Fear and Self-loathing

We faced a substantial, unexpected expense this week, related to our one vehicle, and it conjured up all manner of emotions, some based in reality, and some emanating from the deeper wells of my paranoia. I do not believe I am alone in such reactions, so I am sharing them here.

First, we are fortunate. We can absorb the cost of repairs and new tires with our savings. There are countless citizens who are not that advantaged, who would be charging it on a credit card, or forced to abandon personal transportation completely. Racking up debt seems to be as much of an American pastime as baseball and apple pie.

Every time we dip into savings, though, means less money for the future. It is snipping another thread in the safety net. Everything monetary seems extremely tenuous now, and that is where fear starts to creep in. I believe that anxiety is a legitimate concern. Everyone who is not a billionaire should behave cautiously.

The self-loathing comes from not having traditional employment, or at least some kind of reasonably dependable income. I abandoned that lifestyle well before the pandemic. I am simply dysfunctional in the average workplace. Subjecting others, and myself, to that is not in anyone’s best interests. I do thrive when I get to choose who I want to work with, but I am in a rural location now where that is almost impossible to do in person.

I am nearing retirement, I think, but the age at which you can claim full benefits from Social Security keeps going up. Neither political party seems to have a problem with this because the people we elect to public office are so wealthy they don’t need Social Security themselves. They also get a government pension, and their own premium healthcare package.

Personally, we have investments, even a “wealth manager,” but they certainly have bigger fish as clients. Obviously, everything tethered to the stock market is precarious now, thanks to tariffs and other destabilizing actions that our President and congress have been taking. Consequently, I don’t think of our financial state as “real,” let alone something we can count on over the next twenty or thirty years.

This is all a predicament I think many of us share, and it has enormous ramifications. One horrifically distressing aspect is that as perceived personal risk goes up, we are a lot less likely to make donations to nonprofits that, ironically, help people in even worse circumstances. There are also many environmental organizations and civil rights advocates that I would like to support with my dollars, but what if we have another personal emergency?

I begin to rage when I think about how government has defunded many of those agencies and non-governmental organizations doing positive work, and instead grossly inflated the budgets of the “War Department,” and I.C.E. Emphasis on “gross.” We should have the exact opposite scenario.

If money itself is not the problem, it is the weaponization of it that enables cruelty, and compounds existing misery. We have to make money irrelevant, somehow, to rob it of its power. We stand to lose control of it entirely should cryptocurrency become the new standard. Almost nobody understands blockchain, myself included, and crypto represents, essentially, the privatization of currency. Its value will be determined entirely by powerful individuals, and we will be at their mercy.

My greatest act of fiscal resistance has been to enroll in a credit union. I did that decades ago when I lived in another city, and I have been delighted by the results. Spreading assets across different types of financial institutions seems like a good strategy, at least for now.

Today, our car is safer now, with new brakes, and rides a little smoother thanks to new tires, but where will the proverbial road take us? The GPS navigation device/department of our governments seems to be malfunctioning, and we are being taken for a ride, instead of being in the driver’s seat and determining our own destination. Fasten your seatbelt.

The Impossibility of Money

It should be clear by now that our current monetary systems are failing us, or at least the vast majority of us. It has reached the point for me, personally, where I am questioning the very existence of currency, let alone how it behaves. As long as we accept the contemporary and historical paradigm, we are unlikely to generate positive change (and I’m not talking about coins).

I can’t get over the irony that money is called “currency,” evoking the word “current,” as in something that flows. That is not what happens in our economies. Currency gets backed up behind the dam(n) of capitalism, hoarded by a tiny minority.

Cryptocurrency was, to me, an off-putting concept from the beginning, but I only recently figured out why. While the idea of alternative forms of transactions is attractive, this is not the answer, for many reasons.

The currency of my livelihood is words, so I am disappointed in myself for not immediately recognizing the obvious. “Crypto” is Greek for “hidden,” as in cryptozoology, the study of sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and related legends. Fascinating, but there is not widespread subscription to the idea, kind of like cryptocurrency. The last thing we need for our economy is more hidden currency. We already have offshore bank accounts and other tax havens. We need total transparency in matters of money.

The energy demands for running blockchain are another reason for concern. The server farms consume massive amounts of electricity for their operation. The same can be said for generative AI (Artificial Intelligence), and data mining, too. Such large server farms are also incredibly loud, running twenty-four hours, seven days a week, generating noise complaints along with Bitcoin.

Beyond the energy-intensive aspect, cryptocurrency has other shortcomings. It has yet to be widely accepted by retail businesses. It requires technology that is still inaccessible to many, by choice or by reliability of internet service providers. Don’t get me started on NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens). Lastly, there is understandable consumer skepticism over crypto’s validity, valuation, and sustainability.

