KZ: Every culture organizes life around a few simple principles, activities, and beliefs. The other institutions and activities of the society hang from that core like branches from a tree trunk. These central acts, institutions, and values form what Ruth Benedict—arguably the most perceptive American anthropologist of the 20th century—called a “cultural configuration.” What’s called paradigms here are some of the branches of the western cultural configuration. One such branch, money must meet the needs of the configuration. So, above all else for current western society money is the source of status, prestige, power (political and physical), security, and individual identity. The Beatles were wrong. Money can buy love. H.L. Hunt and Ted Turner both said it, money is just a way to keep score. Money tells you how attractive, important, well adjusted, influential, feared, and loved you are. In short, money identifies who you are. Over the millennia money has served many purposes beyond these, consistent with the cultural configuration of the time, and an almost endless list of objects have served as the physical face of money (e.g. salt, corn, gold, silver, diamonds, cloth, almonds, tea, dried fish, tobacco, rice, etc.). And tied to all this, money is also the means used to purchase and sell everything from humans to every sort of commodity. But identifying money as the thing that makes members of society rich or poor is too simplistic. Naming money the most flexible cultural invention of humans is justified. Plus, money has a normative dimension. It places some people and items above others and elevates some actions above others. Money today can have two sources, banks and other private money creators, and governments (sovereign money). Which serves best the needs of the cultural configuration is an empirical question. Historically, the answer most common is sovereign money. To paraphrase A.H. Quiggin from “A Survey of Primitive Money: the Beginnings of Currency,” Everyone, except an economist, knows what “money” means, and even an economist can describe it in the course of a chapter or so. To say economists are clueless about money goes too far. But to say economists seem mostly unacquainted with money is not. Economists’ understanding of money is historically and culturally shallow.
PL: I disagree somewhat with your emphasis. Yes money has all those attributes, but its real role with respect to the survival of a society is as a medium of exchange. It is the vita and only link between what we create and what we need.
Mainstream economists recognize that money needs to be addressed of course, but traditionally consider it to be a passive player. In reality, a dysfunctional money system will destroy an economy. People sometimes use the very apt analogy that money is the life-blood of an economy.
KZ: Paul, you say money “…is the vita and only link between what we create and what we need.” That’s absurd. What about the basic emotions, love and hate? What about life and death? What about community and the common good? What about war and peace? They’ve all at one time and another, one place and another linked what humans create and what humans need?
Money is created by humans and then used by humans. It is never passive. Life-blood of the economy, yes. But the economy is created by humans via culture. Which means money is important as a tool for art, religion, family life, crime, marriage, etc. As I noted, money is one of the most flexible inventions of humans.
I’m sure you’re correct that mainstream economists take money as mostly a “medium of exchange.” The other 99.99% of people on earth disagree. Which should tell you how disconnected economists are from their supposed object of study.
PL: Money allows the “love” to flow between members of society, I don’t see how what I said excludes any of the interactions you described. Money represents a voluntary claim that we have on each other as members of society. When I have money, I have access to what you create. Our current money system has led to a gross imbalance and distortion, giving certain members of society an unjust and undeserved claim on the rest of us while starving the majority of access to the money they need to live happy comfortable lives.
Me: This is precisely the point. Money is looked at from a reductionistic economic standpoint when it needs to be viewed from a fully integrative sociological, anthropological, economic AND spiritual-psychological one. Keeping the mass of the populace in a state of individual income scarcity via a monetarily austere system acculturates insecurity and strongly tends to trap people below the upper levels of Maslow’s self actualization pyrimidal model. If we’d instead create individual and systemic monetary grace as in abundance and security with the new insight that you can create exactly that plus beneficial price deflation with a 50% discount/rebate policy at the point of retail sale, that barrier would be removed and with the additional acculturation of even a modicum of wisdom in the form of counseling regarding the plethora of positive and constructive purposes other than and in addition to employment who knows what kind of a “Golden Age” might result?
