The End of Money and the Future of Civilization

from spiritualsun.org

Tim Jenkin at realitysandwich.com has a review of Thomas Greco's The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. In Jenkin's words, Greco is saying that the financial problem we now face, "distilled to its essence... is the concentration of power by the financial elite through its monopolization of money. This has been achieved through a pact with government, which has given the money monopoly such power that today it is not inaccurate to say that governments are the junior partners in this alliance." Furthermore, "governments are fully tied into and dependent on this system, and are not the primary decision makers about what happens and how it works. Even if governments did have the will and the power to wrest control of the issuance of credit from the banking cartel.., the historical record suggests that where governments have come out on top their monopolization of credit has led to militarization, wars, expansion and a weakening of democratic processes." So, "the money problem will not be solved by shifting the issuing power, even if governments are able to do it debt free. What is required is the ending of the money monopoly. This means the decentralization and democratization of the exchange process. Again this can only be achieved through traders establishing their own mutual credit clearing circles and independent private and community currencies."

I don't think that this conclusion goes far enough: I side with the comment by MindScape, who says: " I do not agree with the conclusion that what we need is to do is to revert back to a kind of Dark Ages isolationism, where each micro-region has an entirely independent economy and government. Not only is this unrealistic because it runs against the grain of human history - ever increasing unity and cooperation is the foundation of human civilization, just look how we've gone from family, to tribe, to village, to city, to nation, etc - but also this eventuality would have extremely damaging consequences for our world, because it would promote short-sighted and regional considerations over long-sighted and global ones - what is to stop one village dumping its waste in to the river and polluting the water supply of a neighbouring, but independent/isolated village down stream? What we need is to continue the process of globalization, but just to change its direction away from greed towards peace and happiness.. How do we do this? We shift our global consciousness (which I feel is happening as we speak) and we trust in technology. The frontiers of quantum physics has presented man the opportunity finally to unite the spiritual with the scientific ... and technology is what can solve our current problems and establish a world where we don't even need any system of money at all - we have the resources, we just need the will."

As the old saying goes, "money is the root of all evil". A decentralization of money will not free us from the damage caused by basing our world view on ownership, scarcity, and competition. We have to create a new world based on sharing, co-operation, and abundance.