Let’s use a model. Say you want my counselling (that being what I do), if you give me money how will it go? There does have to be an agreement system, but if in my example you sought my counselling so you came and gave me food, there would be a direct impact. If you came and gave me money, what I actually get is totally arbitrary. Maybe I even get very little.
What about the problem of you then having a whole house of potatoes? More then you need, but no apples? Then I can trade potatoes with someone who wants to trade me apples, again it’s still a direct impact. Someone who does labour for money, labours for what a power above him decides he gets. Someone who does labour for resource gets the resource.
In the feudal era the only thing that kept serfs working for the nobility was a share of the resource they generated. The problem is the military power, aka noble, decided how much the serf could keep, and it was often very little to keep them on that little farm. This is fact. The nobility used to curse “villains” roundly. The word originally meaning “free man” who paid fealty to nobody, because nobility didn’t hold all the land, and couldn’t control all the labour.
Reminds me of the current tax system? Well, the nobility has gotten better at it. Now they give us money, and they do control all the land, and we labour.
In contemporary view, a perfect world would be everyone doing something that they specialize in. Trading with another item with no governmental rule over who has what, and in governmental view the government would only have a say over criminalistic acts. Exactly, and the Zeitgeist movement agrees with you. From their view, communities can handle criminal acts, but also this is where their concern with technology kicks in. If our technology is dedicated to production of societies needs, and not weapons and other crap like tools to better damage our environment with, then there wouldn’t be much need to sell anything. You would trade things because you want to, not because you have to.
With technology aspects it should be a service to the public, and not to personal deviancies. Exactly, that is what the Zeitgeist movement is espousing. Technology serving us all. Not medicine if you can pay for it, but medicine when you need it. We automate a lot of our food production right now. With technology being focused on those needs and not other things, we would do them easily, or they could be automated, and people do have callings. People do like to program, they do like to build, and they will do it because they want to.
I have had people do work for me, and for no other reason than they wanted to. I am not kidding. People won’t stop doing stuff, but maybe they will focus more on say raising their kids. I know people who own their own shipping trucks. They would continue to own their own shipping trucks, and just wouldn’t have anyone telling them “I own you”.
People will stop doing productive stuff? If there is a sense that a neighbour is not contributing fairly, there will be a breakdown? Hmm, I don’t know people who won’t mow their lawn just because the neighbour won’t, and with a resource based economy they would impoverish themselves. No one else would have to worry about it.
How are people motivated to achieve in this Zeitgeist system? Because people are always motivated to do. What if you lived in a community where nobody told you your house wasn’t yours? And nobody had any possibility of taking it from you? Even the government. Where no one told you food wasn’t yours? People want the satisfaction of doing the right thing. In general, people want nicer communities. They don’t have to be told to want them. In general, people want peace. They don’t have to be told to want it. So the monetary system and rule of law don’t have to exist if nothing stops us from doing the right thing.
Is Zeitgeist most closely related to anarchy? Not officially. They don’t have a directly anti-governmental view, but some schools of anarchy did agree with their model of how government should exist and function. Anarchy is functioning without rule, and the early anarchists weren’t militant. Taoism is basically anarchist in its principles. We do what we must is the argument they espouse, and what we must do is not dictated by us. It’s dictated by those who decide what everything must be.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~