To Be Clear
To be clear, I was going to be part of the opposition party regardless. I expect you'll also find that to be a good idea.
To be clear, I was going to be part of the opposition party regardless. Because, to be clear, the ruling party is Money, and the current hellscape is whatever government Money has seen fit to buy for us.
Look around. This is what Money has purchased.
Money has purchased an endless onslaught of superstorms and has made it illegal to stop making them worse, and even more illegal to try to ameliorate the situation in any way, because it is now illegal to try to make anyone with money make less money—or even make money less quickly than the maximum possible rate.
Money has purchased indefinite indentured servitude for everyone who works.
Money has purchased for you the expedience of popularity-based fund drives to buy a few extra years of life for the injured and critically ill—or for those who have lost everything due to the new unnatural catastrophes—if you still have friends and acquaintances to milk for charity.
Money has purchased a steeply tilted slope to extract real estate and generational wealth from those who have so far managed to hang onto any—and indentured servitude for the rest. See above.
Money has purchased the right to perpetrate for-profit monopolies, letting them determine for themselves what levels of critical services to grudgingly provide and to whom, with the typical case being “as little as they can get away with.” Medicine, health insurance, basic utilities, infrastructure support—wherever it’s been privatized.
That’s not everywhere yet, but I promise you there’s more of that coming.
Money has purchased legislatures and judges to make sure that everything that Money does to fuck society, either as individuals or as an aggregate, is legal, or, wherever it might be somewhat slightly less than legal, is unprosecuted. Money has literally purchased impunity.
Money has purchased all of your private identifying information so that it can show everybody, individually, whatever targeted lies it takes to make you hand over adulation, votes, children to sacrifice as soldiers, enthusiastic support of resource plundering abroad despite every atrocity that comes along with it—and any remaining scraps of money you still have.
Money has purchased laws to make it illegal for you not to hand over more of your remaining wealth to Money at every opportunity in ever-increasing amounts in exchange for mere subsistence.
Money has purchased armies of heavily armed cops to protect their hoarded winnings, especially where those winnings have been converted into material goods.
Money has purchased atrocity after atrocity at ever increasing scales.
Money has done this because these things have been experimentally determined to gather more money to Money. There may be many better ways, but there’s no need to consider any of them. These are proven to work. Change is risky. Therefore, these strategies stay.
The Capitalism game is over. Money has won. Money has collapsed into a black hole in the middle of the board and no remaining money can escape. Any money still outside the event horizon is circling ever closer, waiting to fall in and never come back out.
So today I am here to remind you that money is imaginary. It always has been.
It’s certainly just a number now. The last scraps of money that are circling the event horizon—the last scraps the soon-to-be first trillionaires are fighting over—are the remnants of the scoring system for a video game us amateurs aren’t allowed to play anymore, and nothing more.
Without money there is still land to grow food, and the food itself, and the ability to move it toward hungry bellies. Without money there are still houses and buildings with apartments for people to sleep in, and people and material to maintain them. Without money there are still teachers to teach and doctors to diagnose and treat and workers of all kinds to work to maintain the roads and rails and utilities and care for the sick and young and elderly.
Nobody does this stuff for money. Not as such. You do it for the things that money is supposed to promise you: for enough healthy food and a comfy place to rest in safety and fun things to do in your downtime so you can recharge. For the promise of being taken care of when you’re too old or sick or just too damn tired to work. For the opportunity to travel or pick up hobbies or hang out from time to time with friends or loved ones. For enough slack to support a family full of non-earning children and support a carer, maybe, so you can concentrate on doing stuff that’s useful to other people.
Promise someone all of these things and they’ll be happy to provide what services to others compassion demands of them—so that others have what they need too.
Because it wouldn’t be fair otherwise.
To most people raised like I was, I’m sure that sounds like an unsupportable, idealized claim. But maybe you should ask John Fire Lame Deer, of the Mineconju-Lakota Sioux, whose mother’s name was Sally Red Blanket and whose father’s name was, aptly, Silas Fire Let-Them-Have-Enough. In his book, Lame Deer, Seer of Visions, he says this one thing you might have read before:
“Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man's worth couldn't be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn't cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don't know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.”
This was how things worked for them for at least the five hundred years or more from the founding of the Seven Council Fires (around 1300 CE) to the arrival of who they still, magnanimously, though possibly with more than a little bitterness, refer to as their white brothers.
Investment banking is quite a bit younger in comparison.
I’m saying that, as a system, the Seven Council Fires system has shown itself to be more stable—less destructive to the environment, say, and less subject to outbreaks of mass atrocity—than any economic system based on ownership, hoarding, and enforcing scarcity while also demanding a continuing exponential growth rate for wealth that the simple laws of physics demonstrate cannot possibly be indefinite.
As proof, you can clearly see we’ve hit the functional limit. We are past The $ingularity. We can simply declare that the numbers be larger by 𝕏% every year, but the increase would be meaningless. As of this moment, the only things the ultrawealthy cannot buy are one another. They can buy nuclear reactors and aircraft carriers and military forces and arsenals and space programs and governments at whim. And have. They can only lose money in significant ways to one another or due to terrible, terrible choices in gambling—with one another.
I mentioned fairness above because humans, as apes, are creatures that value fairness and equity. We see the same urges for fairness in our fellow apes in the wild. We invented money as a fairness tool—as a way of keeping score of how much work someone has done so that they can prove that they deserve to bring home enough to feed their family from a market far enough away from home that they aren’t known by sight. Perhaps the root of the problem stems from building a society where proof that one’s children deserve feeding is required. Regardless. If money no longer is calibrated to the value of a laborer’s sweat, then it has no meaning at all. We should consider doing without it altogether.
We know it can be done. We have numerous clear examples to use as templates.
In the meanwhile, our struggle has to be against Money and those who have hoarded it to the point that they’ve broken the whole fucking game. We have to let them know that they can’t have our respect just for racking up a high score on their video game. We have to let them know that we are no longer for sale as livestock. We have to teach them that their huge-ass high score does not insulate them from the consequences of being a massive dick. We have to show them as often as necessary that hoarding what ordinary people need to live will not be tolerated. We have to show them that hiring cops to beat us for trying to take back what we all jointly own will earn them beatings as well—and beatings for the cops too.
When they learn that we are no longer willing to debase ourselves for money—that we are no longer willing to be hired to fight each other for their amusement, to perform for them or pleasure them for money—then they will also realize that their high scores mean nothing. That their high scores don’t even mean anything to each other.
Then we can start a new game on even footing.
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