Here’s an easy way to imagine having enough. Food is energy. So let’s imagine that a portion of our money system is somehow linked to food. But here’s the catch; food rots.
So you would be incentivized to accumulate food money up to a point, but beyond that point your accumulation would become a net negative. Go ahead and buy vastly more than you need, but you’ll have to pay to store it and then to toss it all out.
The incentive is built right into the system. Nobody has to tell anybody anything. If Gates wants to stockpile a thousand lifetimes of food, only to have to replace most of it every 3 years, that’s on him (assuming this doesn’t come with starving people up the street, I suppose).
Or the money system is tied directly to energy. Every time you purchase something, you are paying in KWhr or BTUs or whatever.
What to have a 12,000 ftsq house? That’s fine, but every single purchase you make requires you to somehow secure enough energy-money to build it and heat/cool it.
When energy is created the money is created. When energy is used (or bought in the case of any particular consumer item) the money is extinguished.
Money is therefore not conjured into existence in unlimited, exponential quantities allowing the 12,000 ftsq householder to hide undetected within the money-flood. Energy-money is finite and has a limited lifespan. It is created with the efforts of humans, period.
Under this regime, if Bill Gates wants to fly his jet, he has to go out into the open market and pay market rates for the energy-money necessary to secure the jet fuel.
All I’m proposing is that incentives be tied directly to the money. As closely as possible. Why? Because humans don’t have an off switch and we’re really simple creatures…even One Step Removed is enough to provide all the psychological air-cover most humans need to operate without any concerns at all for their planet or fellow humans.
The “banning” architecture … how does that work out in real life?
Do we have any examples where “banning” doesn’t get turned into totalitarianism by group evil?
“Hate Speech” and “Misinformation” are my two examples. Fine ideas (I mean, who supports hate speech?) but in reality, it ends poorly, because the details will change over time to profit the Oligarchy.
So the details of what you propose today will get changed over time, to turn into something you did not expect and won’t like very much. Humans are sneaky that way. Free stuff and control over others, etc.
I think altering basic education has a better chance of success. That’s because it addresses the root cause, rather than trying to patch the symptoms. Once I figured out about “enough”, my life improved. I didn’t need someone else imposing rules on me from the outside.
Just my sense.
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Educating kids about debt slavery, repayment time, marketing, how “not having enough” benefits the very rich, and how they can “win the game” by seeing the truth and not being suckers. “Be a rebel” and remain free by not getting sucked into the “not enough” world. I don’t really think its even that hard to do. And I think the positive effects would be very large - given how none of us was taught this in “school” - gosh I wonder why?
This It is endemic in the Western world. Far too many people have seemingly lost the ability to be content with what they have. Which in most instances, is FAR in excess of what untold millions in third world countries have. This applies not just to the financial side, but also other aspects, such as abilities, looks, body image. It is another downside of technology. Instagram and other social media sites are designed to make users want more, to be more, to be better. It is as if they filter out contentment.
For me, this issue is a key component of mental/emotional resilience. To find contentment is to find inner peace and harmony.
Totally agree. Your solution was effectively “bottom up”. You educated yourself.
That’s the answer. It was my answer too.
Now I’d like to share this answer with the rest of the world. Then the world will look at “Bill Gates” and find him obnoxious and offensive. Mainly because he is.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. It is a complicated issue, and I agree with your assessment that ultimately it requires a spiritual/psychic change.
In my view it is not just who gets to define things and choose who to reward/punish, but also the danger of establishing the precedent of a choosing body/individual/party. For example, we now have the precedent of government by fiat diktat, which seems very dangerous to me. It is now accepted that the U.S. president, upon taking office, makes de facto law by executive order. When Trump took office and enacted all those executive orders I felt both happiness and terror. In my view his executive orders help right a scale that had been skewed for years and helped restore the true will of the people (obviously the happy part) but it also furthered creation of de facto law using a process the founders never intended, and which is unconstitutional (hence the terror). If this continues we are setting up a political see saw that will tear apart the body politic and destroy our people.
I’ve been struggling a lot lately with the ideal of the good society and in such a place, how decisions are made. And I keep coming back to the founders original idea of the people (in the sense of a republic and not a democracy) as the keepers of the ideal of the good, along with the established principle that individual rights are sacred, to prevent degenerating into two wolves voting to eat the third voter, a lamb, for dinner.
It is the anti-elitist position, and rooted in the Judeo-Christian belief of the inherent value and free will of each individual. To me it seems our country, and not incidentally the world, is being destroyed in proportion to our tolerance for evil, and that so many feel it and in response turn to non-progressive, authentic religious principles. (@vtgothic, do you have thoughts on this?)
As long as I am rambling, there was a video recommended to our homebot, ivor, I believe from @barbarah, which goes into the issue of a carcinogen in human waste, used as fertilizer on American farms, which are now widely PFAS contaminated. Despite the chemical manufacturers knowing for years that PFAS had devastating effects on human health, they made it anyway, it got into water and the food chain, and now it is everywhere.
