“How to rebuild our civilisation without resorting to Year Zero policies.”
I began to write these letters over two months ago. Back then I seriously doubted whether I could get anyone to believe in a world where we do not struggle under debt. Yet this world actually existed within our own living memory it’s called the 1970s. We experienced an uncontrolled revolution over the last 40 years. It wasn’t space travel, it wasn’t computers, and it wasn’t sexual liberation. It was finance. ‘People’ mutated into ‘Consumers’. ‘Society’ warped into ‘Economy’. At the end of the 1970s debt became the new wealth.
We have come a long way since the 1970s. There is no longer The Job for Life, The Berlin Wall or The Cold War. But what really changed was the fact that it became impossible for anyone but a multi-millionaire to be elected to high office. A reverse revolution broke where the Aristocrats came back disguised as economists. This happened in just forty years.
We now live in a world unrecognisable to Elvis Presley but Marie Antoinette would ‘get’ it just fine.
I have outlined in the first two letters how this revolution has calcified and become a tyranny. I have illustrated how a tiny minority of the human race has amassed control over the vast majority of this planet’s resources but actually I’m wrong. That’s not strictly true. Nobody really controls this planet’s resources. All those bonds, futures, stocks and contracts are nothing more than bets. Sorry, Bilderberg Group, but these bets will inevitably fail.
Obviously wars and revolutions cause all financial bets to fail. War and revolution is coming, that’s what the protests on the streets of the Middle East, the West and now in Russia are telling us. The protesters are just the messenger. They are the inflammation that tells you of the malaise, they are not the malaise itself. By punishing the protesters, the governments of our world have shown their lack of independence, courage and intelligence.
Here’s the truth: All bets are off.
A complaint that is ignored becomes a protest that, if crushed becomes civil disobedience which, if punished, becomes a revolt which, if suppressed, become a civil war which, if fought becomes a new order. This vicious spiral into chaos is already turning and nobody has yet provided an answer to it.
Here’s my answer: There is nothing to fight but the irrational fear of poverty, there is nothing to lose but the unjust tyranny of debt, and there is nothing to strive for but our own success.
Here is more truth and refreshingly some good news for 2012: Money as the default option of wealth is over. Debt as the default state of nations is over. Isolated, fearful impotence as the default state of people is over. Default is over.
This letter is all about the solution. This is the ‘How to’ guide to utterly changing the world for the better.
Changing the world for the better (Step 1) Understanding wealth
We simply don’t understand wealth. We never have. We have been calling this planet ‘Earth’ or ‘Terra’ since the Roman Empire. ‘Territory’ is not a good name for our home. This isn’t just ‘terra’ it’s ‘flora’, ‘fauna’, ‘populi’ and ‘intelligensia’. We are rich in number, in skills, in technologies, in culture and in creativity.
Wealth is what reveals abundance and banishes scarcity. We are wealth.
We are the source of our wealth. We will generate our own wealth just by changing our values from ‘profit out of exploitation’ to ‘abundance through replenishment’ and then applying simple, yet smart design.
Is it so hard to harness the hyper activity of kids at play to generate energy? Of course not! We already do this in the west. Kids whizz about on shoes that contain rollers in the heels and shoes that light up using pressure dynamos. Is it so hard to add a rechargeable battery?
I own a kinetic watch that winds itself when I move my wrist. That’s a complex movement to accurately calculate time powered and renewed by me. Why can’t a phone do the same thing?
Why don’t we design our cities to harness the kinetic energy we expend doing our day to day activities and convert that into energy which we can spend on making our lives better?
Consider how the microchip has shrunk in size and exploded in power and capacity over just twenty years. Why aren’t we also manufacturing solar cells this way? If we did, I predict we would be able to purchase highly efficient solar cells that look like rolls of duct tape so we can stick energy giving strips anywhere and reap the reward.
Why aren’t we looking into polymers and crystals so that we can spray photovoltaic cells onto any surface? Imagine that, graffiti that actually made your house more sellable.
Imagine housing that needed only sand and mud and grey water for their construction. Within days of an earthquake or a tsunami, whole working villages and towns could spring up at negligible cost and imagine if these houses were actually capable of generating electricity, purifying water and communicating with one another and with aid agencies so that doctors could diagnose disease and injury remotely and counteract epidemics before they start?
I’m not imagining; I’m actually designing and researching manufacturers right now.
This is what I mean by ‘℮volution’. We already have universities, laboratories, designers and manufacturers who are well positioned to start rolling these products off. By having the two systems of cash and energy payment running side by side no fundamental change needs to be imposed and no upheaval will happen because the transition will be natural and organic.
Look at how we have changed our world in the last 24 months. Could anyone have predicted the Arab spring? The Tea Party? Occupy? Look at how we’ve changed since the millennium. Look at how different we are now to how we were in the 1980s or the 1970s. I propose that we are the wealth, we can reveal abundance and we can banish scarcity. So let us, the people, become the authors of change in our civilisations not disasters or vested interests or wars.
Changing the world for the better (Step 2): Virtuous circles, not vicious spirals.
