I keep trying to tell everyone that it's time to quit using money, but people are very afraid to even visualize a world without money. They conflate what I'm talking about with some kind of system of communism. I'm not talking about that. I don't mean any kind of system where we keep track or keep score of who does or owes what. I'm talking about stopping that altogether and just doing whatever needs to be done out of love.
Everyone gets caught up on "How would I get food? How would I have a place to live?"
But it's not like money gives us food or places to live. If anything it gatekeeps resources. It's used to divide people up and get them working against each other. It makes us inefficient because we need everything checked and balanced instead of just "done well."
How would things work if we didn't use money? Why would anyone do anything for anyone else if not out of being economically coerced or bribed or goaded somehow?
Look:
All children want to DO things. They are full of life and exploration and wonder. They want to learn and to create and experiement. Curiosity and accomplishment are the natural state of humans.
We have to have that actually BEAT OUT OF US.
We have to have this monetary system and this trading system and these defense systems INSTALLED in us. It takes a lot of work to brainwash people into loving money over anything else.
Let's stop doing that.
With robotics and AI we no longer must do anything we don't choose to do. All the people doing stuff JUST for money, stuff that is objectively WORSE for the World and its People can just stop doing all that.
Money is a terrible addiction. Humanity has such a hard time even imagining any kind of world where it really is just GONE. We have done such a number on ourselves.
Not a single other species of animal could possible comprehend money and what it has become. I'm not talking about gift-giving species or animals we have tricked into trading bananas for drugs or whatever. I mean money.
In the deepest, darkest part of your heart you know fully well that your most secret fear is that you are going to fail. It's that you were given a beautiful, rare, perfect, shining, opalescent, irreplaceable ,limitless life and that you aren't doing the right thing with it. That you're going to disappoint Whoever might be watching. God. Your parents. Your innermost Self. Whoever.
If you have your own children then your deepest fear is that harm will come to them, but that's still the same thing: something terrible like that could only happen because you did something wrong because of that stinky stain of failure that you're afraid of.
A species whose deepest fear is "not being good enough, not being worth loving" is not going to just sit around doing nothing if there is not a paycheck to be earned. Look at toddlers. They don't do a dang old thing for money. They do everything for love and curiosity, and all the right reasons. They only do stuff out of fear or self-preservation when they're presented with something that triggers ancient survival buttons.
In "growing up" we start pushing that button all the time for everything. It's not good. It doesn't help us.
We look for security in money.
But money doesn't offer security.
It offers prison. Disconnection.
Imagine alien species trying to understand why we divide up our resources the way we do. They would become apoplectic to think of allowing so much suffering of their own loved ones all because they couldn't think up a better way to divide resources than these silly "dollars." And now the entire globe is about to have a climate catastrophe.
How can anyone possibly think that preserving use of "money" matters at all?
We've got some tough times up ahead and if any of our decisions are motivated by "profit" we are doomed.
We absolutely must leverage what we have available to our species, now. We have the tech and the science and the AI to implement post-scarcity and start battening down the hatches for the coming climate catastrophe.
But money absolutely has got to go.
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