Thanks for the effort put in sharing your ideas and questions. Our work is dedicated to find the answer to that key question on how to change this dysfunctional system. This doesn’t mean we have a full answer, but we’re constructing it, along with many others, and the pieces of the puzzle increasingly fall into place. See Jean Zin, Changing the System of Production, in the Journal of Peer Production, as well.

Michel

Yes, we are all interconnected. I came here through watching the Keiser Report volume E272. You were being interviewed by Max on Bitcoin. I have been researching alternative currencies for the purpose of implementing in a local economic pilot project in South Africa. I had been investigating Community Exchange Systems, LETs and others. I recently enjoyed Money Fix with my family. There has been an energy pressing me to watch Max, whom I recently discovered and he resonates with a lot of the experiences in my own life journey. Then when I heard you speak about Bitcoins today on episode E272, your words resonated deeply with what I am doing here in Africa trying to find an open source model that works.

In the interview, when you shared your ideas, it was like a pinball machine hitting all the high value targets: centralized financial system causing environmental ruin, transition towns, the nonscaleability of other forms of local currency …. all ideas that I am searching answers for.

Now, reading the above, it also brings up recent thoughts I have been having, questioning the entire monetary foundation of this current economic paradigm (maybe regime is a better word) we all currently live (slave) under. The Money Fix is fresh in my mind, especially the thought that the money system creates artificial scarcity – one tends to look at things differently when you have the specific mechanical knowledge of how the system is rigged so that a certain percentage of people have to lose. I’m pertaining specifically to the fact that the present system creates more debt than actual money in the money supply – the principal has to therefore be used to pay for both the total principal and debt existing in the economy.

What a revelation this was – a light bulb going off! It became crystal clear how the system is rigged so that we all have to compete for the scarce-by-design supply of money to pay off both our principal and our debt – whether it’s a student loan, a home mortgage, a vehicle mortgage or a business loan. What it means is that regardless of how hard and smart everyone is, some people are just going to lose. It’s like being in school and being marked on a bell curve; there always has to be a certain percentage who fail.

That idea is related to the thought of whether it is possible to create a personal ethos of sharing rather than hoarding. This question is intimately connected to this blog post. This is a huge mental shift in the minds of many creatives because it means trusting in the universe to take care of you. When we exist and are conditioned by this current paradigm, we automatically think from a perspective of scarcity. When we have what we think is a great idea, the next thought that follows is: how do I protect it? IP, NDA’s, copyrights, patents. These are all tools of a mind entrenched in scarcity, often borne out by reality.

The problem, it would seem to me, is much like the dilemma and paradox of violence in the world. Gun owners in the US continually cite the 2nd amendment and defend gun possession through that. Yet, if you normalize guns through law, then you normalize violence as well. Guns are not designed to flip eggs or to clean gutters. They are only designed for one thing; to kill efficiently. The 2nd amendment people don’t get that the right to bear arms is what creates a society filled with violence and solves problems through violence. By normalizing it, that is how people like the most recent mass murderer James Holmes turns to it for his solution.

In the same way, by normalizing scarcity, we normalize competition and selfishness rather than trust in compassion and interconnectedness. It suppresses our spontaneous compassion nature and constructs an artificial competitive nature ontop of that. To create a society in which we can trust that our creative ideas will be supported rather than stolen requires there to be a sufficient threshold of people who hold the same idea be crossed. The proof is in the pudding. So the big question to me is: how do we get there? There will be some who will have to put their valuable ideas out there and trust that the support will come.