Nearly everyone I interact with on the internet is operating on at least one or two lower levels of mental integration than I am. I operate on the paradigmatic level and sometimes on the zeitgeist ethic level. Here are the mental integration levels from the bottom up:
zeitgeist/ethic of the age: the idea that appears to be true from all of the levels below it
wisdom-integration-paradigm perception: the integration of only true data and ideas from opposing perspectives
philosophy: the attempt to formulate ideas that are true
theoretics: the attempt to rationally formulate truth
science-data gathering: the accumulation of information that is hopefully true
There is a story I have always liked about a teacher who asked her students, “If you want to escape from prison, what is the first thing you need to know?”
One person said you need to know where the key is, another that you need to know a good lawyer.
The teacher shook her head each time.
She then responded, “The first you need to know if you want to escape from prison … is that you are in prison.”
For most of us, there are many things we would like to change, but it helps to first ask, “Are we in harmonious relationship with this moment or in opposition to it?”
We can argue about many topics, but what we can likely all agree with is: there is a moment right now that we are living. It is hard to argue with that!
Then we can ask, “what is our relationship to this moment right now?”
There is a world of difference between acting with acceptance of the present moment and acting in resistance to it.
How do you know which one is present? You can feel it in your body. One there is an ease, a type of deep listening then responding. The other there is a tension, an agitation, as if something is in opposition to us.
Eckhart Tolle writes, “What you accept is the form of this moment. No more. Then, see what’s needed.”
Today, can we befriend the present moment – that is enough. When we can, we can get out of our prisons for free,as we are no longer in opposition to “what is.”
Then we can better see what actions, if any, want to come forth that can help the world do the same.
Science is good to decipher the workings of the physical universe. Philosophy contains a tool to think about and self actualize consciousness. New paradigms change the temporal universe, our perception and understanding of it and thus are an integration of both science and philosophy. Wisdom-paradigm perception is thus the superior human discipline of the dynamic-ongoing integration of science/the temporal, philosophy/the mental and its self actualizing capabilities that is a thirdness greater oneness of insight.
Me: They change. However, I said “evolve” which is qualitatively different from mere change. The monetary paradigm has not changed OR evolved since the beginning of human civilization as we now know it.
Do you see the potential of a direct and reciprocal monetary policy at the point of retail sale?
KZ: Craig, if you’re speaking anthropologically or biologically, evolution is random physical change that is passed on to future generations or not. Generally, changes that improve human chances of survival are passed on since those holding these changes have less chance of dying. I believe what’s you’re speaking of is cultural adaptation. Not evolution.
Me: Ok.
Do you see the potential of a direct and reciprocal monetary policy at the point of retail sale?
KZ: Not really. It’s just another form of gift economy.
Me: Incredible. A 50% discount to all consumer products from a package of bubble gum to an automobile or house that immediately doubles the purchasing power of everyone’s earned income is no big deal. The IMMEDIATE change in individual and systemic reality from monetary scarcity/austerity to abundance is no big deal. That’s an individual and systemic monetary transformation, not “just another form of gift economy”. Gift economies never had the technological development, productive capability and systemic infrastructure that we now have. Hence they couldn’t conceive of or implement such sweeping changes. And those who deal with culture today, which is the social and mental pattern, apparently still can’t see it as anything but another reductionistic data point instead of the entire pattern change it actually is.
The economic problem IS the monetary paradigm. One of the contributors here Steve Keen has correctly recognized this when he said DSGE theorists ignore money, debts and banks.
To be precise its the monetary paradigm of Debt Only and the profit making banking and financial system which with its idiotic charter to monopolistically create credit/money ONLY AS DEBT that dominates virtually everyone and all of the other actually legitimate economic/productive business models.
Strategically integrating the new monetary paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting into the economy at the point of retail sale opens up so many beneficial possibilities that seemingly NO HETERODOX ECONOMIST SEES, and resolves what virtually EVERY HETERODOX ECONOMIST AGREES are the two biggest economic problems we face, i.e. lack of actually available individual purchasing power and fear of inflation.
Every paradigm change is accompanied by a new insight and/or a new tool. With the Copernican Cosmological paradigm change it was the invention of the telescope and the realization that moons revolve around planets. With the change from Hunting and Gathering to city and nation civilization it was agriculture and animal husbandry.
And with the new monetary paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting it is the recognition of the incredibly powerful economic effects of a 50% discount/rebate monetary policy at the point of retail sale.
