I’ve felt it necessary to create this page, as most people I talk to online don’t seem to understand where I’m coming from. Admittedly, some of my arguments, without their proper context, probably make me look like someone who upholds the status quo, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if anything, my views today are even further out of orbit, which might explain the misunderstanding.
As it turns out, this page is a great idea for forcing me to cast my opinions and ideas in some coherent form, while also having a handy link to share if someone is interested for any further context to my remarks.
A (very) brief history
In 2010, I came out all guns blazing against money, markets and the capitalist system, with The Free World Charter – a document defining a near-future world without money. This thought-train led to a spate of interviews, talks, two books, videos, a wiki page, and several offshoot projects designed to support and embrace this brave new post-money world.
As anti-capitalists go, I may have even been considered a thought-leader on the topic, with a small following, aspiring to such titans in the field as Peter Joseph, Jacque Fresco and Richard D, Wolff, etc. (The reason I state this is to leave the reader in no doubt as to my ‘anti-system’ credentials)
Possibly my most important achievement in this has been the founding of Sharebay – a free goods and services sharing site that is still going strong today.
So what changed?
The most succinct thing I can say is that the intervening years have taught me to temper my ideas more to fit reality, rather than attempting to bend reality to fit my ideas. By this, I mean finding ways to map my post-money aspirations onto what’s already there as a means to get a footing, rather than shouting into the wind trying to find ways to build something completely new and alien.
This has been one of the successes of Sharebay, since it’s not asking people to change the world, just to ‘share things more’ which I daresay people of any political persuasion would readily agree with.
What’s also changed is that I discovered how radicalized I had become as a result of consuming too much anti-establishment opinion. The COVID-19 pandemic probably helped here. While many of my contemporaries were brimming over with ‘Plandemic’ and Big Pharma conspiracy theories, I found myself increasingly marginalized because I didn’t subscribe; I just saw an unexpected global emergency that was dealt with in the most expedient—if messy—way, and where mistakes were inevitable.
The most important COVID lesson to me was how quickly drastic actions were taken by this same ‘establishment’ I decried, and how anti-establishment folks looked positively irresponsible by comparison. All things considered, wouldn’t you prefer an emergency response from your government in the face of some unknown and unfolding threat, rather than not? I certainly would.
This realization caused me to question other aspects of my doubts against the system.
My views today
Firstly, yes I still subscribe to the ideals of a post-money, Open Access Economy. It is by far the saner alternative to market capitalism. However, where my views have changed most is in how such a system could come about.
Where once I thought we only had to find some way to implement a new system, I now know this to be a fool’s errand. You don’t create societies or systems; no-one does. They are strictly emergent properties. Our system today is such because we collectively and incrementally made it so.
Where previously I held money, markets and the capitalist system culpable for our ongoing destruction, I now know this to be patently false. And it’s false it two ways:
1. All these share a common denominator: People. Therefore, people are the problem1. A cocktail of selfishness, short-term thinking and ignorance causes most people to behave in suboptimal ways, leading to:
2. Bad systems, that are also made of people, who perpetuate the cycle.
While it is entirely valid to argue that systems become autonomous and self-reinforcing—and they are—you can’t escape the logic that it’s only people with alternative intentions who can disrupt that loop.
So, in short, no matter what way you look at the problem, it comes back to how we behave. Money, markets, accumulation of wealth are all merely expressions of a creature who hasn’t yet figured out how to interface optimally with each other and the world. It’s simply wrong to blame money or markets for the way that they are used or abused. As with any tool, they can be used equally for good or bad purposes.
So, today my view is that all we’ve got is a serious miseducation problem, and this is where I intend to focus my activist anger from now on. If we can shift people’s moral compass just a few degrees more towards compassion, towards inclusion, towards an understanding of our shared fates in this beautiful window of life, then maybe, just maybe, we can move the mountains of archaic machinery we’ve built to preserve a way of life that no longer makes sense.
Considering that the issues in our society took hundreds of years to coalesce, it seems likely that they will take a long period to resolve. The biggest issue by far, I think, is lack of education, and a culture that continues to support and promote ignorance. Most people literally don’t know what’s important—and even worse—most don’t even care to know.
Fixing that requires a massive cultural shift which can’t be expected to happen overnight. I favour the idea of gently, but firmly, pushing the needle in the direction that it needs to go, rather than hoping for some apocalyptic awakening to jolt us to our senses. A slow pressure in the right direction alters our perceptions and values also in the right direction, until a point can be reached where feedback makes that direction viable and obvious. This could take decades, but slow and steady wins the race, right?
It’s understandable that some people want to upend the system, but I just don’t think it’s a valid approach to serious or lasting change. It’s wasted energy because it’s not going to happen like that, and even if it did, cultural inertia overrides shock changes eventually. It’s also plain wrong to say that capitalism is 100% bad, so focusing on being anti-capitalist is suboptimal and distracts from the point, which is lack of education.
If we actually had a clue what we were all doing here and how to behave properly, the question of capitalism becomes moot. Maybe we’ll have something entirely new, maybe we’ll have some better version of markets that doesn’t suck into capitalism. Either way, we need to focus on fixing the core problem: Ourselves.
- A common mistake is to disbelieve people as problem because you consider yourself a good person. But we are not talking about you, or about one person. People is a collective. ↩︎
