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Conduct a thought experiment: just visualize and imagine what our country and the world would be like without a money-based economy, i.e. literally living ones life without money. The immediate response most people will have without any further thought: What, are you crazy? Can’t happen! How in the world could you suggest such ridiculous nonsense? You certainly can’t be serious. That’s utopian
The reason people have this response is because they are viewing the suggestion with some immediacy and not that it would be a process that evolves over time. They cannot view things 100, 300, 500, 1,000 years or more from now and that we can evolve in a process of social change where that will come to fruition. Their visualization is what happens tomorrow morning when all of a sudden there is just no money. If that should happen, I agree, it would be devastating.
“Money is the root of all evil,” or at the very least a coconspirator with evil. That is not just a cliché, it so happens to be a fact. The pursuit for money is the cause of waste and human exploitation; it breeds the incentive for corruption, theft, and greed; it’s behind the motivation for war, and is the direct cause of poverty, homelessness, hunger, debt, and much more senseless and unnecessary human suffering.
It is the reason for taxation and the IRS. It is the reason we have the communism vs. socialism vs. libertarianism debate. It’s the basis of capitalism and free market vs. the liberal view.
It is the reason for class stratification. Money is used to regulate the economy for the benefit of the few who control the financial wealth of nations.
It is the cause of stress over a college education, retirement, and social security, for it is the reason a college education might not be achieved, or retirement may not be possible, and the reason we need social security at all.
The pursuit of money limits progress and creativity. It’s a major impediment, because a person whose dream and passion may die on the vine because of his or her ability to make more money doing something else.
The pursuit for the acquisition of money is in reality the pursuit for power and control. Although there are many outstanding human beings who have pursued dreams based solely on their altruistic desire to improve life, most Americans and others idolize and emulate those who have wealth because they view money as synonymous with power, and with power there is control. The view is that if you have money you can acquire more toys and therefore build on your stature. Money is the reason only a few have a say in how they exist in life, and in some cases because of their wealth feel they can, or in fact can, dictate how the rest of us must live. Oligarchies and corporatocracies come into existence and become powerful because of the money they can direct at their self-interest.
Governments, business organizations, communities, and even individuals use money, or money in its applicability in the enforcement of law, to control and coerce people into submission.
Thus, it is a fact that most of the world’s people have less freedom in a money-based economy, regardless of its social, governmental, or economic system, than they would have in another system that is not money-based.
The reason our world evolved to this money-based economic system is precisely because greedy men saw the advantages of power and control such a system would have over others. It is not creation because of some divine cause, it is strictly created by men so that he could immorally possess the hearts and souls of others.
Jacque Fresco has proposed a resource-based economic system. It is a system in which goods and services are available without the use of money, credit, barter, debt, or servitude.
The reason behind his proposal is based not only on the aforementioned many problems of a money-based system, but also that the resources of the world should be universally free and freely accessed, because as a citizen of the world they are every human’s common heritage.
It seems logical to me that if we could only shed a money-based economic system where we would not be influenced by any method of exchange for goods and services, whether that is fiat money, a value based currency such as gold-backed currency, or any other system that provides for advantages one could take over another as with our current economic system, would go a long way to making this a better world.
In order to evolve into this “Future and Beyond” that would be congruent with this philosophy are certain things, among many other things, that need to change: Heterarchy or homoarchy rather than hierarchy models of organization; Our inability to shed old ideas and adopt new ones; and, a change in how we perceive the qualities of true leadership in a non-hierarchical world.
There may be some drawbacks: You will probably have to iron your own cloths, clean your own house, and mow your own lawn.
I seemingly always come to the point where I ask myself this question posed by Robert F. Kennedy: "... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
Just look at the seemingly impossible things that have evolved over the years, coupled with the fact that the majority of our problems have been created by man, so man can change them, and also man can create new things.
The social changes proposed in the Venus Project may not be the end design, perhaps that paradigm needs to be tweaked, or perhaps new ideas have to emerge. The process of moving to a resource-based economy or some other non-monetary system needs to evolve. We need to take the incremental steps to get there. Our civilization is at an evolutionary stage type 0 as described by Michio Kaku, and we need to take the necessary steps to achieve an evolutionary stage type 3 or 4. It is not an impossible task.
Now I Ask You: WHY NOT?
Further reading:
Read the Ron Paul page, and its commentary
The Zietgeist Movement
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