You just have to actually and completely/paradigmatically look at it.
Wake up RWER contributors to your own contributors realizations and to the paradigm changing REAL WORLD ECONOMIC effects of my innovations of policies suggested at the birth of macro-economics before it descended into the fallacies of neo-liberal DSGE and the obsessive and terminal abstraction it has fallen into.
KZ: Craig, if I could change the current economic arrangements as I wished, I’d make it something like what my family has in Germany and Norway. But that’s not likely. At least not without one hell of a war, or economic collapse, or both.
Me: It doesn’t have to wait for a war or economic collapse, AND MUSTN’T. That’s the disintegrative nonsense of Trump, Bannon and the authors of “The Fourth Turning”.
In the first place such an occurrence is more likely to cause even more chaos and confusion about actual solutions, and in the second place Scandinavian socialism isn’t actually a paradigm change any more than any capitalist theory would be. There ARE genuine third alternatives and actual paradigm changes always sweep aside the orthodoxies and all of the palliative reforms that have grown up around the old paradigm.
The new monetary paradigm isn’t capitalism or socialism it’s the integration of only the truths, highest workabilities, most relevant applicabilities and highest ethical considerations of the duality of capitalism and socialism that results in the thirdness greater oneness of DIRECT AND RECIPROCAL monetary DISTRIBUTISM.
There can be a theory of the new paradigm, but A MERE THEORY IS NOT A PARADIGM. A theory is a model, a paradigm is an entirely NEW AND DIFFERENT CONCEPT……THAT CREATES AN ENTIRELY NEW PATTERN.
KZ: Craig there is no practical way I know of you can gain political approval of such changes. And culturally speaking, most people won’t know what the hell you’re even proposing. And that alone will scare the hell out of them. And lead them to put your proposals out with the trash. You would have a better chance after years of building and shoring up a cultural foundation for the proposals.
This is from Encyclopedia Britannica. Perhaps helpful.
Third way, in politics, a proposed alternative between two hitherto dominant models, namely left-wing and right-wing political groups. Historically, the term third way was used to refer to a variety of forms of government—from Nordic social democracy to fascism. At the end of the 20th century, however, it acquired a more specific meaning when British sociologist Anthony Giddens used it to describe an alternative to neoliberalism and social democracy in an era of globalization. The term third way may be applied to refer to a new and distinctive policy program, to a new political economy, to a new conception of social justice, and, by many of its critics, to a centre-left capitulation to neoliberal globalization.
The third way was associated most clearly with the New Labour administration of Tony Blair, who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. It also was associated, less directly, with a number of centre-left administrations, notably those of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schröder (1998–2005).
Me: “culturally speaking, most people won’t know what the hell you’re even proposing. And that alone will scare the hell out of them. And lead them to put your proposals out with the trash.”
You’re right which is why I wouldn’t start out in that way. Instead I’d say something much more simple and obviously self interested like “Here is the simple way I’m going double your social security check” or “Here is the simple way I’m going to double the money actually available to purchase your businesse’s goods and services” or “Here is the simple way I’m going to enable you to go to college, live comfortably on $24k-$36k/yr and fully pay for your tuition while you attend so you don’t have $50-75k debt hanging around your neck for the next 15 years” or “Here’s the way I’m going to turn your $30,000 yearly income into $60,000.”
“there is no practical way I know of you can gain political approval of such changes.”
You’ll notice that the statements above integrate the normally opposed political constituencies of students and businessmen or retirees, and everyone who works and who they work for. If that isn’t a politically practical and winning program….I don’t know what is, and I studied political science in college.
Your third way information is entirely correct but I couldn’t possibly give a damn about the pretend third ways which do not focus on the monetary paradigm and do not have the insight regarding the potential for monetary policy at the point of retail sale….which everyone can plainly comprehend….if they are directed to look at its immediate, empirical, mathematical and temporal universe effects. Ordinary people are open to such things. Intellectuals whose minds are still entirely too culturally entangled in complexities and orthodoxies….not so much.
KZ: Craig, if you try this in the “real” world, you’ll find you are wrong about this.
