Who makes the decisions in a resource-based economy? This question actually needs to be rephrased.
It’s not who makes the decisions, but “How are the decisions arrived at?” The running of society is a technical process. There are very few things that need to be “decided” by human opinion. Technical processes aren’t even decided by you now. Did you vote on the structural attributes of a bridge? Did you vote on which materials are used to construct houses? Did you vote on the internal mechanisms or designs of an MRI machine? No, because most of us, certainly me, don’t have the knowledge necessary to make large decisions like this. We already arrive at these decisions based on the best available information we have at the time.
So what about, you know, lazy people?
If I am busy in a contributory role, or not over-consuming,
won’t others simply sit around,
live off the fat of the land that the economy is now producing at no cost to the individual?
First off, why is it that when people talk to me about lazy people, lazy people are always other people? I find that quite interesting. And if you do know a lazy person, when did they become lazy? Was it on their 20th birthday? Were they lazy as a child? Who here has toddlers who have chronic laziness? Who here remembers the day they became lazy? No, it happened over time didn’t it? Slow creeping laziness set in. You get home tired from work, you crack open a beer, you slam on the box and sink into the couch. Laziness is an effectual by-product of our society. Either we are spent from our jobs, demotivated by the treadmill lives so many of us are made to lead, conditioned by advertising to sit and consume, or by social infexibility to be able to go out and do the things you want to do. In a world of far greater personal freedom, these tendencies towards laziness would drop off hugely. Even if they did not, a system of technologically enabled abundance would not suffer from lazy behaviours the way it does presently. The Pixar film "WALL*E" imagined a world in which all the jobs had been replaced, but people were still hapless, over-indulgent consumers. Note that in the film they actually had left the earth to be massively inefficient and non-productive in space. The people had not changed in themselves, the society behavioural mechanisms had not changed, as technology does take over more and more of our jobs, so we must adapt to new tasks, and not simply replace the old tasks with a void. It's a change we are advocating. Coupled with the updating of technology is the updating of our behaviour, the abandoning of the over-consumptive, passive behaviours so excellently satirized by "WALL*E." *** lazy people.
What about dangerous people? Bad people.
Well, here's something you may have heard before: There is no such thing as a bad/evil person per se. Quite apart from the fact those two terms, bad ***, it could mean anything. We are the products of our surroundings. People who commit crimes against the rest of humanity, whether it’s violence, theft, corporate crime, are the products of a sick society whose mechanisms either encourage, necessitate or reward those actions. If you don’t believe this, why is it that some countries have much higher crime rates than others? Are there more “bad people” on that landmass? Surely if “human nature” were to blame we’d have identical crime figures all across the world. We don’t because the situations, the environmental influences, are different in each location. Everything from the wealth gap, pollution levels, positive or negative media influences, right through to the weather, influences our behaviour. It is the ultimate litmus test of society’s soundness. Higher crime rates are symptoms of the flaws of the system. Yet, right now we react to crime, not by looking at the aberrant behaviour as a symptom of our social mechanisms, but by blaming the individual and locking them up, creating more laws and ultimately creating a less flexible and more oppressive society. In turn, this oppressive, illiberal society produces more crime and a higher prison population. Criminals and ex-cons are precluded from successful lives after jail. No-one wants to employ a criminal. They also have most likely been given a decent education *** Violent crimes are more prevalent in societies with greater inequality. This slide comes from the Equality Trust who are just south of the river. It shows the clear correlation between inequality and homicides. Remove the underlying cause, inequality, and the incidences of crime decrease as well. Stressed family environments, relationship breakdown, school shootings, gang violence, bank robberies, fraud; which of these cannot be traced back to social stratification based on income, greed or spending power or the ability to gain differential advantage over others? If you remove the mechanisms that essentially encourage aberrant behaviour and reward aberrant human interactions, the behaviours themselves will go away. As yet, we have not implemented a system which does this. Mental health issues, for the most part, stem from monetary issues aswell. Mental illness can almost always be stemmed back to economical and societal inequality. This slide shows the correlation of mental illness with income inequality. It illustrates this point more than amply. Greater inequality, facilitated by the narrow self-interest, the internal logic of a monetary system and differential advantage and competition, directly negatively affects everyone in the population, including rich people. Based on 30 years of research by the Equality trust, If the UK were more equal, we'd be better off as a population. For example, the evidence suggests that if we halved inequality there would be: halve murder rates, mental illness would reduce by two thirds, obesity would halve, imprisonment would reduce by 80%, teen births would reduce by 80%, levels of trust would increase by 85%. Imagine how little crime there would be if we put true equality into practise in this country. And were there global equality and partnership, can you imagine how quickly war would disappear?
