Tag: New Word Project

What if we did away with money?

Posted on by philipdodson

Philip Dodson blog

What if we did away with money?

A mad idea, perhaps.

What is money? Well according to the dictionary..

‘A medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values on the market, including among its forms a commodity such as gold, an officially issued coin or note, or a deposit in a checking account or other readily liquefiable account.’

Sounds a bit complicated, to be honest it is a tool we use to pay for our consumption and much more.

It is a culture, it is a thing we crave, a drug, a thing we chase in return for our lives.

We have been trained to go to work, in exchange for money. In return for giving our lives to the mechanised world, we have gladly accepted vouchers to use to buy stuff and pay bills. Mainly, these trinkets that we buy, do not enrich our lives in any shape or form.

The US now owes $18 trillion! Wow, it’s so big a number, look, $18,000,000,000,000, it is difficult to comprehend.

Will they ever pay that back? Will all of debts in the world be paid back? Has the current system now gone wrong?

What if we had a giant global ‘write off’, reset all the balances, wiped out money? Made every human being equal. Is that such a radical idea?

If you started from scratch to build something better, you could perhaps consider the idea of all of us being of equal value.

After all, why is an hour of work by a plumber any less worthy than an hour of work by a lawyer. A lawyer can not leave a leaky pipe in her house. Does the plumber need a contract?

You could replace it with a more simple system of trading an hour of your time for a credit, that you could use to get a service or hour of someone else’s time – like say the time bank Echo

You could take that further into a community based culture, where we trade our skills with everyone in return for ‘community credits’. This would bring about a huge social change, it would mean we could work less hours, be more community spirited and genuinely give other humans real help.

We can share resources, for example, how many lawnmowers, ladders, tools, cars, etc does any community need to own individually. Why not the community own a few and then we share. Well the reason is, that we have built an industrialised world that requires us to all own one or more of everything ourselves. After all producing more and more stuff has meant we all get more money, that enables us to buy more stuff!

We would have more time to spend with our families, more time doing meaningful things. Instead of working to earn money to consume more stuff we do not need.

Our current system of money is so deeply routed in the culture of the industrialised world, the greed model of over-consumption to make more money. So by replacing it with another system, you are doing so much more that just renaming money, you are putting in place a system based on equality, based on the community, putting people first and eliminating needless consumption.

It’s a mad idea at the moment, but one that is worth exploring.

It’s broken, stop trying to fix it.

Posted on by philipdodson

#RefugeesMarch

Today, as I marched with many, many thousands of people on the streets of London, I thought, housing, feeding and giving a chance of new life to the Syrian refugees, is of course the right thing to do. It is the only humane thing to do. It is right to march and let our government know how we feel about the lack of help that is being given.

After all, let’s not be under any illusion as to who has created these refugees. It is our government and many other countries, controlled by the global elite.

But what is new about this situation? Not much, this is what the industrialised system has been so good at for 100’s of years. And what will change as a result of today?

There have been a lot of marches, a lot of petitions signed and what will come of these things?

Fundamentally, we need to make some deeper changes to a good many things in the world, if we are to stop the establishment continuing to do the same or worse without our consent.

I’m not for one minute suggesting to not march, or not to sign petitions, as these things are vital in making a protest and helping to raise issues. Without this, then there would be no hope. But they are not anywhere near enough it terms of bringing about real change.

Bloody revolutions are not what we need either, as surely as a human race, we have had enough killing. We do not want to replace one unfair and corrupt system, with another one that is of a different flavour.

However, to be truly successful in bringing about real change, we have to bypass this broken system, we have to stop supporting it, and we have to come together and build an alternative model. We need to start from scratch, we have to have a completely different model. One that creates a world for every member of the human race to be valued, not just a tiny select few.

What is mainly happening at the moment, is we are trying to fix this broken thing, that really is beyond repair. So we need to stop looking at how to fix what we have always done and dare to think about some completely new ways of doing things.

The best thing to come out of today for me, was a hope that there are enough people, who given an alternative world would be inspired by it, and would then go on to convince others to abandon ship for a new hope.

The industrialised world, that we have all been brainwashed to comply with, is dying, and now is the perfect time to build an alternative, rather than trying to patch up what we have always had.

A world for all not just a few.