Me: Not if you make them look at the benefits. Of course there are some people who are so propagandized and acculturated to the enslavement the money system has concocted for them that they will at first reject it, but that cynicism and folly will evaporate by simply stating the empirical and numerical facts to them enough times for them to see what’s in it for them. That and then acting out the policies effect with them as the consumer. The businessmen will back it right away because how can they object to doubling the money available for their products and services. Students overwhelmingly the same. Women, the same. Even the libertarians will quickly cave on the “free lunch” when their wives hit them over the head with a rolling pin for returning their dividend “on principle”.
KZ: Craig, if they don’t blow you off as just one more con artist.
Me: The con artists (whether conscious or unconscious) are always shilling for either capitalism or socialism. Economics isn’t the actual problem. When they realize that I or someone else is actually trying to free them by changing the monetary paradigm and that BOTH business and the individual tremendously benefit from that…..the vast majority will understand and be ready to get the evolutionary pitch forks out to fight the real problem.
KZ: Craig, changing the world in total, replacing one zeitgeist with another, building the best of all possible worlds is a pursuit of humans for thousands of years. It has never and will never work out as planned. As a model consider the five great extinctions that have occurred on Earth. Each was a nearly total reset of life on Earth. But to get that reset 95-98% of all life on Earth died. It’s not that much different for cultural resets. The Nazis wanted to remake the entire world in a National Socialism image. They and their allies killed nearly 100 million people in that effort. The death of people, of nations, or even entire civilizations is not unusual in human history. From the vantage of the span of human written and pre-literate history human life is not sacred (though some religious institutions would disagree). The universe is unlikely to grant notice to the passing of Sapiens when the species goes extinct. Plans to create one more cultural utopia for Sapiens is ludicrous. All such efforts in the past failed. Why would this one, or the one after it, or the one after that succeed? And the repercussions may be cultural collapse. Changes must be gradual, building on existing culture and guided by protection of species survival. Perhaps in a million years Sapiens will have experience enough to make total changes without side effects, but in a million years Sapiens may be wise enough not to make such changes.
Me: “changing the world in total, replacing one zeitgeist with another, building the best of all possible worlds is a pursuit of humans for thousands of years.”
Correct, the process of a paradigm change and a new zeitgeist does take a long time…but the process at its end is very short. If you read my book you will see that we indeed are in that last phase. Our present situation meets every one of the historically verifiable signatures of IMMINENT paradigm change…..and in that same short but insightful book I show that my policies enable every one of the historically verifiable signatures of ACCOMPLISHED paradigm changes. The current monetary paradigm of Debt Only and the current zeitgeist of Power have not changed since the beginning of human civilization. Is that not long enough to endure them? Especially when we now have the technology and instant communicative abilities to bring awareness of them to nearly everyone.
“It has never and will never work out as planned.”
Paradigm changes are not planned. They begin as moments of increased consciousness in the minds of those who are willing and able to conceive and visualize them, along with a new insight and/or a new tool that enables that paradigm changing vision’s temporal implementation.
“The universe is unlikely to grant notice to the passing of Sapiens when the species goes extinct.”
Unfortunately that is a possibility….unless we recognize the new paradigm and act swiftly and definitively to implement it.
“Plans to create one more cultural utopia for Sapiens is ludicrous. All such efforts in the past failed. Why would this one, or the one after it, or the one after that succeed?”
Utopias are top down one size fits all conceptions that are culturally hide bound to the present paradigm and/or zeitgeist. A new paradigm is a generalized increase in benefit and hence survivability of everyone. It is also ALWAYS an inversion of present realities and attitudes toward ideas associated with the old paradigm, in this case the entire concept of utopias. The generalized monetary and economic abundance and freedom that the policies of Wisdomics-Gracenomics would create are a complete inversion of the concept of a top down utopia because they would transfer monetary power and freedom “into the many hands of the individual”.
“Perhaps in a million years Sapiens will have experience enough to make total changes without side effects, but in a million years Sapiens may be wise enough not to make such changes.”
We’ve had the wisdom insights and techniques to self actualize the concept necessary for the new paradigm for probably well over 10,000 years. We just have to contemplate and rationally define its aspects and then align policy with it/them.
