As Long As Money Exists, The World Will Be An Evil Place

Almost all crime in the world can be traced back to money as the principle motive, with the exception of crimes of passion of which many involve money in some indirect way. Money gives a person power, an advantage over others; people will do whatever necessary to maintain this advantage sometimes including taking measures so that others less advantaged by wealth despite whatever other traits they possess as a person stay that way, and do not rise to have equal opportunity. Organized crime exists because of money, so does almost every form of corruption imaginable that is destructive and harmful to some demographic or to all of society.

I well understand the function for money in past era's, in a time when the population was much smaller than today and inversely each member of society could produce only very little in comparison to modern times; today the means of production is many fold more efficient. Money was desired as a token that had a universally understood value to be used in trade so that a person could trade with anyone using that token, even if the two parties did not have mutual interest or need of the products that the other of them produced.

Today i believe the situation is much different, and changing at an ever rapidly increasing rate. Moore's law does not seem to be yielding to any kind of barrier (chip feature size seem's to be nearing another wall, but this has occurred before and will be broken). Other fields such as robotics which has dominated manufacturing for decades does not seem to be slowing down. If anything, what slows down technological quantum leaps is cost. Remove money from the equation and you do not have that price wall. Companies are always trying to squeeze as much productivity as they can out of a payroll budget. There's plenty of capable people that would voluntarily work on these technical problems without pay, in a society where money held no value, because money would not be necessary to obtain necessities. Without payroll budgets, there would be almost no limit to the number of people that could be working on a problem.

This would actually encourage an environment where people had more control over their environment, working on the problems they would like to see solved, and not those things that are harmful. Everyone would have an equal opportunity at as much education as they desire, many would go on to become professors as usual, but entrance into education would be unbarred which would create a much more advanced society capable of far more.

There is no real shortage of anything in the world in modern times, any shortage is purely artificial for economic reason despite how it must seem for those effected (if they were a great deal more wealthy, they would find that there was no shortage).

People will do what they are interested in doing, and will contribute to society in their own way. I do not think that money is necessary as an incentive to contribute. Everyone has some interest and will naturally contribute to sustain society. Every economic system we have ever seen in the history of the world has failed. There is always an effort to balance wealth while keeping everyone happy, which also fails. Money fails! Soon there will be no need for such a thing. It's a peice of paper, something to fight over like dogs fighting for a bone. Money is one huge reason for people to take advantage of others, stunting the evolutionary process and stunting the advancement of society. One of the biggest threat to humans seems to be other humans, we've conquered most everything else .. time to take the next step. Religion is another thing that stunts advancement, there are signs that religion will eventually give way to a new way of thinking that has been happening since the science and the age of reason as dogma is broken down and re-examined. As education levels rise across society, and as education becomes more accessible religiosity falls, and has been statistically falling. By extrapolation, you can expect that in the somewhat near future, religious folk may become a minority group. Money too, is much like religion and many people worship it much like some religious deity. Some time in the future, it will find no further purpose, and a burden to a modern, technologically and intellectually advanced egalitarian society.

 

See, overall advancement does not come through science and technology alone. The growth of science and technology has been fastest in the last century, and there is also a corresponding increase in war and bloodshed, with two of the bloodiest wars in human history. Even now, the present world is torn apart by bloodshed and wars, and depression statistics and suicide rates are rising in the west.

As the west only had an experience of religion through christianity, it has a tendency to view all other religions through the same coloured glasses. It is high time, it made a study of religion as it is, and its true function, which is to elevate the individual to higher levels of consciousness. The truly religious individual is more conscious, loving,creative, happier and at peace with himself.
Peace within results also in peace without.

And conversely, restlessness within also results in restlessness without, with obvious painful results.

Religion harmoniously balanced with science, can ensure a golden future for mankind.

 

Money isn't the problem... Greed is the problem.

 

^ This. It's the possession of goods in general. Money is just an expression of that.

 

The glasses you see through are gold colored, wake up to the rainbow.

 

On that note possession is whether it be prized or demonic.

 

It's ace_karl the commie.