What about the law?
Legal restrictions are present in our society to limit problems we've not been able to solve through technological means. We have drink-driving laws because our cars will crash if we’re drunk behind the wheel. But if we build cars that can’t crash into each other via GPS guidance systems, and with pendulums built into the base that corrects a swerving motion, drink driving laws become irrelevant. You can get really *** and go out and drive. It is technologically more than possible. We've already fly into the moon, by the way. But we don't do it 'cause it is “too expensive.” A society structured around resources, equality and efficiency will mean the automatic redundancy of laws pertaining to finance and money, property, crime and socially offensive behaviours. Having a lot of laws is not the sign of a well-adjusted society. It is a demonstration of the flaws that society has. Laws attempt to patch up the inabilities to function correctly within that society. Perhaps... *** like this one.
Perhaps you think that we can solve our problems with politics.
We are not a political movement. We will not stand for election. In both senses of that. Why is that? Michael Ruppert said it best when he said that politics is economics by other means. Politics is simply another power outgrowth. To be elected, or even run for election, requires a large amount of money to canvas support. Once you are beholden to large corporate donors, it is literally impossible to fulfil real change in a society, since the wishes of your backers need to be fulfilled first. Those wishes are always to produce favourable laws and fiscal policies that will benefit those very donants and corporations, the promise of which was their sole reason for backing your party in the first place. Why do politicians break promises? Is it because they are “bad people”? No they aren't. Politicians are not here to change things. How could they be? They are raised, conditioned, promoted and admitted by the current established societal notions. They are not technical experts. How could they solve society's problems, which are technical? Most of them come from a legal background, which is semantic manipulation and nothing else. They aren't qualified to make changes. This man is an economist by trade. Given that he is absolutely indoctrinated into a monetary system, how is he going to bring about the change he promises? The same is with every other politician. We cannot achieve lasting, real and meaningful change through politics. We need to move beyond politics. The simple fact is that politicians are not there to enact real change to the underlying root causes of society. Constrained by relatively short voting cycles and financial pressures, even the best, the most worthy and honest "leaders" have to operate within the system.
It's time to take the next step in our social evolution.
It is time to evolve along the only path that is relevant, one rooted in the real world, one that is truly possible. We have outgrown the needs for the mechanisms to manage scarcity. We have outgrown scarcity itself. We have outgrown the need for war, poverty and profit at all cost. It's time to ditch the false divisionary notions based on belief, opinion, hearsay, surmise, and any and all inherited assumptions. Human beings are amazing. On this tiny pale blue dot we have come from the simplest of organic life against all odds to our present state of sophistication and consciousness. We have put to task our ingenuity and our creativity to produce astonishing results. It is only money now that is holding us back. We must not let our own failings to continue our evolution destroy the most valuable thing we have... ourselves. You don’t join us by voting for us. You don’t join us by canvassing. You don’t join us by signing up for a mailing list. You don’t join us by buying a book, or a T-Shirt, or a DVD. As mentioned before, any and all information we disseminate is offered completely free of charge. And you certainly don’t join us by giving us donations. We won’t accept them. You join us up here, in your head. You join us by realizing the logical limitations of our current lifestyle and calling for a new global model. We all join by breaking down the barriers we have had imposed on ourselves or have imposed others, to rejoin the other members of the human race waiting on every other side. Thank you.
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