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Originally Posted by can't sit still  Fido, if you go back in time ,we didn't need money. As hunter-gatherers, earth provided security. Imagine yourself in the pre-agrarian days; EurasiaNet Civil Society - Turkey: Discovery of 12,000-year-old Temple Complex Could Alter Theory of Human Development
"Look at this", he says, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It’s a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt."
It was only after we distanced ourselves from an immediate food supply that we invented non-barter means of exchange. We distanced ourselves a bit from the security of hunter-gatherers.
It's over-simplification but, essentially, money represents security. Like any organism, we focus on survival and security. Money is a necessity to a non-agrarian, non-barter society.
We've been impovereshed by those who collect the fruits of our aggregate labor and use these fruits for their benefit not ours.
We believe that we own our property. You could have 20 acres of good land and get by fine. If we don't pay property taxes, GOV throws us off. You are not allowed to live if you don't pay.
Fido wrote "We have to be willing to disorganize to tear it down. We have to be willing to act as we see ourselves: as individuals. We don't have to do anything. We have to undo everything."
I find it difficult to envision a scenario where it is possible to undo everything without "undoing" society and security.
Do you have a framework in mind that would exorcise the more obvious evils of GOV without resulting major upsets to the production and distribution of food? |
What you are talking about is something very evident to me as a reader of Anthropology. You are talking about a change of forms, in this case, of economy; but a change in every case of forms of relationship. When people lived in small, honor societes, there was fairly constant warfare, and general warfare, when populations grew too large. Law, Western Law, which is only another form of relationship, has been introduced into societies in no sense aware of or prepared for the implication and consequences, and money is a part of that paradigm. I don't think history ever saw people dispossessed short of being killed. Now law does for many what war in the past could not, and that is to drive them to the margins of life. Money does not mean security, but poverty. Everyone has to live on today's dollar for example, but America has been sold yesterday. If you can control the money supply you can not only ruin the money, but an entire people, and controlling the money is easy when it is paper. So, if you want to rob from every widow on a pension, and every one living on an entiltment or fixed income, just inflate the currency and he will buy less for more until he is broke. America has been bought cheap and sold dear for a long time by the same class, and it has located both wealth and property in the same pocket, and so; the security of the rich is no more evident than the security of the poor which has evaporated with their wealth. For one thing, the rich will feast on the rich until only one is proclaimed King. But, for the poor, their security, their rights, and even their lives and the lives of their children will increasingly hang on the whims of the rich until property, wealth, and law have no meaning. For property to have meaning it must be owned. Property has no meaning for the poor. What they have is theirs, and is not yours.
No revolution is possible unless people are first willing to share their last bite with their neighbor. Revolution is as possible as people are willing to forget the past and get on with a new future. I would start with constituting a new government as if the old did not exist; and then I would vote it all soft power, the power to do good. The danger to people resulting from revolution comes from reaction. The danger to revolutions comes when they are taken over by ideas. Since revolutions are perilous, no one should hasten them. Just withdraw your support, your faith, and your hope that government will ever manage to deliver justice, tranquility, or general welfare, and start getting to know people around whose help you will need when everyone does as you, and turns away from the government for good.