Money is Dangerous and Primitive
In this fraught time of Global Pandemic 2020, nothing has become more obvious than the Achilles heel of humanity, the need to pay for everything with money. All transactional systems are breaking down and people and governments are left scrambling to pay for it all. If you can’t pay, you can starve, become homeless, go out of business and yes, die. As we helplessly watch markets crash and burn one has to ask why? What’s the point? All that “investment” was in what, for what? Is money really more valuable than life itself or only a way to lord power and control over others? Ironically, at this moment in time, cash money is literally dangerous as a vector of contagion but that’s not money’s real danger to our well being which is much more far reaching. The disease spreading is only an unpleasant side effect and can be mitigated. I’m not talking Ism’s here. Capitalism, Socialism and Communism are all arbitrary man-made models of payment for goods and services and distribution thereof. But what are we really after? Answer: Quality of Life.
Listen carefully to almost any political discussion, or really almost any conversation, and they almost invariably lead to something about money. How will you pay for it? How much are taxes going to be? What’s the deficit? What’s the national debt? How much does it cost? What minimum wage is acceptable? What did you pay? How much do we owe? On and on, money is THE central concern that wins the day. But is money killing us and the biosphere too? Think about the respit the Earth is experiencing right now with a stop of flights, commuting, operating businesses and factories. Pollution is clearing up all over the planet, almost overnight. Carbon emissions are dropping precipitously. What can we learn from that? What can we do to normalize this simpler life without dying out? Could we prosper and thrive in a new way? Perhaps we are being given a golden opportunity to reimagine the status quo for the 21st Century.
Income. Taxes. Bills. Insurance. Stocks. Bonds. Fees. Tolls. Tuition. Medical Costs. Wages. Groceries. Rent. Mortgages. Banking. Interest. Credit. Prices. Sales. Advertising. Spam. Scams. Crimes. Wealth. Poverty. These all have their roots in money and money has its roots in evil, so they say. And I say there is a lot of truth to that but more to the point, money can and may very well become obsolete and using it after that point IS evil. We can call it a necessary evil for now. IF money didn’t exist, ALL of those things listed above would disappear with it. That seem preposterous, I know, but only because that’s how we were trained to think. We’ve been taught that money is essential to life, even though for most of the Earth’s History life has thrived without it and we only got it a few thousand years ago and we are the ONLY creature on Earth who thinks that money is needed. We humans are weird like that. Many will claim that money has allowed us to thrive and modernize and evolve and to some extent that is true. However, in a more cooperative, compassionate historical timeline we could have done all this and more without money, but that’s conjecture. We can evolve past money is more the point.
Let’s be honest—money is an imaginary construct representing some intangible “value” in some non-existent “location” that someone “claims” exists but can never really be “found.” Sure, you can visit Fort Knox and see oodles of shiny gold metal in neat stacks as though that really had any more value than water, which you actually need to live. You can live quite well without gold so we know it’s not required (but it is very shiny and cool). Modern money is even less tangible and is literally 1’s and 0’s in a database held closely and securely by banks. You can’t eat 1’s and 0’s but you CAN transfer some of them electronically to a grocer’s bank account and they will give you something real you can eat. That’s because someone transferred some 1’s and 0’s to your account, like your employer or Aunt Mimi, who got someone else to transfer into their accounts and so forth. You will NEVER find the original transaction that actually created any real value for the imaginary money we rely on. It’s basically a big shell game controlled by hidden powers that keep the masses locked up in The Money Matrix—who knows why?
So how WOULD we pay for things without money, you ask? Aren’t you talking about Communism? Answers: Things are actually free and we are being ripped off by having to pay for them and no, Democracy without money is not communism. We got the Sun and the Earth for free, right? Then why do things on Earth and under the Sun have prices? Who makes the price and why? Usual Answer: We added labor and intellectual property to increase the value of those “free” raw materials that we bought from someone who extracted them and processed them at great cost and transported them to us using gas, trucks, and more labor, etc. that all cost money so they have to pass along those costs plus the magic profit factor where money is made from thin air.
Yes, that is the chain of production we know well: Extract⟹Transport⟹Process⟹Transport⟹Manufacture⟹Distribute⟹Repeat. But we also know that almost any of these processes can be automated, and have been. Extractive machines, Autonomous trucks, Robotic factories and distribution centers—all very real now. What’s more, developing these things to their full potential is the ONLY thing between us and money-free society like in Star Trek world. Well they had Latinum which was a transactional placeholder sort of like Bitcoin but it wasn’t front and center in their operations at all. A fully automated chain of production obviates money for the essentials of life.
