How to Solve the Financial Crisis
Solving the financial crisis is not going to be easy no matter how we do it. Our politicians are clearly incapable of fixing it, so we must step up and do it ourselves. First we must look at what is going on and how we can prevent it in the future.
Essentially what we've done is created a new fitness test for the evolution of our society. In our world, money is the new skill to determine success. Those that are good at making money are the ones that can afford to have the most children. Is that really what we want? A society that is good at making money, despite the real costs?
Money blinds us from the real cost of things. You think your bottle of Coca-Cola costs $1.25 in the vending machine downstairs. What it really costs is the depletion of a part of India's water table, causing many villages to endure water shortages. How much carbon does it cost to ship your soda to the other side of the world for you to drink? Also, what are the chances that your bottle will become a part of the Great Garbage Islands in our oceans?
You see, Coca-cola doesn't give a shit about our planet, or about Americans and their jobs, nor do they care about Indians and their living and working conditions. All they care about is keeping their checkbook in the black. This is the real cost of money.
So you ask me, "Then what? How do you do it without money?"
If you didn't go to your job everyday (that you probably hate), what would you do with your time? Off the bat, I'm sure many of you would describe a perfectly wonderful day of doing absolutely nothing but relaxing. Which is fine, because I would do that too, but let's admit that eventually we would get bored and want to do something more constructive. So what do we do?
You can do one of two things. You can pick up a hobby or you can get a job. "But why would I get a job if I don't make any money?" Excellent question. Why would you?
Why does anyone start a company? Some people do it to get rich, of course, but a lot of them do it with the intention of making the world a better place. The inventor of Coca-cola enjoyed the drink they had come up with and by selling it, made the world a better place. Or, more generally, "Hey I have a great idea that would help solve a certain problem for a lot of people!"
So, let me ask again. Why would you get a job if you're not getting paid? How would companies exist if they're not making any money? What would be their purpose if not to make the owner a bunch of money?
If not for money, a company only has a single reason for existence. Unfortunately, a company's ability to make a profit is currently the only requisite necessary to ensure its survival. Making the world a better place has nothing to do with the way the company operates.
So now, instead of showing your support for a company by buying their product, you can go work for them instead and do away with the middleman that money has become. Since you're not being paid, you are not obligated in any way to stay with a company whose business practices you do not agree with.
"But wouldn't it be a huge pain in the ass to go back to a bartering system, or even some other type of system?"
Indeed it would. But it's also a huge pain in the ass to deal with money. Banks and stock markets had to be invented to be able to properly handle money. I assume that similar organizations would be needed to deal with bartering, but this is a small matter compared to all the good it would do.
At no point should you ever be so invested in something that you have to say "Well we can't quit now, we have too much invested in this."
It is never too late to scrap everything and start over. What are we going to do otherwise; continue letting bankers and politicians swindle us?
By getting rid of the currency-based system, we would be creating a new fitness selection test for businesses. Not only would there need to be a demand for the company's product, there would also need to be enough people willing to work for free to keep the company afloat. It is much more difficult to earn employees than to earn money.
There are more benefits than just having really excellent companies around. I imagine there would be a much higher personal turnover rate in the country that adopts this system. You'd get to try out many different jobs until you found one you absolutely love. Also, advertising would probably all but disappear.
While trying out many jobs, you also become more adept at learning new skills. You sit at your job every day doing the same shit over and over and over and over, day after day after day after day. All learning and creative thought goes out the window once you learn the routine. We should encourage our citizens to learn new things as frequently as we can.
It would become a social stigma to be lazy. There would still be those that don't do anything to help the system, but they are also the ones standing in line for their welfare checks every week anyway. You might as well get used to it.
This would lead to a more flexible society, able to handle changes much faster than the stiff, rigid society we have now. People have to pay their mortages every month, so it is advantageous to have the same job for 25 years. However, on the whole, we are unable to adapt to changing conditions if we continue to live like this.
Another benefit to abolishing money is that our politicians can no longer be bought out by corporate interests. You might pass a bill saying that polititians can no longer accept campaign contributions for businesses, but that would just move the transaction under the table.
This is the cost of money and currency. In a world driven by money, only one thing matters: money. If you ask all of your friends what the single most important thing in their lives is, I can guarantee is wouldn't be money.
So why does our world run on money?
Now for the real questions. How do we get from point A to point B? How do we trade with other countries that do not operate on such a system? How would a store even operate if everything was free?