The most attractive attribute of cryptocurrency might be the perception that it is somehow subversive, a way of undermining conventional capitalist models. It’s complex nature and dependence on technology ensure that it will likely remain the domain of a different, tech-savvy minority. Perhaps it is the “snob appeal” I am mistaking for subversion.

A truly viable alternative currency will have to come from the bottom up, designed for communities of all levels, from local to global. As it stands now, we have currency of an arbitrary value, determined by a select minority, and that is demonstrably unsustainable, at least in the environmental sense. There exists a different model that might serve as a template.

The currency of the natural world is energy. It has an absolute, invariable value. Can energy be hoarded? Not permanently, and certainly not generationally. Various organisms are able to store energy to use during hibernation, metamorphosis, and other stressful processes and circumstances. Otherwise, energy cycles freely, allowing the proper functioning of ecosystem transactions.

The challenge of emulating a natural model is to do so without the attendant predatory and parasitic forms of energy exchange. We have that in spades in the capitalist model, and the trend is toward exacerbating that pattern rather than nullifying it.

The true revolution in currency will have to be organic. The leadership for it will probably come from Indigenous peoples, provided we allow that, and can forge alliances with labor and consumer unions. Existing models for localized currencies might help inform such a movement. Promoting interest in, and subscription to, credit unions and cooperative businesses will only enhance the effort.

The incentives for promoting blockchain tech are still profit-driven, as opposed to even trying to balance the common good. I think I have more faith in the imagination of artists to take us in a positive direction here. Pair that brand of creativity with economic and social justice disciplines, and we might be able to get something truly equitable. Finally.

Chasing Money

At this particular moment in time, I am secure enough in the fiscal sense that I do not need to chase projects for the money. That has not always been the case, and it will surely be a fleeting sense of relief. The welcome respite gives me pause in another way, more restless and disturbing than gratifying. It calls into question the idea that money should be a motivator, that everything be framed in the sense of income and expenditures.

© BayAreaDigitalSolutions.com

The constant implication in our lives is that we have a responsibility to earn an income, a responsibility to spend it and invest it to keep the economy going, and that taxation is the villain that keeps us from fully realizing our financial potential. Those directives come from those already wealthy, who attained their power by hoarding money. We think that money is the matrix that holds our lives together, and we need to free our minds of that foolish belief.

We think that money is the matrix that holds our lives together, and we need to free our minds of that foolish belief.

The only currency of any relevance and importance is energy. Some may equate energy with love, or some other emotion or notion, but what I am talking about is metabolic energy. That is the currency of living ecosystems, and it flows freely among all organisms. There is minimal banking of metabolic energy. Plant tubers might be one example. Bears putting on fat for the winter is another. These situations are the minority, though. Energy usually passes quickly through the food web.

Economies can be viewed as redundant and inefficient ecosystems in which every niche is filled by only one species: Homo sapiens. Energy flow is disrupted as some individuals hoard money instead of releasing it to continue flowing to other niches. Nature is strict in its demand that energy flow.

Perhaps the worst aspect of money is that it has allowed us to assign arbitrary value to everything. "Precious" metals and stones are precious only because we say they are. There is a fine line between priceless and worthless. Arguably, they are two sides of the same coin. The lives of other species are priceless until we decide that the monetary value of the land they occupy can be increased by developing a shopping center....and we arbitrarily decided what the land was worth to begin with.

Money limits our creativity because we think only in terms of how we will benefit financially. We dismiss important endeavors before they get off the ground because [whining] "that's too costly," or "we can't make any money doing that." A cost-benefit analysis too often destroys potentially great achievements.

Money also actively encourages the invention of unnecessary products and services. The marketplace is full of disposable goods, mass-produced decorative objects, and all manner of substances passing themselves off as food and drink that are destructive to our individual and collective health. We are all children in the face of advertising, so easily convinced that we cannot live without a given item. Money fuels the conflict that filmmaker Ken Burns describes as the "I want versus we need."

Money allows us to judge one another not by the content of our character, but by the sum of our bank accounts, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Wealthism should be as repulsive as racism, but instead we collectively aspire to be financially excessive. More importantly, we want to exclude others from our sense of entitlement and privilege. We want a very tangible expression of our success, but ironically define success by tangible expression. We never arrive in this scenario. It is the treadmill of status, nothing more. It is a process that erodes society instead of elevating it.

We can no longer afford (and I use that word deliberately) to allow ourselves to be conditioned to believe that money is a limiting or freeing element of our society. What is priceless? Empathy. Respect. Honesty. Patience. Persistence. Volunteerism. Be examples of those things. Add to that list, because it will get you thinking about what is truly value-able. Meanwhile, I challenge you to imagine a world without money. What would it look like? Could we operate more justly and more efficiently without it?