Scarcity <=> private property

Prophets Paine, George, Gesell

Money – corpse of commons

Interest – the poison apple

Scarcity <=> private property

This particular rot, artificial scarcity, first set in during the Axial Age, from 500BC to 700AD, when the great religious awakening of humanity took place. Confucius, Jesus, Muhammed. This was also the period when written language and literacy took hold.

In the economy, private property became the foundation, and along with it, gold as a store of value.

Thank you, Roman empire. You could now steal from the commons and call it your own. Or you could amass wealth as gold, which amounts to the same thing: stealing part of the social wealth from society. Why gold? Its special qualities (inert, rare, beautiful) promised eternal life, not just pie-in-the-sky, but to be built with your own hands. (Misplaced concreteness, a vain attempt to annihilate time-space, as 'you can't take it with you,' but man lives by delusion.) Money as a store of value cemented the new elite fetish of a person physically owning land as private property – to use and abuse, according to Roman law. What was a common legacy of mankind, the commons, could now be denied everyone else.

And the cherry on top was to attribute further magical powers to gold. It could magically reproduce, increase in quantity through the ritual of paying for its non-ornamental use as money. Usury, interest. Strictly outlawed in the Bible, but somehow interpreted to allow Jews to charge interest (the real meaning being give me more in return, i.e. exploit me) to non-Jews; eventually, condoned for Jews and Christians alike, leaving the Holy Scriptures to gather dust. 

From a gift perspective, demanding more than you gave me is unfathomable. First of all you don't demand anything. Such a society intuits that asking more means I must take more from nature, and it sounds implicitly like a threat, even a call to war. It is taking more of the commons, monetizing it, killing it.

Both attributes of gold, a store of value and the ability to reproduce itself exponentially ad infinitum, are only make-believe, part of our Story of the World, ultimately deriving from the institution of private property. Both are unnatural, as is declaring that you own land, resources. The ancients would see this as infringing on the sacred, the gifts of God to all humanity, attributing magical powers to a fetish, an idol, a false god, and dispossessing humanity of God's gifts. The golden calf. You can't say God didn't warn us. Money-making money, stealing what is a gift to all humans and other creatures and claiming it as yours.

We have to see through this bogus story, to realize the insanity of it. The reason for our obsession with scarcity is because we artificially create that scarcity by denying public access to what is our god-given right. We willfully create scarcity, suffering, dispossession, and for what? Not Buddhist enlightenment.

The trouble with property is more for me means less for you. Our Story is a zero-sum game. This urge to own is not natural. Children quickly move on from 'ME!' and start sharing naturally. It arises from an alienating ideology that severs felt connections. So you claim as much as possible of that lost beingness for your own. If you are a lonely individual, with no love, then you look for a substitute security blanket. Think of the chimp artificially orphaned and offered a wire chimp substitute mom. It clings pathetically, traumatized (probably for life) at the loss of love. 'I'm not part of things so I must make as much mine as possible.' In our Story, 'I am my own.' I control my self and what I produce.' Private property is a fruitless attempt to regain this self, and so a symptom of separation anxiety, not a 'god-given right'.

The problem really starts with the idea of an individual owning anything other than the fruits of his labor. Before the Romans, there were no 'deeds'. If you keep property to yourself, it was either the result of robbery or conquest. The Roman legal system was set up to perpetuate the crime. The rich seize property and make the laws. So abolish this injustice by revolution? Not so fast. An edict to abolish ignores the change necessary in the social reality, our thinking.

In early Rome property was communal except for small homestead plots by social agreement. The answer now is not to abolish property (a symptom of separation). Think: 1917. Been there, done that. The opposite of what you hate is also probably hateful, the old order in distorted form. Rather we must transform it as part of a larger transformation, a reconnection of true human beingness. The urge to own diminishes as our sense of connectedness and gratitude grows.ⁱ Sure, some state ownership of strategic commons (infrastructure, mineral wealth) but state ownership will wither away along with gold as we take conscious control of our lives. The state now is needed to enforce our Rome-inspired institutions (private property, money as store of value, interest). In our new Story, there is no need for income tax to punish you for your work, including the entrepreneurs with new ideas. We want a system that liberates, rewards the innate urge to give. Rewards flow and not accumulation, creating and not owning, giving and not having.