 

your cash aint nothin' but trash

 

and will there be volunteers to do the cotton pickin shit jobs that no one wants to do?...and who gets to live in the mansions while others live on the streets, etc?

or will we just go back to days of yore when there was physical take overs for properties and things?

Man will always want more....it is human nature.

 

ahh, that problem. i knew someone would bring that one up, what about all the things in the world that are necessary but no one really wants to do, it they had other choice?

does society RELY on having some less advantaged people around to take care of such things? it seems to me that generally, some of the most undesirable jobs do not become more attractive because of the wage offered; the wages are often quite low. it must not be money which inspires one to take up such occupations in most cases. in a fair and equal society with a monetary system in place wages should be paid which also offset the human cost and quality of life issues otherwise it is just a new form of slavery. could people not share in certain duties that are less desirable?

in the somewhat near future, these tasks will be less of an issue with automation and robotics tech becoming more accessible most of these sorts of tasks will be performed by machine, as they are tasks fit for a machine and ones in which machines will perform at a higher level of capability. this can already be seen in many industries behind the scenes robotics is heavily implemented in manufacturing. mundane repetitive tasks can be performed continuously, at a higher rate of speed with consistent performance and higher quality consistency as well. we will no longer have the need for human slaves and will be available to focus on the important things that should define being human.

in currency exchange, i have spoken with a few programmers who mentioned having implemented a trading bot, a computer program that analyzes the price changes and crunched the numbers, automatically making the trades. computers excel in crunching numbers, humans not so much. this is why we no longer deal with the underlying arithmetic in mathematics when solving a problem, this is the task of calculators, leaving us to focus our efforts on the higher level, more abstract stuff of mathematics.

 

money is an organizing principal . remove it and only the divine anarchists will survive .
death will be a mess . your orchestrated techno vision will never happen ... but there
will be cool stuff like teleportation that just arises freely .

for the present i'll be activist in free trade/fair trade , and the root of that is making
something for nothing and living very simply .

i recently was aquainted with a cult whose devotion is the money-less society . they are
smiley and hope for peace , and then i gave them 40$ for the communal kitchen , and then
they went to the store for food , and then they kicked me out for selling something i had
made from sticks and rocks and paint at the street market .

 

"Money is not the root of all evil, it is the LACK of money that is the root of all evil" - Rev. Ike

 

Ok, I get it that robots will be the ones cleaning the toilets, etc....and I clean my own here, btw. I have no problem with that...never have.....

In theory, there should be enough for everyone...without anyone suffering, I agree. I hate how some professions make zillions of dollars, while others who do back breaking work and scientific discoveries and medical advancements get hardly anything. It is this unfair world we live in....in theory things should not be as they are, but I see problems arising ...and who is going to live in the mansions already built?

 

Everyone

everyone would be equal, and have equal opportunity to have an acceptable standard of living, a standard that is agreed upon by society. i can see that there could still be problems with people hoarding things, much more than they are actually capable of utilizing, possibly only to keep others from having, which could create the same imbalance in quality of life.

there would still exist laws, legal procedure and such. possibly laws to prevent someone from "claiming" a large amount of housing which creates a situation where others do not have adequate housing. this is not much different than a landlord buying up hundreds of apartment buildings.

there would exist a certain availability of things, and what each person could then have for themselves of that certain thing would depend on the current availability of that particular thing. possible a sort of queue where one person could have a share, but no exhaust the availabilty before others have had a fair chance. the availabilty of a certain thing would depend on the contribution of society to produce, which would be regulated by the overall interest of society in contribution.

you get your share, if society wishes shares of certain things to be more than they are, then they will participate in it's production at a higher level overall. society as a whole could "vote" with their participation by their overall level of participation in different sectors of production so that not one or a few individuals would have power to change things drastically to suit their own interests. however, individuality will be preserved, people will be free as individuals to pursue whatever things in life that they desire that are lawful. each individual will contribute to society as a whole in their own unique way. common interest will be the loudest voice, no one person's interest of a few very wealthy individuals.

there should be anti-capitalist laws in place in this kind of society.

