The How Is In The Why

By Marc Gauvin (c) 28/2/2014

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Here is a sort of plan, "the solution" if it can be called that,  is really undoing rather than doing.  The first step as one of our Board Members a businessman (also a great musician) and long time supporter of free culture said to me, is simply: "No me gusta que me den gato por liebre",  a Spanish saying that means simply, I don't like to be given cat in lieu of rabbit.   Basically, realising our beliefs around money are nonsense,  is THE first step and might be the only one we need to take.  Imagine a world where all children realise that duh, of course money can't be the value it represents.   Also, I don't think the answer lies in playing out the dynamics of an evil elite "world order" and then the rest of us losers,  the problem is really more subtle than that, rather than blame, we need to seek understanding as well as assume our responsibility in the dynamic, not because any of us are bad and evil but because we simply are afraid and mistaken.  Afraid to lose and not be included and mistaken about how not to be so, that is money is not an answer it is a headache both when you have it and don't have it.  

The unravelling of the logic of money for me was understanding that the problem of why things are the way they are is more akin to ALL, predators and victims alike,  being bamboozled by an historical definition that no one has bothered to review systematically, than it is a conspiracy of evil. Thus, bankers are the unwanted but unavoidable answer to our expectations of what WE believe money is and must be. 

Of course once we are trapped in this money paradigm it is very difficult for us to break free as the paradigm serves to justify what we do that otherwise in our hearts of hearts we would not do.  Maybe it was the first religions or the first shamen pulling the wool over people's eyes that is at the root, I don't know, the point is that over time we have inherited words and their meanings and these have configured our world view and once set they are difficult to undo.   Our primordial trust that we all have as children is thus put to the test to the point where trust becomes a widget, or object of exchange and off to the races we go (but on foot and in the middle of the track :-(( ).  All logical constructs are built on premises or axioms and it only takes one false premise for the whole house of cards to come tumbling down.  In this regard there are two problems one is that false paradigms require constant reinforcement, implying a constant increase in pseudo "knowledge" that just keeps adding layers upon layers and we all sort of conceptually tar and feather ourselves.

But I like to think that true science, the type people used to risk their lives over somehow has provided a sort of conceptual trojan horse within which an army of logic suddenly takes the current paradigm by surprise and in the process frees us all from it.   No matter the seeming eons of painstaking efforts it has taken to get this trojan horse in place, once it's contents are let loose the battle is practically won in what seems an instant, change is not always slow and arduous, like how an exponential only becomes intuitively evident long after you can do much about it.   In this regard this article explains how, by working with OWL-DL to create an automated ontology with "decidability" for a decentralised self regulating peer to peer IP market where both big fish and little fish have the same "jaws" so to speak, the question of "decidability" in purely logical systems rose to the forefront.   It thus occurred to me that the problem with money is much deeper than the way we manage money i.e. the issue of interest or no interest.  While there was no doubt that interest is inherently unstable mathematically there still was no answer to why it nevertheless seemed an inevitable occurrence, the question then was, how is it preventable?  On the one hand we can say that we can make it illegal but then that would only drive it underground not stop it.   I thought long and hard and then it dawned on me, the problem is the definition, if we believe either explicitly or implicitly,  that money IS  an object of value of our "property" and believe in personal freedom, then we cannot prevent that it be lent, rented, bought and sold and hence we cannot stop interest.  But as I discovered,  because in order for money to be meaningful it needs to be a measure of value, then because measure is sine qua non, it is logically inconsistent for it to be an object of intrinsic value itstelf, not to mention that the logical function of measure precludes it being an input of value transactions as clearly laid out here. From that same logic,  money cannot be a supply or have any of the physical properties attributed to it, as it is a purely logical entity with no physical properties and only logical limits that preclude any notion of scarcity.     

So our "solution" is for people to realise the above consciously and understand that the very definition of money we all currently assume,  is nonsensical and when 10-15 % of the population realise this, it will be game over for the current paradigm without excluding or condemning anyone.  The question of implementation of alternatives will naturally occur from the moment it is accepted that money can only be a record of value and nothing more, never can it be a controlled supply that any single authority governs or controls.  As explained in this link that provides an overview in three steps of what is needed, this conceptual shift involves a whole new paradigm for social governance that no longer is centerred on money as a reductionist cattle prod, but rather as a voluntary and somewhat mundane auxliary tool to broader and far more integral and all inclusive social governance. 

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