He carried it around with him, with considerable effort, and when he died, the trophy went to his son, who then 'owned' the spirit of the animal and had a little more leverage in the Lodge.
When the Agricultural tribes were 'domesticated' into beasts of burden, and the Lodge no longer needed to hunt to survive, it became evident that land and slaves were the 'trophy' of the Lodge leader, now the King, and thus Kingdoms and the first 'civilization' appeared on the planet. The trophy hall in the new fixed castles became the 'court' and the King's men enforced the King's control over his 'possessions', which was everything in sight. When you got into the King's good graces, you 'gained the King's pleasure' and 'earned' the gifts he gave you from his abundant possessions.
> We leap to conclude that if ownership were done away with, there would be
> no system to insure that we have tomorrow what we'll need tomorrow --
> Charlie next door could decide to wander off with "our stuff", if the
> concept of ownership were absent.
The concept of personal space kinda takes care of that, instinctively, I think, although the bond of person to thing tends to be tight around emotionally charged items, like momentos, and very loose about other stuff. Commonly used tools, (hammers, toolboxes, favorite devices) were pretty much not even asked for, although bigger things were pretty much community items. But you did ask, and someone was usually the 'keeper' for that item, making sure it was taken care of and not 'spaced out'.
> The missing piece in all this: it's based on love, honor, integrity,
> compassion, oneness versus we/them-ness -- in other words, there would be
> no transactions of the sort we know, because the divisions and walls that
> transactions are about won't be there either.
>
> The next objection that arises: "Oh, and who's gonna hand out the goodies
> -- you, I suppose? Didn't they try that in communist Russia...?!" g>
> No--not quite what we're going for, here...
Heheheh... that is what I have heard over and over again, but the communists thought I was a monster, saying people were too stupid to live that way, and the socialists told me they would kill me if I tried it, (???) and the anarchists called me a totalitarian, (who isn't, to them?) and the Republicans almost vomited, and the democrats just laughed and said 'never happen'... But my father, having spent most of his life in the totally dictatorial communism of the military, thought the Farm's collective system about the best thing he had ever heard of, although his wife, (not my mother) thought it was horrible... but knew nothing about it. heheheh
href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected] wrote:
> Roan, Lawry --
>
> In a nutshell:
>
> - Current 'money' is created out of thin air, by the stroke of a pen in
> the hands of someone privileged by government license to do that.
Money is all created out of thin air. We 'exchange' these messages, but do we first evaluate them as to worth? Do we pass money over them? Do we even keep track of what messages come and go, beyond answering those we consider interesting or have a reply to? In all things we can be just as free, if we just realize that on the largest scales, the real scales of wealth, there is far more than enough to go around and nobody needs to keep track of it or play 'evaluation' games other than, in terms of recycling 'material' stuff, distribution and processing... which we can also do without any economics at all.
> True money: (Much message deleted here)
-is the knowledge we are taking care of each other, that we count to each other, that the world is a better place because of each other, because no symbol or evaluation is made other than the fact that we are more, individually and to each other, in real value, than we can possibly imagine...
> - Arises from creative labor; it rests entirely with the "dwellers upon
> the land", the human beings who create and who labor.
A thousand years ago, work carrying a bunch of stuff into a ship and toting it off again produced more wealth for everyone concerned than any of them could imagine.
Now, a man with a machine, with a single push of a button, can produce more wealth than anyone can imagine, more than a thousand ships could produce, and far more people can benefit than the few who were involved in the production.
Technological leverage multiplies labor into wealth.
Bucky Fuller came up with a wealth measurement system based upon how much work a single average person could do in the wild, naked, without any technology, in one day. He called it 'one energy slave', and when applying the measurement to the world, he found that in the rich countries, the average person had 2000 energy slaves available to him/her each day, just in technological leverage, while each person in the poorest countries had less than one, because someone took away a percentage of the fruits of their unleveraged labor.
The most important aspect of this was to show that wealth could be generated at several thousand times the population of the planet each day, but it was not being produced because the possible production was going into numbers in banks, which essentially locked up that possible wealth for the tiny percentage that had control of it, but who could not possibly use it up. This overabundance of energy slaves manifest in a spillover effect, where we produced inefficient junk and useless trinkets, whereas, if we were more compassionate and integrated more rationally, we could all live better than the richest of those who accumulate those numbers.
And most importantly, we could do it without destroying the environment.
Any economic system is too inefficient to allow us to survive... it messed up our priorities too much to see the world clearly.
> - Money is a time-shifting token; the point of it is to allow Charlie to
> receive from Edgar what Charlie needs today, with a promise to provide
> equal creative or labor for Edgar's world, another day sometime soon.
> It's a token of -agreement-, in other words, and not an objective
> 'commodity' of any sort.