If we had a society composed of individuals who understood “enough”, and the moral and practical basis for enough, this wouldn’t have happened. The covid gene therapy genocide wouldn’t have happened. We would have a built in defense of First, Do No Harm. But we are not there and short term gain seems to win out every time.
I see the long term solution of education and focusing on community and enough (the spiritual/ethical side) and changing our lives and our community’s lives as much as we can towards reality and resilience but what about the short term? If we have a true Reckoning the suffering of the innocent will be massive and unbearable.
Thanks so much, Chris. I’m going to go pour some Kahlua in my coffee because I don’t even understand how a debt-based monetary system works, much less this. I see that you are proposing tying currency to something real, which seems like a step in the right direction, but I don’t understand how the transition is made.
Maybe two shots of Kahlua and also whipped cream. My brain is tired.
Yeah. Long story short, debt-based money gets created when someone (say - you) “borrow” money from a bank to buy a house. Presto - money gets created out of thin air, given to you, which you then hand to the seller of the house.
Of course you have to pay it back plus interest. As you pay it back, the money you borrowed gets (slowly) destroyed. Except for the interest, which gets put into the pockets of the banksters.
Cool, huh?
Getting a loan from a bank = inflationary [money is created].
Repaying a loan from a bank = deflationary [money is destroyed].
It is nothing like borrowing money from your friend.
IMO, the key distinction is that the money created out of thin air involves no work, therefore no energy - the very thing @cmartenson proposes tying money to.
But the money “you” (whoever “you” is) pay back, plus the interest you’re being charged, does involve work: the money you earn represents the value of your physical expenditure of life energy. And that’s the scam: they make you work for them - literally. Your life energy is taken from you for free by the financier class. And by definition that makes “you” a slave.
Back in the day, when George Bailey loaned bank money to someone in the community, it was real money that, all together, represented the combined saved life energy of the bank’s depositors. George could only loan out actual savings; no simply making a notation in a ledger when there was no cash in the safe. That era is long gone. Nowadays banks don’t have to have any actual money representing actual expended human energy before they make up a loan for you. So you’re not actually paying anything back. What you’re doing is being fleeced of your life energy, your productivity, under the ruse of returning life energy you produced for life energy you received and spent before you produced it.
There was no life energy in reserve at the bank to lend to you. Yet, you handed over your life energy for meaningless currency (it’s not even truly money), and paid some additional lifeblood (interest) for the privilege. That’s the grift.
I’ve been involved in quite a series of conversations with a 30 year old friend (about half my age) since inauguration day. His main effort in the conversation is to convince me that the Trump Administration is racist and will precipitate a massive uptick in racism in this country either through it’s own actions or through providing cover/inspiration for individual actions. The conversation has touched on abortion, deportation of illegal immigrants and other issues as well.
I’m going to include a long message I sent to him followed by some additional insights that came to me while sitting in the woods this afternoon:
Perhaps the conversation we just had is pretty close to the root of why we see things differently. My take is that by being humble and realizing how much bigger this universe is than us and how ultimately unimportant we as individuals or even humans as a species are in this beautiful creation, we gain freedom and peace and gratitude and the power to use what we have to do the very best we can.
My take is that the opposite view, which is the one that, as best I can tell, you represented in the conversation, is an attempt, probably unconscious, to escape from the knowledge that there exists what many of us judge to be darkness or pain or dysfunction in the world. Perhaps we do this because we are not yet ready and/or mature or experienced enough to integrate it.
I believe that it is that denial of darkness that prevents us from integration. When we don’t integrate darkness, we actually increase the outward expression of darkness in the world, especially the worst aspects of it.
I believe I speak from experience, because for the first three or probably 4+ decades of my life, I often created more darkness through denial of the darkness that already existed.
I know I could be wrong in this assessment of you, or at least partly or even mostly wrong. If I’m right or mostly right, I don’t blame you, because, if my future self would’ve come to me at 30 and told me what I’m telling you now, I probably would’ve told them to go to hell. Make of this entirely what you will, but I do want to say this. You are a truly unique young man with lots of experiences, the ability to go really deep in your thoughts and a burning desire to do good work in this world. If you can at all, I suggest you spend some time humbly considering this. If you conclude that I’m full of shit, that’s fine. I just honor and respect and, to be frank, deeply love you and are hoping you consider it, because I damn well wish there was someone to tell me this in a way that I could hear it when I was your age.
Finally I want to say that from my perspective those who won’t acknowledge this perspective are doomed to repeat their past moments of darkness. To give two examples, this holds in Germany where their deep ongoing shame about the holocaust and their legal code that pushes any expression of that darkness out, puts them at risk of doing something that rhymes with it again. In Israel, it’s similar but involves the people who had the trauma perpetrated on them rather than the perpetrators. They are well down the path of doing to the Palestinians more or less what the Nazis did to their ancestors.
