“We already possess something that does the job money was supposed to do even better, naturally occurring energy. I propose that we transform our broken financial economy into a genuinely 21st Century ℮conomy.”
Trust: it’s what the entire system of wealth and industry in the west has been built upon since the days of men in short skirts fighting over Helen of Troy. So the worst thing to lose for any system designed to generate and manage wealth is trust.
Coinage, credit, bonds, financial products, the markets, all equal one thing: Bets.
Only gambling addicts believe there is a pattern and science to betting on the future. The rest of us are grateful we don’t have that illness. Yet there exists a minority that insists upon their right to manipulate all our savings, all of our acquired wealth, for their employers’ gain.
Every ten years or so a domino effect occurs; the culture within this financial élite becomes so competitive and so aggressive that safeguards get ignored and people literally start playing poker with the wealth of nations. This meltdown has happened three times in my living memory; I am under fifty! In the past, there were regulations that had to be adhered to; a limit on the way banks used our money existed and was enforced by law. That law was ‘deregulated’ in the late 90’s in both in the US and the UK.
Nobody is going to prison for this meltdown because nobody has broken the law.
Clearly, this is a betrayal of our trust. Equally clearly, our trust CANNOT be given again. By what convention is the deliberate undermining of a currency and a peoples’ access to wealth not warfare? By what measure is secretly monopolising public stocks not theft?
Our faith is broken. The market for currency trading is too decadent and too aloof not to cause another meltdown in five to ten years’ time. This market produces nothing; it doesn’t generate wealth; it serves no purpose but warfare. Nothing currently exists to counteract this insanely destructive cycle. The savings of the ordinary person in the high street remain unprotected. No insurer can compensate for a depression. Once a currency has been undermined, the value of savings is wiped out and all this actually happens with the signed permission of government. This is what the Tea Party and the Occupy movements are about.
Money, as a confidence trick, cannot recover. Money, as the only game in town, is over.
Debt is over. We will not pay the debts of those who deplete our savings as part of a game.
I propose a new vision for all of humanity, not just the West. I propose a means to peacefully move from a financial to a post-financial world. You read that right: A Post-Financial World.
I don’t have all the answers; nobody has all the answers but I do have some answers.
Here are my answers: “Money doesn’t actually represent wealth.” or “Profit doesn’t actually exist.” and “An economy that doesn’t serve the people is actually a tyranny.”
Let’s quickly go through each answer.
Money doesn’t actually represent wealth.
As anyone in Weimar Germany or present day Zimbabwe can tell you, money has no value other than the readiness of a seller to accept it in return for goods and services. Currency is scarce even at the best of times. Money, as something that can be used to access essentials (Food, Energy, Water, Clothing, Shelter) and luxuries, can only be generated by government.
This control of scarcity against abundance is a switch that is denied us as individuals. If we tried to print our own money we would be imprisoned. Either we get a job and thrive or we fail to get a job and rot. It doesn’t matter if we’re Mozart or Van Gogh or even Howard Hughes, we will starve or fatten depending on whether we can do as the market demands.
Where is the wealth? What is the wealth? What’s reliable? What’s real? What can we control and use to make other stuff happen? What can liberate us from our daily toil and dismiss our doubts for the future? That would be real power. That would be real wealth.
Profit doesn’t actually exist.
Take every single financial transaction in the world. Ask why these transactions are happening. What result do you get? Both parties are engaged in the transaction to enrich themselves. However it is a physical law that nothing comes from nothing so, in order for one party to make a profit, the other party must either make a loss or the remainder comes from a passive third party. That passive third party is everyone else; you and me.
Party ‘A’ has item ‘a’ A(a) (b)B Party ‘B’ has item ‘b’
‘A’ and ‘B’ agree to trade: A(b) (a)B ‘a’ and ‘b’ exchange places.
Whether this is bartered chickens or an international electronic transaction the physics remains exactly the same. Nothing was created and nothing was destroyed. The gain or ‘profit’ exists purely in the minds of parties A and B.
Profit doesn’t actually exist. Profit is a spectacular fantasy.
In the financial world profit is the raison d’être for everything. Nothing happens that doesn’t realise a profit at some stage. Even charity is now profit seeking. So what appears profitable to the trading parties is adjudged by the market to be good even if it is suicidal to us all.
What benefits both Parties ‘A’ and ‘B’ must harm Party ‘C’: This is simple physics.
An economy that does not serve the people is actually a tyranny.
In totalitarian societies, the state controls all the wealth and dispenses it (or not) based on the decision of the ruling élite. This system of government is abhorrent to people raised in the west. Yet our wealth is controlled by a group just as shadowy and exclusive as a cold war politburo. Our every action, movement and impulse is being controlled by people employed to manipulate us into making financial decisions and accepting contracts that do not benefit us at all. We are being subverted by actuaries, marketers, advertisers, cost appraisers and legions of other liars into doing precisely what doesn’t enrich us for their own profit. It is not a pretty sight. We live in an actual Dystopia. We are but one step away from George Orwell’s '1984'.
The truth is: neither leftist nor rightist ideology is truly going to break the vicious spiral of wealth and power centralising. Wealth and power are indeed centralising; 27 corporate logos now command control over 50% of the world’s wealth and resources. Our politicians are now being paid more by private interests than their government salaries. This process will continue to the point where we are the slaves to one super king and we are all building the Tower of Babel again.
Thanks to this vicious spiral, this planet will be uncomfortable within our children’s lifetime and uninhabitable for humans within generations. That’s really coming. Profit is a game of ‘let’s pretend’ that requires us to asset-strip our planet in order to for it to continue. But the truth is poking through the fantasy. We are Nero. Our world is Imperial Rome and Rome is burning. Our governments can’t or won’t deal with this problem.
