The poor have just indebted their children to a further $700 billion by bailing out the gambling losses of the rich.
Trust in printed promisary notes is now at an all-time low.
The call for a mass change of direction has never been more popular.
What is not fully grasped is the depth iof change that is needed.
The actual degree of change needed goes beyond ending the Iraq war, party politics, better health care, better schooling and a better energy policy.
If we stay locked into the same economic philosophy, Obama will never find the money to pay for half of what is needed.
The only real long-term answer lies in ending the practice of using money as the prime medium of exchange.
We are ensuring future shock by continuing to support an idology that places artificial barriers against investing in the large-scale long-term engineering projects that are needed to stop us from destroying the home planet
The value of money is based on its scarcity. There is not enough printed money to pay for all that needs to be done to get all the people on this panet employed and eating three squares a day. Money will always have endless loopholes for endless corruption. All games of monopoly eventually end up with only one winner, no matter what social rules are imposed.
In the end the only wealth we have lies in our built-in work ethic, our technological genius and our personal sense of honor.
Whether we pay for services via money or some form of trade, it is only via our trust in each other that really ensures a fair deal.
A social philosophy based on Custodianship instead of ownership is both Earth-friendly and people friendly. Its natural ethical foundation trancsends the artificial limitations of Capitalism, Communism and Socialism.
Nothing ensures a pure state of efficiency like a state based on pure ethics
Nor does anything less than an ethical mind-set ensure the highest grades of motivation and creativity.
Custodianship does not reduce all of us to the lowest common denominator, it elevates all of us to a an equal level of wealth and well-being.
Bowing before Baal has to end.
Now seems an ideal moment to get up off our knees and stand on our own two feet.
Check out Buckminster Fuller’s “Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth” for a nonpolitical realization of what real wealth is and how it can be obtained for benefittiing all humans. The political oppositions stated here offer no such solutions.
Very simply. By not indoctrinating children with artificial values.
I have a large family of nine adult children. We all live on the family estate. 40 acres. All the children are home-schooled. Each has been raised to be aware of an an inner sense of ethical conduct. All organic life is imprinted with an instinct of non-trespass. It is easy to make tiny children aware of thr laws of cause and effect. From the age of seven onwards each child gradually learned the value of a chore-based work ethic. By puberty all had learned to appreciate the peace and harmony that comes from the ethics of meticulous sharing in work and communal property. From puberty each tutored themselves in academics.
Each child is gifted with a different talent. One likes bulding; another likes farming; one is a computer wiz; another likes retailing; another is interested in social communication, another is a born healer. We all contribute our individual efforts to the communal weal. Nobody owns anything everybody shares everything. Our joy in life is in our communal spirit and the care we have for each other.
This does not mean that we are not competitive or not involved with creative originality. Those drives are innate within all humans. What it does mean is that we enjoy the game of life - both its ups and downs - and that existence has no meaning unless it is witnessed and shared by others of like mind. We all agree that love is the only life essence that really matters.
All societies are founded on family values. The global population is comprised of millions of family groups sharing the same fundamental values Custodianship is the only economic dynamic that can keep a family linked to a harmonious cooperative. There is no reason why that universally appreciated family ethic cannot keep the world in harmony.
Utopia is not a pipe dream. It is a profoundly simple life-style - founded on a hardworking loving family that finds joy in sharing and taking care of ther planet we live on.
(Gib. I am interested in your website. Will get back to you.)
Couple questions: 1) on the acrage, the children were raised by mom and dad, were they not? They instilled those values and work ethic. Wouldn’t a whole society require a similar relation to a strong centralized government? 2) this sounds close to communism. Is there a difference?
Our future has always been based on child education. How we focus and motivate them deternines the social culture. Government schooling and indoctrination into Capitauism Communism or Socialism will gradually become a past event as more and more young couples realize that there is more worth in creating a sound family than in seeking commercial success. Home-schooling in a myriad differnt forms will replace crowded government classrooms.
Family values are universally based on the same fundamental ethical principles. All responsible parents encourage and try to instill: Sharing; Caring. Work. Courage, Heart, Creative vision, Intellectual stimulation. The commonalty of those family values, if conscientiously applied, will transscend the current artifcial indoctrinations of political and religious ideologies. It will force all of us to concentrate on the commonalty of existential realities. This ensures a new generation focused on responsible stewardship of the home planet.
All social ideologies are communistically based. The variations are superficial and serve only for temporary artifcially motivated forms of national development. Family and extended family values are the only constants. Our evolutionary momentum which is linked to the survival imperative determins and ensures that so too will those same basic principles extend eventually to a global cooperative. We all relied on each other; first in family hunting territories; then clan farming territories; then in National territories; then on international cooperation. This was necessary not only for mutual survival, but also for determining the ground on our reason for being. The next step (or 5th Shift of the mass consciousness) into a global community of mutual reliance is a logical evolutionary imperative.
Everything that has gone before, all the wars and arguments, are simply the teething problems of a young specie busily engaged in its own cycle of evolutionary development.
The new Nuclear Age presents us all with a global paradigm. We work together to manage the planet efficiently, or we die prematurely.
If we survive. The next Age will encourage the responsibility to become terra formers within our solar system.
Our final Age of conscious development secures our species maturity as cosmic transcendalists.
At least that is my take on it. What we are looking at right now is teenage acne.
The problem with communism (so they say) is that the worker is unmotivated to produce high quality results. Capitalism boasts that they have an advantage over this because the worker is paid in proportion to his work. The more he works, and the higher the quality of that work, the greater the pay.