There are gaps to my vision, I’m just one guy. But there have always been gaps in our world. No society is Utopia. But the gaps are much bigger now and those that help the weak are now weak themselves. So we shrug our helpless shoulders and say: “Stuff happens.”
Well 'stuff' happens to us all. In 2011 a lot of 'stuff' happened and the ‘experts’ are telling us that there is more shit to come. What we are supposed to do when that happens and what skills we are supposed to have acquired to stave off the worst is becoming less clear.
The west is in a vicious spiral of fiscal anxiety. The middle-east is in a vicious spiral of violent political frustration. There are entire nations that are so far gone down the poverty vicious spiral that they are deemed ‘failed states’ by the UN. But states don’t fail. People fail.
We will continue to fail one another until such time as we can arrest being spun about by vicious spirals and we can design a virtuous circle. That’s what is broken in the west: the “Take the booby prize for not coming first” model we live under is obsolete. Competition is the product of scarcity. The ancient Greeks developed the Olympiad so that they could beat up their neighbours for their goats because Greece isn’t great land for growing food.
We have so much food we throw it away when it is no longer pretty enough for us. We don’t feed animals with it, we don’t convert it into new soil or energy, we throw our food away.
This is a vicious spiral. Our system encourages and rewards this waste with imaginary profit. How about we don’t try to exact a profit from feeding ourselves? How about we make access to food a basic human right? We already do this for education so why not food? Why don’t we all enjoy great tasting, wholesome food and transmit our collected energy directly into the kitchen? The act of walking to the restaurant could power up the cooker that heats our meal.
Why not? Don’t we already rate restaurants and other services on our social media pages? What new skills need to be learned? Can a restaurant serve both cash customers and energy customers in the one sitting? Of course it can. Isn’t this already happening with credit cards, discount vouchers and loyalty schemes?
In Germany there are stretches of pavement that, when walked upon, generate electricity. Simply by walking to and from work by day pavements power the street lights for the night. In France the electric car is being successfully rolled out and they have found a niche with urban drivers. If we covered our urban roads with magma enriched tarmacadam then, simply by placing two copper strips to the underside of our electric cars, we could drive all day for FREE. The kinetic movement recharges the battery. It’s really that simple.
I am by no means the greatest engineer or inventor out there and look what I just came up with by thinking along virtuous circles. That’s just me, no one else. One guy. Now multiply that by thousands, millions even billions. Won’t this boost confidence in our economies?
Not that Energy needs a confidence boost. Energy is. It’s real. It’s useful. It can be converted into wealth. It can be transmitted and transmuted. It is the ultimate virtuous circle currency.
Changing the world for the better (Step 3): Assume the change.
We have all heard ‘Be the change you wish to see.’ If we want change we have to cause change. Did Thomas Edison ask the US government’s permission to invent? Did Albert Einstein have to fill out an application form to be a genius?
To ensure that we get the civilisation we want we must behave as if it already exists. It’s that simple. It’s how our world nearly got taken from us in the first place. A small gang of ‘experts’ decided to act as if they actually ruled the world and they nearly succeeded. The financial crash five years ago was the best thing that could have happened because it stopped us in our tracks. Remember Weimar Germany, we very nearly started WWIII in 2009.
I wish I could say ‘Never again’ and believe it but that isn’t true. ‘Never again’ is a daily struggle; it requires tenacity and patience and vision. It requires a near paranoid scepticism of government and private interests. This last year 2011 year proved one thing beyond a doubt: Change can only come directly from us and not from our leaders or self-appointed experts.
Once we get into the mind set of assuming the change, of living the change and of being the change then the steps needed to reach our goal become clear. If we cease relying on outside agencies to effect the change we want we can just get on with sorting the shit out ourselves.
The ultimate form of protest against tyranny is to completely disregard the tyrant’s power. It’s not easy and the cost can be huge, just look at the middle-east. Nevertheless, that is the only way to change the status quo. Live as you want to live and that is precisely what will happen.
But don’t panic! Being the change you want to see in the world needn’t involve occupying anywhere or facing down riot police or dodging snipers. Protest movements use social media and smartphones just as effectively as oppressive governments use guns and propaganda.
Human Rights cannot be compromised and remain Human Rights because we are all human. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not an ideal it’s just a minimum standard for our species. We must be about the business of achieving the Declaration’s promises by 2020 at the very latest. If we deny even one human being basic human rights then we must confess to ourselves that nobody on the surface of this planet truly merits human rights.
So let’s decide to prosper. The best form of resistance to the ‘Age of Austerity’ and the intellectual mediocrity that represents is to disregard it altogether and to build virtuous circles among our own communities. This way we may build the society we desire and deal with the problems we face using the elegant natural solutions virtuous circles reveal to us.
In short, we do it ourselves, for ourselves and by ourselves. We generate our own energy and convert it to our own wealth. We reward those that replenish and shun those that exploit. We can end the old tyranny of uncontrollable debt simply by preferring our new ℮conomy. This is how the internet started. This is how social media took off. This is Punk. This is every street culture that ever was. We can do all this because we are not passive consumers. We are not people ruled over by masters, we are bigger than that. That’s what Letter IV is all about, why we must take the reins and manage our world: We are Zodi.
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