Let's start with a simple transaction. Say you want to purchase a pack of gum in a convenience store. Instead of a price label, you simply ask the shop owner if you can have the pack of gum. He says yes. Transaction complete.
Now, what if someone were to abuse the system. Instead of one pack of gum, you want the whole box. You ask the clerk if you can have the whole box. The clerk probably won't say yes, but may ask you why you need all of them. If you have a good reason, the clerk might go ahead and give them to you. Otherwise, you might have to settle with taking only a couple packs.
How about a car. If everything were free, everyone would want a Ferrari or some other luxury car. How do you sort out who gets one and who doesn't? Again, it would come down to the seller's decision. In a system where everything is free, the a product's seller would have the final say in who is allowed to have a product.
In a case such as cars, it would probably be first come first serve, and you would have to demonstrate your ability to not crash the car you're getting. What's funny though is that cars would no longer be a status symbol. It would be about the most comfortable car, the one you like to drive the most.
So on to dealing with other countries that still use the old money system. How do you trade with them?
You ask their companies for free stuff, plain and simple. If they say no, then you offer a trade or a future favor. Essentially, you would come up with some sort of agreement. If the company insists on only accepting curreny, then it looks like it's time to start a new company in your money-free country.
Lastly, how do you make the big switch? I have proposed one way of doing it in a previous article called The Peace Revolt, but I shall simplify the process here.
Essentially, you start working at your job for free. Now, of course, no one is going to want to because then what if you get evicted? The people that should start this revolution are the ones that can afford to work their jobs for free. Once people start seeing their coworkers working for free, it will catch on easily.
The financial system could be discarded much more quickly than you might imagine. Money stops having value the instant people stop giving it value.
So I ask you one last time. Why is our world run by money?
Comments (0) 04.29.2010. 01:28
Money! It's a Crime...
There is no alternative to this disease of greed we call currency.
Your first reaction was, "Yeah! That's great! Money is evil!" Perhaps giving it a second thought you might have said, "Realistically, money is necessary because it is the tool of commerce and trade. Of course we need money, you twit."
Which is where I have been for quite sometime. Discussing the topic of money at work with a reasonable colleague, he had me convinced that money was indeed necessary. Going further, he had convinced me that capitalism was the new environment in which evolution was taking place. That was the bit that had me convinced.
What he actually did was make me okay with the fact that money was evil. I say pollution is a necessary evil of technological production, but when we have the technology to do so, we should clean it up. This way, currency is the necessary evil for trade and commerce.
Money is evil because it has "mass" if you will. Money attracts money, hence the expression "the rich get rich...". This makes it clear that there is something unfair about money. Money is evil because it controls every aspect of our lives. You can only follow through with an idea if you can get enough money to do it. The ones with the money, eg investors, decide if your ideas are good enough to make more money for them and a little for you. The ones with money decide if your ideas live or die. That is not a world I want to live in.
So now we have taken control of our own evolution with the dollar. You are guaranteed to procreate if you have enough money.
Corporations are no longer driven by providing a quality product. They are driven by their bottom line and will sacrifice quality for money. People do that with their own lives, too; trading quality for quantity.
These people have sold their souls for currency.
The game we are playing is no longer about doing good things for ourselves and our customers. Our egos and pride drive us to spend more and more money to show how "fit for reproduction" we are. Status cars, expensive suits, office politics.
"But you said there's no alternative!"
You're right. There is no alternative to the money game.
I read a bumper sticker that said "STOP BITCHING. START A REVOLUTION."
Starting a revolution is as easy as not paying your bills. Fuck your mortage, your car payment, your tuition, your student loans, your taxes. Take your cash out of the bank.
Tell your creditors that you will no longer allow them to enslave you with their monthly bills.
The answer to the money game is simple: Stop playing it. But then what? Go about your day.
Go to work knowing you're doing it for free, to help your company provide a good product for its customers. Don't view your life as a collection of stuff you have spent money on.
How about you spend half of your time making the world a better place, and spending half of your time doing whatever you want?
On average, I work every other day at my job. My shifts are 12 hours each. This leaves little room for doing much besides sleeping on work days. But for half the week, I can do whatever I want. I think this adds great balance to my life.
I know not many can say this, but I would stay at my job if everything was free.
So what is our real currency? Our time and effort. That is what money is supposed to be measuring anyway, right? So if money is power, and money is a symbol for our own time and effort, let's use our time and effort to vote on how we want the world to be.
[This is a future-link-placeholder for a realistic way of doing this. I am formulating a plan.] <- Now a link to something!