What you’re suggesting seems to be that we can eradicate the pay and replace it with an instilled sense of integrity and hard work ethic, that if raised from childhood to value this frame of mind, all the motivation one will need to add quality to their work will be internal and engraved. You’d have to replace the pay of capitalism with something, otherwise I see your custodial system failing for the same reasons communism does.
The problem with Communism is atheism. Children are natural mystics. They need to be reminded that an invisible and absolute standard of Goodness is witness to their every thought, word and deed. Remove that Presence and try to replace it with a corruptible standard (The State) and you eventually and inevitably have social collapse
The problem with Capitalism is greed and the rebellious nature of religious protestation… Underlying the psyche of the mystic child is the selfish ape. Put too many bananas in front of man and he forgets to be human. Humans have evolved by sharing meticulously. That ethic is what separated us from the ape. If, added to greed, there is any level of Protest about who and what God stands for, then personal ethics deteriorate further. As we speak, Capitalism, which is bowed before the corruptible money god, is in the final throas of collapse.
Yes.
We are all born with a soul that desires self-realization and demands perfection. If the right ethics are evoked in the right sequence by responsible and loving parents, from infancy through childhood, the pubertal initiation produces a deeply committed human being, one who does not need carrots dangled in front of the nose; one who is profoundly concerned with the quality of life; one who realizes that life quality is founded on sincere social cooperation, one who has the desire to be fully self-realized on the death bed, As one example: There are monastries and nunneries all around the world that are filled with such hard-working, God-loving people who are mostly all highly intelligent individuals. As a personal example: I have nine children who have all, without exception, turned out that way.
I don’t see anything inherently wrong with your system, MM, but I don’t see anything convincing about it either. You say, for example, that the problem with communism was atheism. For all I know, this may be true, but it goes against the commonly accepted beliefs of the political and social sciences - common beliefs have been wrong before, but they’ve never been proven wrong without mountains of evidence and powerful reasoning.
I believe that the system you describe worked for your family, but you’ll need a lot more than your personal family experiences to convince a whole society that it ought to abandon the systems on which it most highly depends and invests its livelihood. Perhaps a whole series of well control experiments dealing with similar social groups like your family under a wide variety of circumstances and challenges, and then more studies on larger groups with a similar variety of circumstances and challenges, and then more studies, and then more, and then more… you get my point?
And who know - you yourself may be surprised by the results.
I don’t need large scale tests. Changing circumstances initiate social change. New ideas arise from them. When 14 generations of South African economic effort collapsed it changed my family fortunes. That mass event forced me into a new way of thinking. An economic sunami is sweeping world wide. Few realize that the world we have known is undergoing a mass change of consciousness. We are not experiencing an economic recession or even a depression. We are entering the vacuum, or better said, the synapse, that preceeds a mass change of direction. The cashless global society I am talking about is inevitable and just around the corner. Privately I first broached it twenty years earlier. That is when I began educating my kids in a new way, in order to prepare them for a New Age paradigm. Then five years ago I privately published a book about it which nobody noticed. Just a year or two ago I was laughed at for mentioning it on these public forums. Just recently I am being met mostly by a stunned silence. Everybody is hoping things will go back to what they once were. When they don’t everybody will no doubt tell me that my predictions were self-evident.
GM will be asking for bail money. The finance institutes got bail money. In the eighties the savings and loans were bailed.
We have socialized risk but no socialized profit. What is wrong with that picture. If it is not Facism it sure smells like it.
What Fuller had to say about this is that real wealth is not to be found in static entities such as cash; it is found in the type of human ingenuity that was capable of using levers and pulleys to move objects beyond human strength to do so and to use computers for communication and informational exchanges unimagined only a century ago. But little value is placed on such ingenuity except in times of war, e.g., in WWII trashed rubber and metals were converted into tires and weaponry. WWII got us out of the great depression. Where did all of this wealth come from, since we were told that our economy had bottomed out? It certainly did not come from cash. It came from a spirit of cooperation, as MM notes well. For this wealth to help us in our current economic condition, the “We” must become more important than the "I’. From cooperation comes inventive solutions. From isolation comes panic.
The most important job in a cashless society is for parents to educate their kids at home.
All the graduates can run the planet.
Net result: A well adjusted global society. Zero unemployment
Ahh. But that woulld be too simple. Also it would require far too much integrity and personal commitment. We like it complex and f##ed up so that we can sit on the side-lines and jeer at it.
If only today’s problems could be so simplified as to suggest that their solutions would entail some global gestapo! What a limited understanding of both problems and solutions!
Rugged individualism is an American myth dependent on a viable frontier. The land frontier has been exhausted. The space frontier still belongs to the distant future unless humans from all parts of the globe pool their intellectual resources. The brain/mind frontier is open for grabs.
A hermit in his cave or guru on his mountaintop either communicates, which takes at least two, or has nothing to say.
“So, planners, architects, and engineers take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsideness will be increasingly short-lived.”–Fuller.
These are not liberal vs conservative ideas; they are survival ideas!
And so Big Brother becomes invisible! And Goodness and Presence in capital letters! - but invisible. A theocratic utopia… just wonderful. Sounds almost like the Islamic family>kin>clan>sect structure. Just different words…
Santa Claus has a similar set up. He knows what you’ve been doing, He know’s if you been bad…
I’m sure that the invisible Standard of Goodness is making a list and checking it twice…