But agreement needs no evaluation. If I need some help, I ask you. You help me or not. If you need some help, you ask me. I help you or not. What Charlie needs today comes from production which Edgar might be controlling, and visa versa at some later time, but with a real understanding that there needs be no scarcity, that there is plenty of both products for both and a lot more, there is no need for exchange measurements.
> - True money is a unit of measurement; it's "a dollar's worth" of
> something, and not a 'store of wealth' in itself.
>
> (If I said, "Tell ya what -- I'll give you 37 units for those 2 chickens,
> there," you'd rightly want to know, "37 units of what, exactly?" 37
> dollars is not a meaningful answer, unless we know what it is the dollars
> are a unit measure of. Today, we don't.)
>
> - All debts in true money are to be 'retired' as soon as possible;
> they're not rightly intended to be something that goes on for years and
> years and years....
Debt itself is a measurement of an imagined scarcity. It is still based upon the idea that we produce a limited amount of 'whatever' each day, and that's all, and no leverage is considered in that equation. Economics was always just a means to get resources to support a military in it's glory, and nothing else. It was never necessary for 'civilization' but just a long term rip off.
In the real world, rather than a social world of economics, we all have exactly the same amount of time in each day, the same basic amount of energy to put out, so at $1 an hour, we would each have $1 to $24 dollars at the end of each day. Wouldn't that be interesting. heheheh So concepts of money being time based really doesn't wash, considering Bill Gates... (grin) It's all based upon evaluation, that evaluation being based upon the smallest scale of ignorance. Our civilization throws away most of it's wealth every day, doing things with money.
> -- Jeff -- http://www.wellnow.com
Uh, no offense meant, no offense accepted... (grin) -- Peace,
Roan Carratu
Date: Sun, 09 May 1999 21:33:21 -0600
> Hi, Roan --Oh, OK. Well, I agree totally, there has to be a flowing transition from the economic system to a realistic culture. 'Economics' are not natural, so I'm going to call money-less communities 'natural' communities, just like the Geonet is natural democracy.
>
> >-Jeff, you know I hate to disagree with you! Dernit!
>
>But you're not disagreeing with me, bud.
>
> You're talking about what we both know is where we're headed and must end
> up. I'm just talking about "how to help folks come to see the current
> money system isn't what we've been told it is" so we can move beyond it.
>
> I'd expect many folks will require an interim step, feel a need to cling
> to the side of the pool for a bit before launching out toward the middle
> of it -- or at least to have an awareness that there is -an- option to the
> current experience, so they'll feel safe enough to consider allowing that
> current experience to be ousted from its central position in our world.
>
> Most folks in our world roll their eyes or glaze over when someone
> suggests we might do without money altogether. It's because the entirety
> of our day-to-day experience is resting on top of this particular
> illusion. It's difficult to examine the 'net' that we're inside of
> together (like asking a fish about water).
>
> That tells us we might need to work a little harder to provide the
> 'bridge' for folks to consider coming to the other side of the paradigm
> chasm. Writings of Riegel might be that bridge.
>
> Picture yourself trapped in the inner city, somewhere; picture the
> difficulty even of travelling to where a decent-paying job might be found
> each day; picture that all the groceries are being locked-up each night
> behind barred windows, and that your gas, water, and electric will be shut
> off if you don't present the only acceptable 'money' in a transaction to
> acquire those things.
>
> I know you know this feeling, already -- perhaps many/most of us do; but
> picture that the feeling is heightened and more pervasive for folks in the
> inner cities (far removed from Nature in general and any possibility of
> growing their own groceries especially) and with families in the same
> boat. If you were one of those folks, and a 50-ish guy walked up and
> said, "We don't need money, y'know...." what would be your likely
> response...?
>
> But suppose the same guy walked up and whispered instead, "I know how we
> can get out of the rat-race money system," what would be your likely
> response then?
>
> -- Jeff --
That's why it is necessary to set up natural interrelated communities globally, as a movement. There is no way the existing system can get beyond the logic of the economic system as is. I don't like that conclusion, but I cannot escape it either.
But a long time ago, someone on this list or one of the NCN lists told us about how caterpillars become butterflies. They told us cells in the caterpillar sit dormant until the caterpillar's time to change, and then the old cells in the caterpillar slowly decline while the butterfly cells become active and start to reproduce. Eventually, the butterfly emerges and the caterpillar is no more. This is, imo, the only way the real changes we need will occur, and natural communities connected through the Geonet can be those butterfly cells.
I think we are coming to the time to change, and we need to get those cells into existence so they can do this transformation. It seems to me that all the various groups in the world working on Peace, Environment, etc, while still emerged in the old civ, are trying this also, but they are too tangled in the old civ to do much... I think this movement is instinctive, and that we will do it. When and what form it will take, is the question.
-- Peace,
Conversation on Economics On the Edge of the Millennium