Comments (0) 02.18.2010. 17:23
We Don't Deserve Utopia
Governments and Corporations exist for their own benefit nowadays. The interests of these two entities are now one and the same: money. What better way to get money than to take it from the people you control? In a Utopian society, corporations, do not profit. Corporations don't spend money on themselves, but they invest it in the country. Corporations are the entities that the government imposes taxes upon. They are most able to pay such fees. In a world where the government and corporate entities are forced to work for the benefit of those whom are responsible for its survival, citizen shan't have to fear these comic book villains, but embrace them. A company that is capable of posting hundreds of billions in profit is certainly not a company that has competition or is providing beneficial services to its customers. With profit margins this large, it's clear that these companies have only one thing on their mind: money.
It's been said that money is the root of all evil for as long as it has been around. It has become just a saying as people don't put any thought into it (or anything for that matter anymore). Life has become a race to the end, a race to buy the modest home, complete with 2 luxury cars (that don't even get 20mpg), 1.83 children which parents shape and mold to become exact replicas of themselves, not thinking about the future, but how much of their money they can spend before they die. Money isn't the root of all evil though. This valuable paper only provokes the natural human response that is indeed the true root of evil. The one unforgivable sin: Greed. Before humans began to settle into clans and villages and towns, cities and empires, we knew nothing of possession. The concept of ownership had never been bestowed upon us, yet once things became permanent, when you had a need for heavy clay pots to hold water, possessions were something to die for.
The problem is that humans are depressingly inadequate. We could spend no longer than a few days in the wild. To combat this, we developed intelligence, and the ability to use tools, but as time goes on, we became so dependent on these tools and possessions, that being without a particular tool meant that death could be imminent. Greed evolved as one of the most important of human emotions, coupling dependence with technology, turning greed into an easily dominant character trait. Kings were selected by how many possessions they had. Things became powerful and valuable. It wasn't long before currency became the law of the land, with everyone fighting over the shiny metallic objects that could be exchanged for anything you could ever need or want.
What do we want now? We want to be happy, but no one seems to be able to say what happy is, so they just let everyone else decide what happy is, and then they strive for this status of happy, which happens to require as much money as possible, requiring more and more with every generation. If more people sat down and contemplated what happiness truly was, they might come across the idea that possessions cannot listen or interact with you in a meaningful way. They might also realize that money is not a good insulator and will not keep you warm at night. The problem with money is the fact it's what everyone seems to want, so we just make more of it to keep up with demand. But what if money wasn't important? What if what was actually important was surviving? A laughable thought, as the human race has moved far beyond surviving to the ability to live a life that is comfortable. It seems today that comfort is the ultimate happiness, yet we are still unhappy. The reason for the typical mid-life crisis is that when we all turn middle age, we start to think about what happiness truly is, then we realize that we haven't been happy yet. We spend the first forty years of our life preparing ourselves for the life of comfort, but when we get there, we realize that we've wasted our best years.
One cannot be told the meaning of life because it is different for every person, but we try anyway. Society impresses upon us the importance of being 'normal' when no one sits down long enough to think about what normal actually is. If you take a look at the people in your life, are any of them exactly like you? Of course not. You may have some things in common with them, but no one is exactly alike, yet we try to suppress our individuality so we can become normal! Have you decided what normal is yet? It's another word for 'insecurity'. Being different terrifies people nowadays. Everyone becomes the person they hate just so they can pretend to be like everyone else, slowly changing themselves into someone that is boring and ordinary, so they can fit in and appear to be living a successful life. Then you have to ask yourself, what is success? These days, it's quite obvious that life is nothing more than a video game and the points are the flat green rectangles that you trade your time for. Tell me, would you pay your hourly wage to go have an adventure? Yes? Tell me again, would you pay many times your hourly wage to do everything you've ever wanted? What's that, you don't know what you really want? I see, because you were too busy becoming successful to know what you're interested in.
If you look back on your life, you may realize that all the time you've invested in your personal success may very well have been better spent doing things you enjoy. The human race is in a very unique position as far as animals go. Wild animals spend their entire lives surviving. There's not an activity wasted in the daily life of a blue bird. A snake is always looking for its next meal, but us humans, we're better than that. I couldn't even die if I tried! My roommate would immediately rush me to the hospital and I would probably survive. In fact, it takes such little effort to survive in today's world that it's no wonder people are unhappy. You'd think with all of this spare time on our hands we would contemplate mysteries of the world around us, or perhaps try to make our home a better place. Instead, we watch mindnumbing television shows and consume the resources this planet provides us at an alarming rate.