The legacy of Roman slavery is the modern debt peonage of nations, debtors who can never repay even the 'interest', de facto slaves. Land once for use, beauty, suddenly becomes a dead monetized commodity, the property of a powerful man, ripe for abuse. A poisonous conceptual transformation, perversion, that is literally killing us, turning us at every moment into masters and slaves. Early Christians had it right. They shared, lived by the gift, though many were wealthy, like St Augustine. But though promoting the gift economy, Christianity was part of the Roman empire, and didn't prove up to the task, abandoning its rituals and condoning the sins of the Romans, including private property, its offspring slavery and usury. We need a new or rather a renewed religiosity. Even Buddhism allows interest on accumulated wealth, though a good Buddhist would just give it away. Islam is the only religion that stands by the ancient prohibition of money-making-money, the cherry on top, as unnatural, immoral, unethical.

Prophets Paine, George, Gesell

It is the separation of spirit and matter which makes the present material world with profane money so destructive. This leads to Paradox: Our inverted thinking sees socialism as atheism, and private wealth as God's favor. No! Socialism is really just a good religious utopia (with or without God), and private wealth is theft, the work of Satan, yet is clothed in sanctimony as 'reward for hard work'.

Law: Every proprietor owes the community ground-rent, not 'the proprietor is owed ground-rent solely because he 'owns' (i.e., stole) some unfortunate parcel of land.

Corollary: Only the value of improvement to land is 'individual property'. (Thomas Paine)

Henry George had it right: the farmer must have secure possession of his land to reap products of his labor. But all have equal right to all land, so ground-rent pays for privilege of private use.

Once we have that huge error corrected, we can easily see how the commons must extend to other forms of property (sea, intellectual, money, radio waves, DNA, ecological diversity, capacity to absorb waste). Can you see the new world beginning to take shape? Can you see how we can use money to destroy money? Not yet? We're almost there.

Silvio Gesell, who lived through WWI and in 1918 predicted a new war in less than 25 yrs, did. He called for public ownership of land and leasing it. The senseless slaughters he both witnessed and predicted were all about private property. Britain was hogging it all, and was expecting both wars and yet blind to them, unwilling, then unable to stop them. Gesell saw that 'No trespassing' enclosures was really war, and like full-scale war, make us all poorer (and resentful, leading directly to more 'war'). Sweden and many 'old countries' maintain the right of allemanstratt: walk, pick flowers, camp, swim, sit (not too near dwelling).

Gesell applied the same thinking to money and invented a new/old kind of money which discounted (i.e., decayed) over time. This returns money to its original role of exchange minus the 'store of value'. You have to 'use it or lose it.' Discounted money eats itself up, destroys itself over time. Similarly with land, if you 'own' it, you pay the ground rent for the privilege of owning a piece of the commons. You are effectively the tenant (of the community's commons). You can 'sublet' to someone else, in which case they are exploiting the land, earning 'profit' and can pay the rent for you. But what's the point of owning it then? None. So give it back to the commons. (And get the gratitude of society.). You can always mortgage it if you really need to.

Similarly with money. Now, like greedy slum landlords extorting rent from tenants, greedy but smiley bankers extract interest from debtors. Interest is their perverse form of ground rent for use of their gold/money. Paradox of interest: Wealth from creative labor (ALL labor) flows to the rich. Money, property, usury, are like palimpsests,

hiding layer after layer of violence and exploitation. The banker must work very hard to promote his image of social responsibility, as he prints the money that he lends at interest. 'We' give him the right to do this and to lend the money to his friends. At least the landlord needs guns, barbed wire and security guards to impress us. The banker walks on very thin ice.