 

your laws will be enforced by killer robots ... you can see even now the approaching reality . they
will be maintained by capable volunteer technicians .

 

the only "world" there's anything "evil" about is the "world" of human society. money does motivate needlessly destructive behavior though. and society could be organized without guns or money. or we could live without infrastructure, which is the only thing society needs to be organized for.

personally i like some kinds of infrastructure, and many kinds of technology. though there is no shortage of both i wouldn't happily trade for somewhat less of social organization and a lot less of hierarchy.

i define evil as the intentional causing of needless harm. mostly because i know of no other definition that makes any kind of sense. now tyranny is part of that. and the dominance of aggressiveness is always tyranny, whatever ideology, belief, or anything else, manufactures consent for it.

money, culture, ego. its overly simplistic to look for some one thing to blame outside of our own selves. though equally so to blame only ourselves individually. money certainly is a big factor in creating problems.
but a lot of that comes from how we regard it culturally. if we use it only as a tool and recognize it primarily as a convenience, a lot of that obsession with it, can go away.

but the op is right in the sense that again, we could be better off without the concept of money and the way we think about it, and those things ARE perfectly capable of becoming obsolete and going away, as i believe inevitably they eventually will.

 

ok , then what's to be the organizing principle ? i hope your intellect advances , meanwhile , certainly
hold to peacefulness .

an anarchist will believe all is anarchy now . what can be more inevitable ?

i'm really only asking here 'what's to do ?'

 

universal consideration. shared effort to accomplish shared desires. its not that organization nor the lack of it, need be objectives in and of themselves, rather that some modest percentage of things or conditions mutually desired depend upon it. that is to say, anything you would like to see exist that you can't make or do, entirely by yourself.

it is not inevitable for people to be unable to live without such things, though there do seem to be a rather large number of people who seem to find it difficult to imagine doing so.

building your own shelter, where there are no restrictions is fun. feeding yourself entirely by your own effort, without the use of anything you haven't created yourself can be a bit of a grind.

the reason not to mess things up isn't because a bunch of people wrote a bunch of books a long time ago, but because you still have to live in it.

 

thanks for your relationship . obscurely , i do like to grind flour . them others can go on and terra-form another planet
and colonize it with 700 females and a sperm bank . maybe the new humans will write home now and then .

 

I could not disagree more with the OP. Firstly, you seem to be confusing money, or currency, with value. Currency has existed for a fairly short time. But value is ever present. The prime cause of most strife in this world is that living things are in competion for resources. It is a lamentable fact that the more two species have in common the more they will be in competition because they rely on similar means of existence. Following this to its conclusion we would arrive at the realization that competition within one group of organisms would be greater than competition between groups because members of a species are relying on the exact same means of existence. The prime causes of large scale violence throughout history have been access to land, water, food, and women. The ultimate cause of evil is not money, or the pursuit of money, or envy and jealousy over money. Rather the root cause is highly evolved minds realizing that they exist in a world that is predatorial to the maximum, and attempting to be successful in that world.

If anything currencty helps to alleviate this problem. This may partially be why we are currently living in one of the most peaceful and prosperous periods the Human race has ever known. According to the best statistics available so far, the odds of a person dying violently in our time period is much lower than ever before. This even includes attempts to determine the rate of violent death in pre-historical societies.

Of course the real reasons for peace and prosperity are this: 1) Increased productivcity has lead to a situation in which more people have access to a decent means of living, and are therefor less motivated to be violent. 2) The creation of strong centralized states. By vesting the power of violence solely into a central authority, and by agreeing that this authority has the power to use the threat of force to control the behavior of it's citizens we have greatly reduced the profitibility of individual violence, and therefor we have reduced its occurance.

I know many will disagree with this. After all the world seems so violent. 50 million people died in WWII alone. Those casualties were figured into the statistics, and even including all combat and all non combat deaths in all wars the last 100 years still appear to be the most peaceful and prosperous times we have ever known. For further reading I recommend "The Blank Slate" by Stephen Pinker.