We sit around every night watching American Idol because our lives are so incredibly boring and atavistic that we consume ourselves in the lives of others so we don't have to think about our own. When I was a child, I proposed that man would not kill itself in nuclear war and we would not go the way of the dinosaurs, but rather that we would sucuumb to our own bordom as we figured out every last question that had ever been asked. As a child though, I did not expect the situation to arise so soon. Are people no longer curious? Do they think they know everything? I certainly hope not.
Comments (0) 02.18.2010. 13:56
Evolution or Peace?
What happened to the good old days? The days where your life was constantly in peril, where a mistep can swiftly remove your genetic line from mankind's family tree?
Instead we have warning labels and laws that protect us from ourselves. We have hospitals that let people with genetic defects live in our cushy, comfy society.
I used to want world peace until I thought about what it would mean. Peace is the end of evolution. Peace is the absence of change. Change is evolution. When the human race stops evolving, there will be peace.
I want to keep evolving. Why do you think there is a constant class struggle within the human race? Evolution is trying to play itself out.
The way I see it, mankind is polluting itself. We have all but removed the original natural selection mechanism from nature: death. We no longer permit people to use their brain to determine their own survival. Instead, we've built a castle of idiot-proof rules, which harbor mostly idiots.
Half of everyone on Earth is below average. How do we fix that? I don't see the problem solving itself anytime soon, so long as there's a warning label for every possible form of death.
Since resources here on Earth are coming up short, the "right" to live will soon be a challenge, much like it should be. Americans should have enjoyed Utopia while we had it, because now it's slipping out of our control.
The problem with cleansing the human gene pool is that no one wants to step up and do it, or, if someone does step up and do it, we start a world war over it. We're not exactly sure what sort of people should be "selected". Do we pick a bunch of smart people? Attractive people? Athletes? Everyone's idea of a perfect human is different, so we'll never settle on who should get knocked off.
Deciding is the hard part though. For the sake of argument, let's say that we reach a majority for who should be allowed to live and who shouldn't. That conclusion is that people with above average human traits should get to live and people with below average human traits should not get to. People that live are above average in intelligence, physical stature, genetic stability, and emotional stability.
How do you pull it off, though? The Dunning-Kruger effect will pull it off for you. The reason we even reached a majority of who should be offed was because of this effect in the first place. People never think they are below average, so they happily signed a law because they all just assumed they were above average.
But why do we want to do such an evil thing? For the long term survival of the human race. I'm sick of the morons that say global warming is conspiracy liberal agenda. For fuck's sake people, this is your planet we're talking about. Why even take the risk? Selfish. You are all fucking selfish.
I don't want your silly religious bureaucracy interfering with my efforts to make the world a better place. I'm tired of dragging you, kicking and screaming, all the way to the finish line where you look at me and say "I guess you were right after all."
I want to evolve. You clearly do not. Instead of pursuing truth and knowledge, you cling to your invisible advice giving psychics and ancient tomes. Yet, rather than accept your place in evolution as a subservient being, you continue to interfere with our work and effort.
You do not deserve to reap the fruits of our labor, for you did nothing to benefit the process, and everything you could to foil our plans.
It's time to let rational thought prevail and enlighten our world, for the very survival of mankind depends on purging our ignorance.
...
After much thought and consideration, I've arrived at the following conclusion.
I've ultimately decided that genocide is not a good way of going about doing things. Neither is symbiotic slavery.
However, this option will likely be despised more than death of half the human race.
The option is flawless and inarguable accountability. In short, everything everyone does is recorded with video and audio. No exceptions.
While this is drastic, it could be done peacefully. A lot of people's feelings would get hurt. Imagine a wife tuning in to her husband while she's at work, only to find him at home with another woman. Accountability.
You find out the politician you vote for is accepting campaign contributions from a corporation you think is evil. Accountability.
For something like this, though, we would need a much bigger internet.
The problem with rules is that sometimes they need to be broken to make things better. Rules are for people that don't understand the difference between good and bad, or selfish and selfless. Because everything you do affects someone, other people should have the right to call you out on doing something that's bad. Of course, you have the right to ignore them, but they also have the right to kick your ass for being an unreasonable prick.
I think what I'm really getting at here is that we all have to be able to trust each other. I would be willing to bet that most people only do bad things because they think they won't be held accountable.
People should be allowed to do whatever they want, but only if they can't hide it from anyone. Secrets protect no one but the guilty or the insecure.
Comments (0) 02.02.2010. 10:47