OK, one more “finally”. I don’t proclaim to live this philosophy well or even in a mediocre way or even to be on a path towards living it more fully. But that is my wish for myself and for everyone.
This afternoon, I thought about John Michael Greer’s myth of progress and the related concepts of all of the world improvers and utopians out there today. I believe that all of these root from trauma, and a desire to heal oneself and the world before having done the hard work of learning to be comfortable with darkness, knowing that it will always be there, knowing (as sitting in the woods has taught me) that we individually and as a species are small and insignificant in the greater whole even as we are important and integral parts of this beautiful, unimaginably complex web of creation. (Yes, paradox is everywhere), knowing that only through this humility can we truly integrate the darkness and harness it to add to the healthy expression of creation that we strive for.
Unhealed, we fear it because of the past pain it reminds us of. We cling to the myth of progress and utopianism in an effort to create a perfect world of light and love that is totally free of darkness. This unipolar world cannot possibly come to exist because it denies the undeniable requirement of destruction to exist if there is to be creation, and of darkness to exist if there is to be light.
I believe that the absurd place the woke movement has gotten itself to is the end result of this path of denial. I have no doubts that the current story of those who support president Trump’s actions could get them into a similar pickle if they aren’t careful.
But let’s create an alternate path: Healed (or as healed as we can be), we begin to get more comfortable with death, including our own, with both the light and dark side of human nature, with pleasure and pain. It’s funny how in doing this, the darkness loses it’s ability to take away our equanimity, our joy, our awe and wonder at this beautiful finite life we have been given. It’s even more surprising how in this acceptance, the darkness loses the multiplying factor of denial and recedes into the background until, of course, we’ve had it too good for too long and once again some world improvers show up and begin to hold sway over the collective story.
How did it work in medieval kingdoms? Could they get any loan when all gold and valuables was already sold and spent to pay for war and extravagant mansion for king? Wars and conflicts back then seemed to stop once money ran out and debt wasnt as big thing coz no revenue meant bankers didnt give loans.
There is also “trickle down” ie bank gets that cash first, before inflation. Once they give you mortgage, inflation has already hit as banker class and their friends took advantage of that “threshold” before new money inflation kicked in.
So what is better centralized system? Bitcoin? As centralization has time and time again caused bottlenecks and problems in societies. This loan system is giant centralized balance sheet.
Spot on @quercus-bicolor-2. I fully resonate with your comments starting with your reflections on Greer’s myth of progress. For me, it leaves the perfection of the human species to God. So I can relax, let go of that burden, and work on integrating with planetary life in all of its forms.
This is the Garden of Eden. But only when we’re not trying to make it perfect. Perfect is beyond me. All I’m endeavoring is to ennoble the bit of creation entrusted to me; and myself through that work of actively loving. Which, in my Christian vocabulary, means actively serving the best interest of the life around me; all forms of life.
@barbarad: that’s also my response to your query. Except, perhaps, to add that the exercise of free will vouchsafed to us by God includes the exercise of free won’t.
When two halves of the country see the other half as the literal expression of evil in the world how can Civil War 2.0 be avoided? It probably won’t be like CW 1.0 with organized formal armies battling over territory along clearly defined front lines. As Matt Bracken has said (paraphrasing) it will instead be street to street and neighborhood to neighborhood and even within families. He famously says it will be Rwanda X Bosnia squared. What gives me a glimmer of hope is that most leftists are unarmed, unskilled in any forms of combat, physically unfit for fighting, and temperamentally unsuited for physical violence (with notable small pockets of exceptions, like Antifa, Black Block, etc). OTOH the right is armed, very experienced and more physically fit. Another glimmer of hope I have is that the left no longer has the political power to freely use government law enforcement and military resources against the right (as in the J6 persecution). Now they will have to do whatever fighting their side does without farming it out to government enforcers.
That low-budget film is one of the best movies of all times. It does such a good job of demonstrating the problems of modern society. And what a brilliant solution to their problem! Through the freaking bottle that is creating so much strife off the edge of the world.
Yes. I can be perfectly imperfect. And I am free of the guilt and shame I would feel as a world improver who knows somewhere deep down inside that I will never meet the standards of perfection I am aiming for, especially since the endeavor of world improving tends to make things worse, not better.
Definitely a possibility. We will see how successful Trump is at spreading prosperity to everyone. If he is successful, it should help encourage all but the most of the TDS folks to soften their stance considerably or even to let it go. That would greatly reduce the risk of violent conflict.
It is endemic in the Western world. Far too many people have seemingly lost the ability to be content with what they have. Which in most instances, is FAR in excess of what untold millions in third world countries have. This applies not just to the financial side, but also other aspects, such as abilities, looks, body image. It is another downside of technology. Instagram and other social media sites are designed to make users want more, to be more, to be better. It is as if they filter out contentment.
. I don’t proclaim to live this philosophy well or even in a mediocre way or even to be on a path towards living it more fully. But that is my wish for myself and for everyone.