Ok, dudes… here’s my main idea for radical change, in a nutshell. (well, maybe a few nutshells)
No more money.
From where I sit, it’s time for money to be obsolete. Think about it. Money is no longer the useful tool it once was. It has become a liability. Money is now THE primary self-imposed barrier to our progress.
Back in those earliest days of our story when we were doing all we could to survive, if there was any currency at all, it was simply strength and cunning. If I could kill you (or trick you well enough) I had the money. See… money was power. Power was money. They were one and the same. It was natural, clear and no one could argue about it.
Then we had our first great idea affecting money and power, and it was truly radical.
We had all kinds of useful tools by then so we decided to make a new one, and it was money. What we made into money was whatever we decided to use as a substitute for the power that money had been before. Now, money wasn’t power per se, it was a symbol of that power.
Now, if I had enough of this powerful symbol, I could do all of the things I used to need all that real strength and cunning to do.
This idea became very good for our progress in many ways. Mostly because it allowed more of us to have power. Now, we could buy strength and cunning. Now, we could sell our skills and ideas.
Money was good. It lead us through the agrarian, industrial and information revolutions and we used it to build a truly amazing world for ourselves. The problem is and will always be…
It is all based on a lie.
The lie is that a symbol of a thing, has the same value as that thing. Oh we can agree that it does, but that doesn’t make it so. This isn’t such a problem when what we use as money, is almost exactly the same as the thing itself. “Barter” is what that is called and it works pretty well, but only on a relatively small scale.
But when the value of what is used as money, is nothing like the kinds of things it can be traded for (like when a piece of metal buys a human life) then we have a system that is inherently evil and will be THE END OF US!
This money thing has to stop. I’m not alone in thinking this of course. One of my favorite things in science fiction is all the cool scenarios that creative writers have come up with for how a world can function just fine… can thrive! with no money.
Of course these scenarios are dependent on a future technology where energy is virtually unlimited and they have machines that can make almost anything desired almost instantly.
A long time ago, I met a man who first put this idea into my head. I wrote about that encounter here in this blog.
A friend of mine actually co-wrote a musical comedy about money that I think you should check out. It’s called Money Talks but What the Hell is it Saying?
I know finding a way to stop using money is unreasonable.
It’s RADICAL!
It’s as radical a change as the one that brought it into existence in the first place. And even though we no longer make a commodity of human lives (oh, wait a minute… THAT does still happen, yes?) and even though we don’t have the resources to just feed and house everyone in the world (Ahem… really?) and even though the profit motive makes for better people (yea… right!)
Just look at how good it is today that the value (to himself and to others) of a how a person lives his life, is judged by how much of this money stuff he can collect (no matter how he does that). We make these people our leaders now.
Yea… that is working out for us really well, isn’t it?
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Blessed…
m(___)m