KZ: Craig, reversing Voltaire, you think doubtless that all is not for the best in the moral and physical world, but that the changes you offer will make a world where nothing could be better than as your new system creates it. Past experiences are that wholesale changes in cultures, or the replacement of one culture in favor of another disrupt, often deeply people’s faith in culture and thus in the reality of their lives. Even if what you propose is worth this risk, and I don’t believe it is, how will your new world defend itself? Without public support, and a willingness to change their lives, and I’ve seen no plan from you to gather that, it will be another dead end. But worse, this will leave people’s lives in bedlam. That’s a heavy moral cross you’re taking on.
Although the novella Candide was partially written for entertainment purposes, it was written primarily to satirize the views of Leibniz’s philosophy. Voltaire looked at the world with the idea that there could be something done about all the evil in the world. He achieved his goal of satirizing Leibniz by tearing apart Pangloss’ philosophy, using Martin as a contrast to Pangloss, showing the destruction caused by natural disasters, and the brutality of war. The satire remains incomplete, however, since Voltaire’s placed in the position of saying nothing can be done about the evil in the world. Craig you’re now front and center in this 500-year dispute.
Me: Ken, You have completely misjudged me. I have always been skeptical and iconoclastic, and I’ve lost none of the insight or intellectual capability those traits can endow one with. I just haven’t so worked myself into contending orthodoxies and intellectual bamboozlement over complexities that I can’t discern the difference between a data point and a paradigm change. Such inability to so discern can turn a radical into a Whigish advocate for no REAL change or terminal caution when survival depends upon deep and definitive action/policy.
KZ: Craig, I recognize your commitment. It’s your recognition of the difficulty of convincing others to put into practice what you are committed to I question.
Me: Why would I not be confident in a message that was the monetary and economic problem resolving integration of the opposites of self interest and the survival of the other (other human beings, other species and the ecological survival of the planet)?
Remember I’m not just hung up in data gathering and theoretical modeling I’m utilizing philosophy….and not the sophistry and confusion where one thing appears to be another, but rather the pinnacle concept of wisdom, the utterly integrative, unifying of the truths in opposites natural philosophical concept of grace.
Do yourself a favor and do a thorough and objective exegesis of the many aspects of that concept and how they apply to, integrate and resolve the apparent contending dualities in economics, politics, quantum physics etc. etc.
KZ: Craig, let’s look at it this way. How do you convince Walmart to sell today for $50 what it sold for $100 last week? Will Walmart’s suppliers make up the difference? Will the government? Will charities? If what you’re proposing is a planned economy where markets do not set prices, but the government does, I can accept that as a proposal. Please explain.
Me: You’re COMPLETELY misunderstanding what the policy is and does. It’s a Discount/REBATE policy. The enterprise discounts their prices to the consumer and the monetary authority/central bank REBATES every cent of the discount BACK to the enterprise so that they can be made whole on their margins and overheads.
The policy, because it actually doesn’t take effect until the very end of the economic/productive process, does not interfere in price discovery in any way. As consumption/possession has occurred no additional inflation can occur. It’s NOT quotas or price controls it’s individual and commercial monetary ASSISTANCE/GIVING/GIFTING.
Wal Mart would be convinced to opt into the policy because it will double the amount of individual money actually available for their goods and services….and because if they don’t then they will have to get $100 dollars for $100 of groceries from the consumer while their competitors will only have to get $50.
Because the 18 and older individual with their $1000/mo. dividend now can purchase $2000/mo. worth of goods and services the legislature can eliminate all transfer taxes for welfare, unemployment insurance and social security so it helps reduce costs for all enterprises and every working individual which will expose commercial greed if despite such cost REDUCING benefit they try to raise their prices. You tax any arbitrary non-economic price rises all to hell and the president or whomever gets up on the bully pulpit in a public news briefing and blasts any enterprises “who make such arbitrary non-economic decisions to destroy the additional purchasing power of you Mr. and Mrs. America” and then those enterprises lose the most valuable business commodity they have….their good will toward their customers.
Do you see it now?
