Humane Money 6

Part 5: To be done

Any individual or organization inspired to make this outline a reality will have to leapfrog conventional – and I assert inadequate – thinking about what constitutes a democratic organization. BSHTRS are always in the wings waiting for an opportunity to take, and control, center stage. It truly seems to be an irreducible quality of the human species. So from the moment the first meeting is called until thermodynamics brings the universe to its maximum entropy, constant vigilence is, and always will be, required.

Therefore, a set of rules will have to be written that is both reasonably simple and reasonably safe from co-option by BSHTRS over the long term, even at a global scale. This is not an insurmountable task, but it must be undertaken with a sharp weather eye toward the dark clouds of BSHTRS and with a spirit of trust in democracy. Thus the following questions should be asked concerning each proposed rule:

• What is the rule's intended goal, how does the rule support reaching the intended goal, and does the rule incorporate other, hidden goals?
• Does the rule simplify administration or would it require complex cascading regulation and micro-management?
• Does the rule introduce restrictive technicalities, does it inhibit, prohibit, or otherwise attempt to limit or prevent the government from performing its legitimate role through non-elective means?
• Does the rule provide opportunity for BSHTRS? Are BSHTRS advocating the rule?
• Does the rule move the solution as far upstream toward the problem's source as it can be moved?
• Does the rule reduce the burdens of being a fully participatory member of democratic processes, or does it make such participation more difficult and exclusive?
• Most importantly, does the rule contribute to the affirmation of the value inherent in each and every human and does it contribute to a human economy based on a fully humane money system that enables responsible and honest economic communication?

Also, an operational design for the day-to-day use of Humane Money must be created. Today's digital tech provides the capacity to ensure speed, ease of use, and minimal opportunity for fraud and corruption - if properly coded, regulated, and honestly administered. Yet aside from that caveat, there is also the issue that digital tech is only available to those who have access to it, financially and geographically. Therefore, there must also be a well designed alternative analog method for tracking political-economic conversations running parallel to any digital medium so the now most excluded members of our human society can be welcomed fully into the family - if they so choose.

Just A Few Words More

If you've read all the way through this website to here... Wow!

The point of all this is that money is nothing more than a symbolic method of communicating to large numbers of strangers the contributions of time each individual must inevitably make to the world's community, just as words are a method of communicating individual human thoughts to the world's community. And just as people have thoughts and the natural right to responsibly communicate them using words, so do people have hours of life and the natural right to responsibly communicate them using money.

Any definition of money that limits or otherwise manipulates that right to communicate by requiring first-the-work-then-the-money is, in essence, an abridgement of freedom of expression. It places the value of stuff above the value of people. It constitutes a limit on the human right to interact on an equal footing with an equal voice. It's a lash that drives people to do things they would not otherwise choose to do. In other words, it is a slave-system variant, no matter how subtle or dressed up as benevolence. It is, in fact and in practice, nothing more than an attempt to shout down or silence the many so the few can control the economic, and consequently the political, conversation. In the world today, this amounts to a strategy of keeping the low-born and unlucky subservient and in line. What is proposed above is an alternative that puts money first, and only then the freely chosen work - the antithesis of all slave systems and a critical component required to establish a democratic society that honors and values all its members equally.

In any case, even total acceptance worldwide of humane money is no silver bullet, no magic potion to make all right with the world. The all too human vulnerability to power and fame addiction will ever be with us, just as additictions to the bottle, the needle, and the slot machine are inevitable so long as we are human. Ultimately, addiction to power and fame must be treated as a serious illness and fought on many fronts with many structural barriers designed to ameliorate and hopefully put into remission a disease that has for too long been both enabled and ignored. Those vulnerable to this disease deserve better from society, they deserve help in fighting the misfortune of having inherited or become vulnerable to a debilitating weakness.