Over at Emergent Times Jon F has an article about Second Tier Money.
It is well worth a read and I will be following the progress of CHE UK closely so that I can get a better idea of what second tier money looks like.
Of course, there is a need in coming years – and it may, or may not, take a long time perhaps measured in decades to fully percolate through the global systems for a different kind of money system. But what exactly has to change?
My first thoughts are that it is not so much the money itself but the way that we value the things that we buy with it. If you want my long term view then we will simply do away with money altogether but I think that is a very long way off indeed.
But perhaps exploring the ways in which a society without money might work may give us some clues as to what might need to happen in the short term.
Will we forget what money looks like?
For a start, I reckon that we will have had to move towards a society where there are a lot more highly evolved beings ( that is the me and you of the distant future). I take the term highly evolved beings from Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsch – basically he uses the term to mean beings that don’t need or want to harm others in any way or even worry about there own state. I suspect this is an idealistic term that an understanding of spiral Dynamics renders quite implausible in the short term for the vast majority of humanity.
But still, that shouldn’t stop us from considering where we would like to get to.
First a couple of positive things that would happen if we didn’t have money and we had everything in place to ensure that things would continue to run smoothly:
- The world would become much more efficient – an awful lot of people are employed managing the money system in one way or another. Most obvious are the banks and insurance – not that I have anything against these or the people they employ (notwithstanding the need for changes post the banking collapse of course).
- I would hope that the removal of the money system would result in a fairer distribution of resources to everyone. This assumes we solve a lot of other physical and social problems as well but lets hope and plan…
Now onto the practicalities.
Take the spiral dynamics model. In very simplistic terms, the colours of red and below can’t make proper plans for the future. We are going to have to make sure that these influences are at a minimum in society. Otherwise, can you imagine the scenes in the supermarket – most people wandering round nicely and taking just what they need for the next few days and then suddenly a gang come in and take loads of alcohol causing chaos and then disappear again.
Whoops, maybe we will need a citizen test that shows people have reached at least a BLUE level of values and are mature enough to use resources responsibly. Without your citizen pass you can’t go shopping. There is a lot to think about here – maybe we should ban alcohol altogether as it fuels unruly behaviour.
And if we don’t have money how do we decide who lives where? Does everyone automatically get a house? Ah, that implies population control as well, voluntarily i would suppose but who knows, – otherwise there would not be enough houses to go round.
And what if someones house burns down. Will people be careful with their property if they don’t have to pay for it.
Or perhaps we would have credits instead that people only get things if they have the right credits? Ah no, that’s just money by a different name.
It seems that it will take a being much more evolved than I am to design a society without money properly. In the mean time, do pop over to Emergent Times for the start of a much more realistic discussion on Second Tier Money.
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