Money is great - it allows us to easily trade dissimilar goods and services with each other globally, but there are also downsides to it. A lot of the downsides aren't inherently in the concept of money itself though, but are instead in the way we manage money centrally, as this allows for all kinds of mismanagement, including over-issuance, debt models, and control over populations through debt slavery and money supply gateways. These lead to pooling of power and the formation of monopolies, which compounds and speeds up the process.
We talk about "financial independence" which is a good thing in the culture we have built, but it is also something that facilitates the breakdown of community, as we can buy what used to be provided through relationships. A tribal community had many ongoing tasks to keep it functioning, and devoid of money, they were still trading their time, skills, support for access to resources. Money allows us to circumnavigate the tribe, meaning that if we have enough, we don't have to contribute our own resources to get what we want.
We see this in many ways today, where we don't "need each other" to live in the sense that we don't need to have a direct relationship to get what we want. We don't need to meet the farmer in the market to get food, we don't need a partner to have sex, we don't need children to care for us in old age. We can buy it all, or some form of it, without ever leaving the house, never needing to get to know anyone.
This might sound like an extreme outcome, but I think we are already seeing it happen to a large extent at the extremes of society, where there are people who literally have not left there home for years, but are still able to survive this life. And while there are extremes, we are all on a continuum, all somewhere on the curve of relationship degradation, with depression rising, interpersonal violence increasing, drug addiction increasing, social disconnection increasing, birthrates plummeting - and the consolidation of wealth increasing rapidly.
The increased complexity of life means that a far broader range of skills than in a tribe are required in order to service the needs, so money allows us the possibility to buy what we can't do ourselves, or within our local community. We import goods and services that we cannot do for ourselves, we don't want to do for ourselves, or we want to spend our time doing other things instead. For instance, a country will import oil that it needs, but doesn't have as a natural resource. A company will hire cheap labor for non-essential jobs, like cleaning. A professional might hire a nanny to care for their children, so they can spend their time working or in hobbies instead. The entire economy is set up in this way, where proxies are used to do tasks, and money has become the currency, whereas the currency in the past was social connection.
Our "social fitness" has rapidly declined in most of the world where money has become the currency at the expense of community. And, perhaps it will speed up even more as we are able to distance ourselves even further from each other, working from anywhere, earning digitally, making money without anyone knowing who we are. Yet, while that might seem a dream for some right now, it leads us down a path where no one ever really knows who we are and later in life, we might find that due to this, we are even more disconnected, sadder, lonely.
And this move away from community happens at all levels of our lives, where governments are compartmentalizing us for ease of control. Corporations are systematically categorizing us to target, influence and homogenize us, in order to increase profits. And we ourselves are choosing to focus on the variance in our surface-level differences, rather than the 99.5% of us that is identical.
All variation at the human genetic level is accounted for in just 0.5% of the genetic code. Everything.
And, we seem to celebrate this breakdown in community, as if it is an advancement for the human race, even though up until this point, the only thing that has been our competitive advantage, is being able to work together to innovate and create what we can't do alone. Yes, we can still communicate at this point, but what are we going to be innovating together, when there are so few interpersonal relationships?
Our attention turns inward, a satisfaction of the self, disconnected from the needs of others. We don't need to make the world a better place, as all our focus is about making the tiny little box we live in, our universe a better place for us. We don't have to even think about the future, as long as we are able to survive happily enough through our lifetime, as we don't have children to think about, and therefore will never have grandchildren. We can think short, because we will never, and no one we "know" will ever see long.
And all of this happens due to the breakdown of the direct relationships we used to need in order to survive this life. And, while it is easy to blame the "evils of money", the real cause is the centralization of the control of value, because it is this that allows for power consolidation, which centers itself through wealth collection. The powers can then control to gain more power, changing legislation to increase the incentive algorithm that feeds them - profit. Profit itself is not bad, but when there are no mechanisms of profit control, it will lead to power monopolization, with no way to roll it back.
And this is where decentralized finance and currencies come into play, because if any one entity becomes too powerful and controlling, there can be currency readjustment without the need for the controlling entity to approve. We saw this with the split from Steem to Hive in 2020, where while there was a cost to the community to do so, it was still possible to uncouple from centralized control and choose a different path for ourselves.
Currently, we cannot do this in the global economy we have, because the mass of material resources are controlled by only a few hands, and those hands still want more, because that is the incentive algorithm in play. If we want to change this, we would need to shift the algorithm away from "profit at any cost", to something like profit for wellbeing improvement activities, where the most profitable thing to do, is the right thing to do.
However, this isn't something that is profitable for those who are profiting from doing what they do now. Yet, while it seems insurmountable because they control the vast majority of material value, the one thing that they rely on, is us. Without the resource that is us, they have nothing - nobody to build with, nobody to purchase goods and services, nobody to control. Their money is useless without us.
This doesn't mean money itself is useless.
The more we are able to decentralize currency, the more valuable money becomes as a tool, because it is less controllable, less able to be pooled into the hands that will inflate the supply, generate wealth from debt, and use it to finance our demise, rather than increase our wellbeing. And, our wellbeing is intrinsically tied to each other.
A lot of people seem to have been fooled into believing otherwise, but relationships are the key to joy. Without them, we will suffer far more, than with them. And if we are able to get better at building and maintaining community, we will all benefit greatly. Money shouldn't be the tool that pries us apart from each other, it should be the glue that binds us to each other, by allowing us to interact globally, leverage skills and share support, directly.
We don't need centralized control of money now, as we have the tools available to apply a different model, one where the algorithms for wellbeing can be increasingly utilized, and the ones for harm retired. It isn't an overnight change, but it is one that we can all make steps towards, just by changing the way we think about money, wealth, value and what it means to be part of a community.
Is it an idealistic view, or is it pragmatic for the survival of our species?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
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