But doesn’t everyone become lazy and unmotivated in a society that provides the basics for free? Not necessarily. It only means the baseline for living is elevated and poverty is a thing of the past or at least is redefined. There will always be people who are more inspired and more motivated who would find more interesting ways to spend their time. Also, there would be a vested interest in maintaining and caring for Nature and the infrastructure of automation and participating in the social fabric, raising kids, teaching, creating, etc. Indeed, why even care if another fellow is lazy and boring as long as it doesn’t effect you? I don’t see my cats judging each other because one likes to go out and chase birds and the other likes to sit around all day. Who cares? It’s not as though we did anything to deserve the free Sun or the Earth. We never earned those. We only care because of money itself and we don’t want lazy people leaching off our hard work. If everyone became lame and fat like some sort of Wall-E dystopia then the system would likely fail and we’d be back to our old selves scrapping for a living. In reality, everything would change without money—for the better. The reason for most crimes would be gone. The reason for spam and ads bombarding us constantly would be gone. People could pursue higher things and live much more enriched lives, to even move on to outer space for those that wanted to.
Money is boring. Chasing it. Worrying about it. Working your life away in pursuit of it. Saving for retirement. Boring. All that time for 1’s and 0’s someone says is worth it all. In a way, a world without money seems inconceivable but what’s bothering me is I can’t quite figure out what makes it so special or necessary. I understand the value of food, water and a roof over our heads. But those could easily be provided by automated systems. I could see money being replaced with some sort of social credit system where you get to move up on a list and have access to nicer places or properties by virtue of good deeds in the community.
Money is also primitive. A truly advanced civilization would have no need for money and futurists and science fiction writers have no problem envisioning a post-monetary society. It’s a legacy from cruder, more basic times when we had no other way to exchange things of value besides barter where we made honest trades of needed items or those we could trade to others for same. But in a world of free and abundant energy, replicators, 3-D printers, automation, AI, robots, etc. things can simply appear on-demand and no one need care about the cost. It was free for you and it’s free for me. Big deal. It’s sort of like making a big deal that you get to breathe air for free which is absurd. Yet air is a Big Deal. Trying going a few minutes without it. It’s almost as though the more we actually need something, the less we value it. Plants give us food and more seeds and trees give us fruit over and over and there is no price tag on them. But we primitively insist on making everything cost something. That will all change some day when we are tired of the medieval game and realize we’ve been getting ripped off all those centuries.
Of course it all gets back to ownership and what constitutes ownership of, for example, property. I say do away with the notion of ownership and replace it with stewardship. You are designated a steward of a given property sort of like a lease and to keep it you have to take good care of it and be a good neighbor. I could see a world where we can freely move about because we aren’t tied to our free possessions. One big Global AirBnB. I think we’ll take that free electric fusion plane down to Rio today and hang out for a month.
Regardless of whether it’s practical or even desirable to do away with money, we could still eliminate poverty and reduce the cost of living to a nominal amount. Dial it all back to a simpler life with more time for our friends and families and our communities and much less crime, anxiety, depression and all the ugly side effects of money or lack thereof. All I am saying it let’s re-examine the whole model of “work for money to pay for things” and ask if it really makes sense in a world that is highly automated.
Look at how an investor makes money. They identify a hopefully good investment using smarts and intuition and if they start out with enough money invested the in the right things, that money magically grows to enormous wealth with very little actual labor or effort. In fact, a relatively small investment can have a huge payoff over time. Or more likely, a huge investment can have a huge payoff in a short time. Investing in an automated chain of production is more like creating a golden goose that keeps paying off forever, not just the investor, but everybody.
The danger of money becomes even more apparent when you witness the global economic meltdown that occurs from even a few days, let alone a few months of economic shutdown as in Pandemic 2020. Workers lose jobs, can’t pay for basics, default on loans, good businesses go bankrupt, markets crash and recession or worse ensues creating peril and insecurity for billions of people, except those at the top of the food chain. A post-monetary society would be free from such unnecessary strife. Medical and food supplies would continue uninterrupted and autonomous delivery would be disease free. Robots and drones don’t get sick and don’t transmit viruses or any other biological disease. They can also grow foods without pesticides. Our whole society would be much healthier if highly automated.
We’re really not as in love with money as one might think. We’re in love with the things money gets us—a better quality of life. If most of those things could be provided automatically, then it would be fantastic and would basically extend the promise of the free Sun and free Earth to free things on Earth. Free food produced by automated hydro and aeroponic systems. Free transport. Free energy produced by automated clean fusion and solar systems. Free homes built by macro-scale 3-D printing architectural robots. Free water cleaned and distributed by automated systems. And lot and lots of FREE TIME to do the things we love.
This essay in part was based on my book where I go into much deeper detail about the coming changes such as the role of Nature, Cosmic Resources, Governance and much more: Wealth and the End of Money: Automating Utopia
