Malthus Was Wrong

I actually wrote the text below a couple of years ago, but it's never been published until now.

Malthus Was Wrong

The major reason that we're in the fix we're in is that many years ago a man named Malthus looked around and said, "There's not enough." And he made such a convincing case for it that the world economy dances to his tune to this very day. What's more, nearly every facet of our lives is informed by this idea, and we're almost totally unconscious of it. And it demonstrably wrong.
Buckminster Fuller's argument throughout most of his life was that we really do have enough, we're just being horribly inefficient about using it.
I don't think that, as it says in the Bible, "Love of money is the root of all evil", but so much of our self-worth is tied up with how financially successful we perceive ourselves to be that it might as well be true.

If money were abolished (or preferably, simply atrophied away to nothing), perhaps we would be less eager to measure other people's worth at all. If I'm not your competition or your friend or your lover, what's left? What's my role? Perhaps the mere existence of roles and our perceived need to assign other people to them is conditioned by our sense of lack and insufficiency. Perhaps the disappearance of roles would facilitate the disappearance of our defensiveness and fear and allow us to be together simply enjoying whatever is present in the moment. Imagine no longer wasting mental and emotional energy on preparation for defending ourselves against the possible hostile actions of others, actions that almost never happen even in our present world anyway.
So what has to change for a money-less world (or at least world-view) to take hold? First we need to realize our interdependency. No one can do entirely for him/herself and expect to rise above mere survival. Specialization, as we have learned throughout history, allows us to be more efficient and to emphasize quality, But a competitive economy works at cross purposes to quality. Such an economy rewards mass production of cheap products at low prices. Quality is the luxury of the rich.
If we realize our interdependency, then the next logical step is to realize the need to be in service to that. If I understand that whatever I do or produce ultimately reflects back to me, then I must create for others what I would want for myself. From a purely pragmatic point of view, if I contribute to fulfilling the needs of others, then others will want to fulfill my needs. Reputation will mean something, and quality work will be in demand. If I produce quality chairs, then soon I will not be able to keep up with demand. I will also have incentive to help upgrade the skills of lesser crafts people, and if they wish to improve the quality of their work, they will be seeking me out. Thus quality constantly increases.

But I Digress

If some of the previous posts seem to be off-topic, my apologies. All will be clear anon.

So what might a world without money look like? For it to work we'd all have to start taking care of each other, mindful that we ARE our brothers' keepers. Remember in the Bible what the first incidence of competition was like? That's right, it was Cain and Abel. To refresh your memory, Cain is a herdsman and Abel is a farmer. They both offer some of their produce to God, but God likes Abel's stuff best. (What does that say about the merits of vegetarianism?) So Cain gets jealous, kills Abel and tries to hide the body. God shows up and says, "So, Cain, where's your brother?" Cain says, "I dunno. Am I my brother's keeper?" And God says, "You bet your sweet bippy you are! And I'm gonna make the rest of your life miserable as a result!"

Okay, so I paraphrased a bit.

You might say that we invented money so that we could get away with not taking care of each other, and by that I mean that we were trying to assure that individual transactions were "fair". First of all, "fair" is dualistic. "That person over there should get as much value as I do over here." Now that there's self-and-other in play, the next step is fear: "What if he's got more than me? How will I survive?" From there we move right into greed: "I need to make sure that I get more than him so that I'll be safe."

So now fair was not fair enough, and we ought to be making a "profit" on every transaction. You can see where that led. Some folks have been able to get away with not delivering full value for the money, so some folks got richer and most other folks got poorer, because it's too arduous to try to figure out if every transaction is fair.

What if we suddenly all remembered that we are all connected, all in this together? Now it makes sense that Jesus passed out only two commandments, and the second was "Love thy neighbor as thyself". Because he is! You want to take care of yourself, don't you? Well?

If we were devoted to taking care of others-as-self, we'd make sure that everybody we encountered was doing okay, had enough. And we would trust that we would be treated the same. How would we do that? By giving away the fruits of our labor and receiving freely-given fruits of other peoples labor. Economists will gleefully point out that barter is clumsy: a bushel of apples doesn't equal a banjo. (I have friends who would say that the person who got the apples got the better deal, but that's another story.)

But we're not talking about barter here. There's a principle here, and it is "to each according to their needs; from each according to their abilities." I can hear the cries of "Socialism!!" all the way over here. More about that in another post. For now imagine that currency suddenly disappears and that we smart enough to keep on doing exactly what we've been doing all along. Truckers drive trucks, therapists do therapy, presidents preside, etc. The difference is that when we go to the store to get something, it's free. Need flour? It's free. Need a new car? It's free. Need to fly to Timbuktu? It's free. Need lumber to do your carpentry? It's free.

Now somebody is going to object, "But people will just quit working and hoard stuff!" Not if they're conscious of non-separation they're not, and it's going to take everybody remembering that for this society to even start. That's what the Shift is all about. You'd feel bad if you weren't contributing something, and you'd feel bad if you were taking more than you need and that some folks might not get their needs met as a result. So contributing your energy will be what gives you satisfaction in life. Love feel much better than guilt or smugness.

