The battery had run dry. I took my headphones of and looked at the clock. Damn. There were still 3 hours left on my rainy ride back home. I was sitting in the typical western european made, eastern european maintained - meaning run down, but stubbornly persisiting - bus, slowly coming to terms with the fact that for the rest of the trip, boredom was to be the only thing coming my way. The bus was full. Left without the headphones, only then did I realize the roaring chatter in the bus. It’s not often that complete strangers start and maintain a lively conversation from the get go. Old people sometimes have a knack for it. And with the bus full of them, it proved to be such a venue. But the youth quickly joined in.
Now being “back in the world”, present, I quickly found out what all the fuss was about. The radio said our government had fallen. Well, almost. It had fallen the test of trustworthiness, small as the bar is in the realm of politics. They were a week old, maybe two. But already the writing was on the wall, invisible only to the few remaining die hard voters. The rea-son for it was, as is tradition in our lands, corruption. And everybody knew. Nothing would happen to that particular guy, the one caught this time. He would walk away with the money in his pockets, and a of course with some new, less public position already waiting for him. This was a certainty. But it’s not what this story is about.
After a while, the passengers got bored of politics, now filled with anger and despair, and with the topic being money, started sharing some of the problems they had. Stories about those insurmountable bills and delays of salary no one wanted to encounter, but so many already had. The conversation died down soon after that, many felt uncomfortable with sharing, those who did, now felt embarassed. The silence of the next few hours would be deafening. And then salvation came. To a degree.
We had left the rainy clouds behind and from the highway could now finally see the mountaintops to the west. And the sun standing above them, painting the valley to the east in colors and ways only it knows how. Everybody was soon looking through their windows. The silence was now different, serene. And in it, I started wondering.
At first it was that calming daydreaming about running away and leaving everything behind that I indulge in occasionaly, when nature proves a primer beautiful enough. Then I started thinking why it was I liked those kinds of fantasies. And soon I asked myself if I was the only one on that bus doing it? Everybody had went silent. But was everybody only en-meshed in their own problems, most of it probably relating to money? It didn’t seem that way. Their faces, the ones whose reflection in the windows I could see, showed calmness. The one I was experiencing as well while thinking of the great es-cape and the world travels that would no doubt follow it. I knew my troubles. But (if indeed that was what some of them were doing) what was making others enjoy the their own calming fantasies, what was their trouble? Why was escape the only route left?
My short term memory fired up a suggestion. The obvious one.
In my fantasies, there was money. But money was about freedom. I would guess to most people, it represents the same. So how did we find ourselves in this world where to most of us it brings only shackles? If you don’t got money, money got you - a rough translation of a saying I once heard. Why is this it’s nature?
The uneducated simpleton I was and still am, I concluded that there were two kinds of people. The ones to whom money was about freedom. And the ones to whom it was about power. The choice to enjoy your freedom, only after you subdued everybody else’s. In the material world we live in, the second notion became dominant. In the spiritual one, the battle is still being raged.
And since power loves creating rules, it created the rules for money as well.
Money first materialzed, as far as I know, as a tool of raw power. Way back in the days of ancient states and empires.
The simpletons back then had a different kind of economy. You would give an ox to your neighbor. After a while, you would get some apples from him in return. There wasn’t a fixed exchange rate of oxes and apples. It was just relationship- and trust-based exchange. You knew someday you would need something from the neighbor again. And likewise, he/she was certain of that about you. It worked. Slowly and mostly peacefully. But only for small communites. And it wasn’t terri-bly good at spuring big changes.
Changes for some of which you needed an army. The ultimate show of power for a king. But how could a ruler integrate this army into the local trust-based economies? A mighty soldier defending your king was a sight. But a sight you knew wasn’t here for long. So why should you give the soldier anything, if you knew nothing would be gained in return. Since the soldier was already on the one - back home. So the king thought of the mines he had in his lands. And created shiny, weird, most often circle shaped things and gave it to the soldiers. And they would give it to the local simpletons. Who would accept it, now that the taxes of the King had to be payed with them. It was guaranteed by the power of the King that the money was worth it. So that in turn, he could again pay his armies for yet another battle. War was also somehow being ingrained into the nature of money. And so, the logic of power gained a foothold in money. It also became its simulacrum. Thus, if one wanted freedom from that power, one only had to gain enough money to get its respect and eventually, a share in it. And money turned out to be as desired and as selfishly protected as power.
But what is central to power? Exactly that, centrality. It’s biggest tendency.
And now for the first time, there is a decentralized way to money. There already was one on the international scale. Which was exactly why (a) power has a more difficult time staying on top in that realm . But in the life of the average person, when it comes to money, the table had been set before you even knew you were hungry.
There is now a diffrerent kind of mine. And I don’t see a king in control of it. Yet. And I am thinking about the possibilities it’s opening up to society. Just like the rest of you are.
I love reading history. It is a Game of Thrones streching thousands of seasons. But it is different in one crucial way. You know exactly what’s about to be killed - progress. You see all these instances where things could have evolved in a better way (every one of us has her or his own ideas about what “the better way” is. I have a lot of them and am fully aware that I’m certainly wrong about a lot of things. But one I would impose without hesitation on everybody else if I had the king’s power - not one person should die of hunger in today’s world. Simple as that.), but the combination of a powerful center and divided periphery (not just in geographical terms), the uninformed and undereducated majority and the mentality of leaving the problem for the next guy to deal with it, has left us on a planet where most of the planet is in agony. Don’t kid yourself. The level of not living up to our potential as a species has reached staggering heights.
And a big part of it has to do with money, one of the underpinnings of the system. But now could be the time to start changing the rules of its game at least. Pathways leading safely back to the status quo are already being set up, you proba-bly noticed. This is not the time to be lazy and complacent. What you are experiencing right now with all this new technolo-gy is freedom. But it can be taken away from you. Controlled. There are people working on ways of achieving just that every second of every day. Share what you know with the people you think don’t deserve to know or are just too dumb to get it . Beacuse that other side surely will talk to them. And good luck keeping your freedom (out in the open at least) then.
E.H. Carr once wrote - “Change is certain. Progress is not.” Worse than that, I have this feeling that this change is a big one. Maybe THE big one. Next on our not-so-long-term timetable, it seems, might just be interstellar travel. Be it willing or as an evacuation. Ain’t nobody got time for poor (a.k.a the majority, and you’re probably in it) people then. This might not be a problem that actually will concern you, but there will be ways you as well will be fucked in the meantime. That’s certain as well. Getting shafted is a rule of life for most of us. The coming technological improvments will not fix everything. But could we please finally have a push in the right direction?
How many times can a battle be lost, before you declare the war over?
Do you believe in last chances?
hiveblocks