Money – corpse of commons

Money embodies what was once common and free, turned into property. Money by nature usurps the commons, ruins Earth, and reduces the vast majority to debt peonage. 'Capital' is mistaken for money. No! Our capital is our natural, social, cultural, spiritual heritage. Our old Story accepts, celebrates the monetization of the world's commons, famously, the expulsion of peasants from the Scottish highlands, and commons land all over the world (called globalization), understood as the inheritance of each generation from the previous. This rupture combined with the new age of industry, to accelerate production in these economies and stimulate further privatization, monetization of other commons, abolishing traditional land use, with its built-in evolutionary wisdom.

Minstrels borrowed from each other, circulated into the commons of music. Now, where all commons are monetized, you are prosecuted if you try to use others's tunes, for hiking on someone's land. Paradox: If our relationships are all money, then we have no real community. We must create it. Thatcher is right: under capitalism there is no community. There is only consumption, and the only community is consumers, 'joint consumption'.  

But do we really find joy in others' consumption vicariously? Quite the contrary, we envy others' consumption. Consumption does not call on anyone's gifts, their true being. You watch a Hollywood movie passively, living vicariously off the director's fantasies. Only from giving, cocreating do we find real satisfaction. Read a book. Better yet, tell a story to someone, to the world.

The power of money here is the power of death. The goal in this subterfuge is to replace relationship with a faux 'service'. When all relationships are replaced by monetized 'services', planetary and social life will cease. Midas. Dead but rich.

Paradox: We drown in what's measurable (i.e., profitable) and starve of what we really value but can't turn into money (love, relations). The Hobbesian nightmare world of survival reflects our own condition (illusion of scarcity created by privatizing the commons). We go from self-sufficiency and modesty, to closets full of clothes to discard.

Interest – the poison apple

Money from the start was an instrument for counting grain supplies, so a kind of debt-based money. But without interest. Soon enough, the concept of fractional reserves crept in. The blacksmith who guarded your precious gold coins was sitting on (your and others') capital. He could accept I.O.U.s from trusted neighbors and his word alone was enough to allow for the neighbors' credit to be good, creating more credit. In that earlier world, and in our future world, such a loan would be repaid, period. You, the blacksmith created a bit of money by accepting the I.O.U. Repaying it didn't start a chain reaction of more-begets-more. But 'greed' (already by then, separation anxiety in a commodity world had set in, warping out natural gift mode of thinking) led to a demand for a fraction more money in repayment, interest/ usury. Once you take gift thinking out of the economy, 'greed' becomes unlimited. So where to get the extra? Produce more, speed up the circulation of that I.O.U.

Law: 'Interest' means a 'constantly, exponentially growing supply of money' which means a constant, exponentially increase in exchanging things.

The World Trade Organization's purpose is to accelerate all trade everywhere 24/7. Send bloated container ships back and forth from China to the rest of the world burning precious fossil fuels and eating up raw materials to frantically produce junk. We call this the Chinese miracle and are deeply impressed. It is capitalism at its most glorious even as we drown in junk and destroy the world. All so that the 'wheels of commerce' spin faster and faster and we all become richer and richer. A nightmare of delusion. And global warming. China alone produces 25% of the greenhouse gases, opens a new coal-burning energy plant every week.

Ultimately, steal from the commons. Burn the heritage of millions of years, sell your bit of land if necessary, monetizing it to repay the debt. Or borrow some more, in which case, you must monetize even more of your (and others') lives. Like a nuclear bomb chain reaction in slow motion.

This is our positive-interest economy in a nutshell. Ultimately, it leads to war as the failsafe answer to the need to find new bits of the world commons to exploit, to create more money, a constant destruction and rebuilding. When all markets are sated, all (who have money) desires filled, you can still get more (monetary) GDP via war, destruction. Efficiency and profit meet 'needs' in endless, obscene elaboration.