Let's look at some side affects: doctors would doctor because they love doing it, and insurance companies would disappear. Farmers would farm because they want to, and they would be able to revive small farming because the "economics of scale" would disappear. Small crafts people would be able to replace factories, because quality would replace cheapness. Banks will disappear with the rest of the financial industry. I'll be doing a lot of posts on what will change, but feel free to chime in here anytime....

Now the objection will be raised "What about all those factory jobs that will be lost?" Jobs? There's no such thing as a job anymore. Wow! Think about that! You can spend your time doing something you love and giving it away. What's going to be rewarded here is quality, and you can't produce quality if you don't love what you're doing. So how are you going to build houses? You get a contractor (who by the way gets immense satisfaction from what s/he does) to round up all the needed workers and gets them to commit to building a house for you. Now you really appreciate all the great work this person has done for you, so you recommend him or her to all your friends that need housing. Word gets around that he delivers quality (because all his workers love what they do), and suddenly the contractor has plenty of steady work for the whole crew.

So what about the chores that nobody wants to do? Hard manual labor, jobs with a high distaste factor, like cleaning toilets? Who's going to love those jobs? Will the entire infrastructure collapse?

Stay tuned....

Two Hoaxes

As a species mankind has been the victim of two all-pervading hoaxes.
The first is the hoax of the personal self, and the second, derived from the first, is the hoax of death.

The first is the result of an honest mistake. Our senses, limited as they are, are producing a lie. I seem to be over here, doing whatever with this body that I seem to control. The "doing" produces the illusion of time and space, when in reality there is only Here and Now. I thought "I" just did something, when in reality that something is already a memory which presents itself to the pure awareness that is the only "thing" Here Now. Even the thought of "awareness" is an object of awareness, not awareness itself at all. Just a thought, just an object of awareness, fundamentally no different from a pretty girl in view, although much more attractive. I say that because we glom (for lack of a better word) onto our thoughts and sense data without the least hesitation, unlike what we go through regarding the girl.

So we, in affect, construct this world, this alleged reality because we have similar senses and therefore agree (sometimes) on what they are presenting. But we know, for instance, that there are radio waves, gamma rays, ultra violet and infrared light, and who knows what else penetrating or bouncing off every cell in our bodies all the time. Yet we choose to pretend that what we see is all there is, just as we choose to pretend that there is some entity called a "self" that no one has ever seen or produced for viewing under any form of light, yet that somehow has independent existence. It's a agreement that we've created based on the assumption that that apparent entity over there seems to behave as we do. Another term for it is "consensus reality".

We operate in this consensus reality for some "time", and then we "die", or so we believe. We base this assumption on the memory of witnessing some other entity stop functioning in an integrated manner and not reverse that state. Yet we make the assumption that this entity has experienced something. But if it experienced something it would not be dead. We have some anecdotal evidence of near-death
experiences, but we have no evidence of anybody experiencing death.

And how do we explain dreamless sleep or anesthesia? If you've ever had a tooth extracted under sodium pentothal the experience from the inside resembles a time discontinuity. The doctor sticks a needle in your arm, you pass out almost instantaneously, and then you are awake (notice I didn't say "You wake up"). The usual comment is "So, when are you guys gonna get started?", and the usual response is, "We've already finished." From the point of view of consciousness, no time passed between being out cold and being awake. Now if you look carefully, that's the only true point of view. Everything else is inference or speculation, in other words, an idea.

If we apply that same test to death, it has to look like, "You approach loss of consciousness you are awake somewhere." No discontinuity. We can speculate to the end of time what happens after "death", but from the point of consciousness, there is no death. If there is experience there is consciousness. Period. So awareness always is. Always.

Fear

The more I look around me, the more clearly I see that it's all about fear. And what we fundamentally fear is death (FOD). Why are we so afraid of death? All the evidence from science, religion, and everywhere else points to the startling fact that death is an illusion, an illusion resulting from the illusion that the separate Self is real. As Wei Wu Wei put it,

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself--
And there isn't one.

So we're afraid of anything that might result in our death. If we could realize No-Self, we would fear nothing. As it is we've created a society/culture where that FOD, since we're unwilling to actively confront it, manifests itself in lots of smaller fears, all of which are bulwarks of and reinforcements for the Illusion of a Separate Self (ISS)

We're afraid of Not Getting Enough (NGE) and that if we don't get enough for long enough, we will surely die. But if we could realize No-Self, we would see that since Everybody Else is co-extensive with us, we would take care of each other as a matter of course. Love your neighbor as yourself (because that neighbor IS yourself).

The Not-Getting-Enough plays out as "I gotta make sure I get My Share." This leads us to guard and protect My Share. Even little children's first projection into NGE is "That's Not Fair!". See how early this sense of lack is conditioned. Prior that is the learned sense of "Yours and Mine". Again it's ISS.