Me: Steve Keen just posted this video on his patreon page. It’s both enlightening and yet leaves out the most problematic and important issue regarding money and monetary systems. And that is the fact that IN A MONETARY ECONOMY its perfectly alright to have profit making productive/commercial agents BUT IT IS COMPLETE IDIOCY TO THINK THAT YOU CAN HAVE A PROFIT MAKING MONETARY AND FINANCIAL SYSTEM. Why? To start out it ignores Lord Acton’s obviously true dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It also ignores that in a monetary economy….money is the most powerful economic factor. Why do we think finance presently “owns the joint”, and why would it be any different in any future profit making monetary system? And why would any central bank that was “independent”…read: the handmaiden of the too big to fail banks, ever tolerate policies that didn’t benefit private finance????.
We need to make the monetary system a fourth non-profit making branch of government with STRICT and absolute arm’s length independence from the other three branches of government that issues money as debt BUT IS PRIMARILY BASED ON MONETARY GIFTING.
And never mind obsessing about inherently insecure distributive ledgers. Focus instead on DIRECT AND RECIPROCAL MONETARY GIFTING AT THE POINT OF RETAIL SALE WHICH ACCOMPLISHES MONETARY DISTRIBUTISM BY RESOLVING BOTH THE HIGH COSTS OF HIGH TECH CAPITAL INTENSIVE ECONOMIES, THE IDIOTICALLY HIGH COSTING PROBLEMS OF PRIVATE FOR PROFIT MONEY SYSTEMS AND THE SCARCITY OF INDIVIDUAL DEMAND AS WELL…..ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
Of course Facebooks proposal is wrongheaded. It just adds another corporate structural impediment to what is actually needed which is a new monetary and financial paradigm/pattern/concept that firmly and ethically guides a new publicly administered non-profit national banking and financial system. The trick is to discern the new paradigm’s concept which is monetary grace as in gifting, to be precise direct and reciprocal monetary gifting, implemented at the pivotally powerful policy point of retail sale (because its the ending point of the entire legitimate economic/productive process where production becomes consumption, the summing point for all costs including profit and finally the economic factor terminal expression point for inflation). Hence, paired with a universal dividend, a 50% discount/rebate policy at that point simultaneously ends individual income scarcity and any possibility of price or asset inflation.
And the new national non-profit banking system is mandated to implement and distribute the monetary gifting policies into “the many hands of the individual”…..not a corporate elite.
Of course economics is an explanatory disaster….because it hasn’t cognited on the fact that the money system and its monopolistic paradigm IS THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM.
No, it’s not just interest like the monetary cranks fixate on because MATHEMATICALLY you can always inject a flow of credit/debt into the economy that MATHEMATICALLY palliates the fact that temporally the system/pattern never works out…MATHEMATICALLY. Well why doesn’t it turn out mathematically? BECAUSE THE SYSTEM AND ITS MONOPOLISTIC PATTERN-PARADIGM…..IS THE ACTUAL PROBLEM.
YOU HAVE TO THINK IN TERMS OF THE PATTERN-PARADIGM….TO FIX THE PATTERN-PARADIGM.
TRY THINKING ABOUT IT THAT WAY. PARADIGMATICALLLY, THAT IS.
The economic problem is precisely like the Matrix. It’s not obsessive machine thinking ONLY, and it’s not human idiocy or even systematic thinking ONLY. It’s an integration of the two that creates a thirdness greater oneness out of the two THAT RAISES OUR CONSCIOUSNESS REGARDING THE PATTERN/PARADIGM.
It’s when agent Smith realizes he’s not right. It’s when Neo realizes he must give himself/his consciousness to the machines….in order to bring grace/flow/raised consciousness/permanent but not final progress to the system….because there’s no end to history….but there is an infinity of up so far as paradigm perception/grace-consciousness is concerned.
The real question we need to be asking ourselves is: Do we owe parasitic private finance and their monopolistic paradigm of Debt Only guaranteed dominating control over everyone and every other actually legitimate economic business model? You have to be paradighmatically hypnotized to get that question wrong, and paradighmatically unconscious to not even ask it.
The current monetary paradigm IS the economic problem. Think about it.
Social Credit/Wisdomics/Gracenomics/ Gracientialism 