Interest's motivation (I have, give me more) is the antithesis of gift giving (I have more, I give you some). Interest's effect is ditto. E.g., if you are a subsistence farmer and decide to buy a cow for $100, you have to return not just the $100, but you have to take an extra $5 out of circulation, from the commons. Interest is a surreal game of musical chairs, bankers taking a bit of the commons (a chair) away, creating artificial scarcity, making us greedy and warlike till we 'fight to the last Ukrainian.' The real Story of our World.

Our nature, fitra, is papered over. A palimpsest. Our Story of Self makes us look greedy and aggressive, always in search of a commodity fix to fill our lives empty of meaningful relations.

Rule: Money works best with quantitative needs. The qualitative dimension of 'good' or 'service'ⁱⁱ does not fit easily.

Paradox: We are very busy all the time, 24/7, and yet drown in a sea of mental illness, despite all the tech that should let us live lives of leisure. Money captures all nature, then all culture, turning it into Marx's wonderful depiction of the wealth of society presented itself as an 'immense accumulation of commodities'.

The bad news: no leisure era will never arrive. Money created by debt and bearing interest demands an always increasing quantity of money in order to pay that never-ending debt.

So a horrible paradox: you must run faster just to stay in the same place, producer and sell more, not just the same or, horror of horror, less, even if that's more than enough.

All religions until capitalism prohibited usury then accepted it as legitimate (the except is Islam). You deserve no benefit for merely holding property; ditto money. Interest is the engine of continued robbery forcing us into at minimum strip-mining Earth, at worst, well, let's not go there. That Islam did not lead to capitalism and the West's tech marvels is seen as a condemnation. It is on the contrary proof to me of the robustness of Islam. It never led to world wars slaughtering tens of millions, nor create the means to destroy the world.

Implicit rules of interest: For Mr Moneybags, interest exaggerates his 'perpetual sacrifice' of present consumption deferred, promising him a better future, not a worse one, like the debtor's. For the debtor it implicitly discounts your/our future, even for Mr Moneybags. The insanity of owning the money which is destroying your future even as you make more of it.

That little bit of interest (compounded daily these days) means you accept a steady decline in the future of the commons, in your and your children's future. Q.E.D. Or rather R.I.P.  

Who is the bogeyman? Our Story points the finger at ne'er-do-well rebels, communists. Most people are duped, believing their Stories of Self/ World. Conspiracy theories miss the point when they denounce the Rothschilds, give too much credit to the ability of humans to successfully manage and control complex systems.

Law: Capitalism is conspiracy with no conspirators. Everyone is puppet. The only way out is to wake up and start the transition away from capitalism.

What better way out than to bring an end to our inner and outer Shylock? Ban usury, positive interest, money-making money. This means government taking back its right to issue currency and wresting the control of society from the bankers. There will be a role for traditional bankers, but trying to maximize book values is no longer the be-all-and-end-all. Banks will localize as other reforms, local currencies, local management of resources takes place. Successful loans will be feted by our more localized media. Awards and political recognition take the place of profit and interest. Quite possibly the banker will be boasting of salvaging something beautiful, precious, even though it wasn't profitable, earning him a knighthood or presidential medal. I'm already spinning a new Story of Self/ World.  

Gesell's discounting currency means no one sits around doing nothing or sits on a stash doing nothing. That doesn't mean you're overworked. On the contrary you're demonetizing so it doesn't matter that your money is discounting. A basic income is enough to get by 'in the material world'. There are enormous problems that don't make a profit to fill our lives.

Sharing not greed, commons not private property, equality not skewed distribution, sustainability not growth. Hollywood intuits this with its fascination for extraterrestrials, ET. That's really just about capitalism, as an alien force beyond conscious human agency, out to destroy Earth, humanity, etc, but caught in its own solipsistic world. That Men in Black are really lizard-insects, stuck in fight-or-flight 'greed' mode is perfectly 'rational' to viewers caught up in our Stories. Capitalism, interest/usury, even destruction of the world are perfectly rational given the right closed-system conditions. Withdrawing from the sinful world is no answer. That just makes a fetish of personal exculpation from the sins of society.

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