But we can. We can decide that the financial world and its chain of debt is over. We can decide it is time for a post-financial world.
How can a Post Financial World Possibly work?
Money doesn’t actually represent wealth. Profit doesn’t actually exist. An economy that doesn’t serve the people is actually a tyranny. The common denominator here is the word ‘actually’ or reality in action. What is the reality currently in action upon our world?
We are slowly poisoning ourselves and all other life forms to serve a fantasy. To make a profit, we have in the last ten years meekly accepted the loss of our own security, any hope of security in our old age and the security of our children and people who haven’t even been born. This is the reality. We are actually enslaved to a fantasy. There is no physical profit.
There is abundance, however, and that abundance is us.
Where the financial experts see enormous problems I see golden opportunities. Where governments see overpopulation, I see an amazing mix of ideas and talents just waiting to be unleashed. Where economic commentators see the ‘Age of Austerity’ I see the ‘Golden Age of Innovation’. Where protesters demand revolution I propose ℮volution.
I do not propose shutting down of factories, production, services, confiscating personal wealth or other traditional revolutionary activities. I propose a means by which we can generate our own wealth and transmute that wealth into pre-existing goods and services as smoothly as if all we are doing is changing the design of our bank notes.
Clearly our existing production and service industries must be able to adapt. How we now do business must be able to continue for the foreseeable future so we need to co-ordinate tills to also count in an energy credit system. People will be able to transfer energy as easily as they now transfer credit. This is so easy to do.
What I propose is doable within five years. We already enjoy an infrastructure well inured to the transfer information. Our mobile phones already scan, receive and transmit data and we even know how to make a car park itself. We are good at engineering. The change to our surroundings is minimal. Cities can generate energy just by having us living in them.
The main challenges facing this transitional period aren’t to do with the fundamental principle but with the engineering required. Energy will never be scarce again. Energy is universal; kinetic power, light, gravity, matter are all universally physical realities so energy is limitless. There is no point to hoarding the limitless. Life itself is an open-ended, unending calculation. Life is Pi, it never ends. That’s an energy that never ends!
We are the abundance. We are reality expressed as an equation of energy to matter and light. We are ℮ = MC². Forget ‘Green’, energy is the new dollar.
Energy is indestructible and yet we can generate it with ease. People give off vast amounts of kinetic energy. We enjoy giving off energy and it is good for us to do so. We could harness each footstep, each jump, and each syllable, to create energy and enrich ourselves further. We already possess the technology to do this, why don’t we?
In an energy civilisation, an ℮conomy, everybody already possesses a certain wealth and can generate more wealth, independently of employment. This is a people centred model. The Medici are dead, they no longer matter. In the energy model wasting our resources for profit is nonsense. Even with the very great recycling efforts that happen in all the countries of the world we still dump the majority of our resources into landfill. All of this is wealth.
Nothing in an ℮conomy is disposable. Everything is designed specifically to be broken down to its core elements and redesigned for new uses. We could recharge our cars simply by driving them. The incessant pad of pedestrians’ feet could provide the energy required to light up our town centres. All this requires is the will and the imaginative engineering to derive the most efficient solutions to our energy challenges. We could power our urban centres through our own day to day activities. And we will because we are the source of the energy. Life is energy. Life is ‘℮’. We generate the energy, our cities store the energy and our technology is invested of the energy to do all the work.
And the MC² part?
In Einstein’s equation M stands for Matter or all that is physical. C stands for the speed of light. Therefore MC² represents the passage of events as far we can detect using the medium of light to discern changes in the matter that surrounds us. We call this ‘Time’. What we learn over time informs us of potential future events. What we record from times past serves as our guide to our present. What has this got to do a post-financial world? We’ve been here before and quite a few times. We now need to learn from the past.
The secret to success is not trying to reinvent the wheel or utterly destroying all that we have built within civilisation but to use that which aids us and reject that which hampers us. Our current financial system has built wonders as well as destroyed and we must embrace what is good about our financially controlled civilisation and reject what causes us harm.
Once our core value is energy and not amassing piles of coins it’s a no brainer that we’ll want to nurture our source of wealth and not let it starve in the desert. In an ℮conomy, we will want to maximize life and minimize our impact. It’s not about hugging trees it’s about rendering even more of our rather generous planet habitable by us and other species. That way we’ll be even richer.
If we are an ℮conomy, we are in the business of replenishing the Earth. There is no ‘the environment’ it is not separate to us, it’s not ‘somewhere else’. The environment is us and our home. We and our planet are connected and, until we can leave, we must replenish it.
If we’re smart enough and humble enough to pay attention, we may learn how our home solved the very same problems we now face over the billions of years of her existence. We have been gifted, with a range of elegant solutions for each problem. All the homework has already been done by our home.
We are the result of a very, very big and generous explosion. Whether by Divine will or random chemistry, the fact remains that we are energy (℮) contained within matter (M) learning over time (C²). We are the exquisite solution to our energy and financial crisis.
I have chosen to call this letter ℮ = MC² for a reason. We are the energy that results from the vast process that has happened since the first galactic explosion. We are not just physical but we enjoy insight and sentience. We think and feel. I am sure other animals do too but we are the only animal that has the means to undo the damage we have done. Now, the planet will ultimately repair that damage if we all die out but I’m proposing that we don’t actually have to die out. We just have to rethink our civilisation a bit and revolutionise how we get stuff done. I illustrate this in part III entitled ‘The Energy Revolution or the ℮volution.’
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