The habit of NGE is institutionalized as Money. Money is there to make sure that each one of us Gets My Share. So NGE also points back to ISS. The first crime outside the Garden of Eden was Cain slaying Abel because he thought he wasn't getting his share. Envy and Jealosy are manifestations of NGE. NGE combined with these emotions translates to a new fear: I AM Less Than You (LTY) because I HAVE less than you. If I am LTY than it's natural to fear you--more ISS.

The fear of LTY plays out in a variety of ways. I can suck up to you to keep in your favor. That's institutionalized as feudalism. Or I can try to get more stuff than you so that I'll be more powerful than you. That leads to a Warlord mentality.
Our modern version of this is corporate power. If I have more employees and more profits than you, I have more power than you. I am not LTY, therefore I don't have to fear you.

So we have made Stuff (which is essentially neutral) merely a pawn in the game. Greed, too, is a manifestation of the fear of NGE. Looks like I'm going to implicate all the Seven Deadly Sins, doesn't it? Okay, let's look at the rest of them. The Seven Deadly Sins are Anger, Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy, and Gluttony. We've already covered Greed and Envy. Anger protects ISS, and so it points back to FOD. Pride is a cover for it's opposite fear: LTY. Lust is a manifestation of NGE, but it's really an artifact of our monogamous, post-agrarian culture. More on that later. Gluttony is clearly NGE, but the fact that we label it as one of the Seven suggests that it can be extended symbolically as Acquisitiveness, also an artifact of our monogamous, post-agrarian culture.

Sloth is a secondary sin. The real message of Sloth is "If you don't do your share, then you'll get some of MY share. So I'll be NGE and That's Not Fair." Contrast it with Gluttony where the message is "You're taking more than your share." Translation: "You're taking MY share."

That was easy, wasn't it? All this behavior is a manifestation or result of ISS, and to reiterate, if we see through, awaken from ISS, we would really see that our neighbor is ourself, and making sure the my neighbor is taken care of, has enough, becomes our default behavior.

Look for future posts on Lust and Stuff.

Not So Far-Fetched, Eh?

Since the last post, trillions of dollars have spewed from the US Government's coffers to shore up the collapsing financial system, the auto industry, and other segments of the economy. If all this fails--and no one has come up with a better idea that hasn't failed (e.g. supply-side, trickle-down economics)--it's quite possible that currencies as we know them will be a thing of the past.

If so, what are we left with? Answer: the intrinsic value of goods and services. What's no longer here is a convenient yardstick to compare one thing against another. Conceivably, such a yardstick could evolve on its own as time goes on, but in the short run people with no currency can't buy the necessities of life. People could starve, be evicted, and go naked in the midst of immense wealth simply because we are all focused on the economic fairness that a currency allegedly provides.

The point is that nothing has lost its value simply because we have no way to measure it. In the absence of money, people instinctively begin to barter goods and services, and that's fine as far as it goes. The problem is that we are so conditioned by the presence of money that we would try to make sure that every bartered transaction is "fair", and we will be so hamstrung if it isn't that we won't trade until it is.

This attitude is based on the notion of scarcity. From scarcity comes hoarding. Both are based on fear: fear that we won't survive if there isn't "enough." Wealth, as we normally understand it is a form of hoarding. It is based on the notion that if we put enough of an economic armor around ourselves, we will be "safe." The chink in the armor is capsulized in the saying "You can't take it with you".

All of our notions about scarcity, safety, and wealth are based on the illusion of separate, individual existence. Advances in physics, biology, ecology, and other sciences should convince the most hard-boiled among us the this really is an illusion. As an example, our bodies seem to be the same from day to day, but if one looks at what's really going on from a systems point of view, we are constantly changing: inputting oxygen, outputting carbon dioxide and other waste products of the food that we input to keep the system functioning. I'd have to check the numbers, but I seem to recall that nearly every cell in our bodies is replaced in about seven years. The "body" is a matrix for all this activity. For this to work, the entire ecology has to support it.

Given this fact, the notion of getting and spending have to be called into question. Stuff flows in, stuff flows out. More accurately we're looking at the flow of stuff through matrices, and it's only because we can't apply our five senses (especially sight and hearing) to what's going on in the microscopic realm, that we can't operate from this perspective in the first place. It normally takes holding this conception in mind constantly to not operate this way.

But there are circumstances that push us out this set of attitudes. For instance, how do people behave in emergencies and national disasters? They almost automatically start helping each other. Newscasts always show neighbors helping neighbors in the aftermath of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, as well as man-made disasters such as war, often at significant risk to themselves. Our better instincts demand it, and only the most fearful can resist the urge. People who rescue others, soldiers who act to protect their buddies almost universally are puzzled when we label them as heroes. They always say, "I was just doing what anyone would do."

My guess is that this is what we'd do if confronted with massive economic collapse. We would make sure that everybody has what they need. Our better instincts are to protect the survival of the group rather than the largely illusory individual.

Next post: Redefinition of wealth.