Can we rediscover ourselves? Could we then discover each other? Whether these questions are as crazy as they may seem at first sight is the subject of this essay.
In earlier times cultures were slowly grown over centuries by individuals, acting as individuals and in association with their fellows. Few lives didn’t contribute to this in some way. It might be a word, a phrase, an observation, an idea, or a technique, method, refinement or style in agriculture, tool making, husbandry, dress, song, play, or some other aspect of life. It was always democratic in the sense that what was contributed remained, but only insofar as those within the culture elected to keep and adopt it.
Culture was organic; a distillation of that contributed by once living people.
It was never static, any more than life can be static, but changed, usually but not always slowly, with the bringing into focus of the natural world and of the nature of ourselves.
That changed with a loss of innocence. In today’s language, it changed with the realisation that people can be artificially programmed. This is perhaps most evident in advertising practice. Incessant repetition across all media for two years can establish brand recognition as a household name, though it began as an unknown. There is not thought to be any defence from this, and countless billions are spent every year on the basis that there is not.
If Pontius Pilate asked his famous question "What is truth?" of modern advertising executives they could only answer "That which we have been told the most often!"
Newspapers (and other media) are not intended to inform us, to entertain us, or to educate us. Their intention is primarily (and therefore often only) to sell merchandise, and of course to win its advertising fees. Here is but one example of the endeavour to programme and capture culture, rather than grow and share it. There are plenty more.
In the field of health, cancer research is a case in point. The support of millions of charitable people and organisations is funnelled, amidst much urging and publicity, into finding a cure. All research, however, is confined within strict limits. Unless the "cure" turns out to be a patentable drug or procedure, there cannot be any return upon investment.
Cancer cells, for example, consume eighteen times more sugar than do normal cells. At least once cancer is diagnosed, radically reducing sugar in the diet and those food types which the human body can turn into sugar would seem to be worthy of investigative research. This research will never take place, however, except at an alternative and amateur level. Why? Because even if it does prove to have great value, and bring benefit to many lives, there can be no financial gain to the researchers. They may as well have poured their money down the drain; there is no patentable and saleable cure at the end of the rainbow.
Health research is primarily aimed at the prospect of a financial result, with a "health result", hopefully, being only the means towards getting it.
The environment is also a battleground for the conquest of dollars. When the environmental movement was miniscule, full page advertisements appeared in the major media to "Save the Whales". Saving the whales is an excellent thing, commendable and simply sane, but the adverts were paid for by the "Seven Sisters" because they had a product to displace the special applications of whale oil. It couldn’t compete, being more expensive, until the whales were "saved".
Some years ago I spent a few weeks in the company of one Geoff MacDonald of Footscray in Melbourne, an ex-communist who had been raised in a communist family, and spent his youth in the Young Communist Movement. Although having broken with communism, he met a comrade from his youth (let’s call him Tom) in a Melbourne bar. They exchanged news of their lives.
Tom had spent a decade in America and was designated by the Party to oppose the use of the chemicals 24D and 245T, the famous defoliants of the Vietnam War. In the first years they got nowhere.
Then a fellow walked through the door, said he liked what they were doing, and said he may be able to help. Seven million dollars and several years later they found out who he was. He was Mafia. The Cops were despairing of the courts, and were taking to the air with 24D to spray and kill their drug plots. The Mafia fought back using the "useful idiots" (Lenin’s term) in the Communist Party.
Those well placed to import and exploit the use of cheap timber produced by clear felling in environmentally backward countries always support (read fund) and campaign against measured and regulated forest harvesting in developed countries. Competition is a sin. Even limited opposition from production in high wage areas is to be removed.
A time was when where people lived was within easy distance of the food, fibre and building materials upon which they drew to sustain themselves. Ninety per cent of people lived in villages, had known the other families in the area for generations, were largely self-sustaining, and constituted in these ways a quite organic society. It is now estimated that the food which modern Americans eat has travelled, on average, over 2,000 miles.
For centuries it was difficult to communicate with larger numbers of people from rural areas, but this has ended. Modern communications and transport puts us in as close touch with each other as we may wish, from pretty much anywhere. So why are we living in great congested urban jungles?
Excessive urbanisation is not the product of public choice, nor is it decreed by government. In this, financial policy and practice rules. It is more difficult to get a loan to build a house in a rural area, and the interest rate is higher than in a city. The general level of house prices is determined wholly by the banks, in their propensity to lend us the money with which to outbid each other with their money. Build a house in a city and an identical one in the country, and the former will fetch twice the price of the latter.
We discus organic gardening, organic farming and organic food, but perhaps the thing we are most in need of is an organic society in which to live. How could we achieve an organic society? One thing that it certainly involves is the decentralisation of decision making back to the individual, so that decisions are made from a standpoint of enhancing human satisfaction rather than financial outcomes.
One of our difficulties is that people imagine than the big decisions are made by voting. They are, but certainly not by voting for politicians. The really important voting is done by all of us every day. And yes, there are elections every day and everywhere.
There are two types of ballot papers. One is only used for making choices in politics. The other is used to elect all of the products and services upon which our lives depend every day; we speak of course of money. Of the two, the latter is usually the most influential, so our money elections are worthy of a little inquiry.
When we work hard and long, most of us will say that we are making money. Making money is a criminal offence. What we are really saying is that we are acquiring money. We acquire money from others who in turn acquired it from others, who had it from others again, but somewhere, somewhere way back, somebody did make it. And I really mean make it.
Oh! You mean the mint? No, I don’t mean the mint! Only 2% to 5% of money is ever made visible by representing it in the form of notes or coins. The 95% is a record. A record printed on a bank statement or held in the form of magnetic blips in computers and neither the mint nor government has the least thing to do with its creation or initial allocation into society. This is a private monopoly shared by a few entities, and of course it carries with it the ability to own and/or control any and all things which are for sale. It was at this point, the centralised private control of the creation of our money supply, that organic society died. It is not my intention to have it RIP.
95% of money is created by private entities, at no cost at all as it does not need to be visible, and they make it available to us on the condition that we accept it as repayable debt and pay interest, and, as this is the actual origin of our economic ballot "papers", can we really pretend surprise that we don’t have economic democracy? Both laughing and crying are entirely in order.
But some of us, standing in the cold dawn of this unfurling light, know that there is nobody else. There is only us and we have, thankfully more apparently than really, nothing. Ending the omnipotent monopoly of money creations does not call for heroes. It calls for fools. If you are one, or think you may be able to learn to become one, please step forward. Ours is a life of quietly and peacefully demesmerising our fellows to awaken a new age towards economic democracy. As there is no personal gain to be had with immediacy in this, its lot falls to nature’s fools.
What changes are needful to democratise the issue of money and its distribution has been developed over the last hundred years, starting with C H Douglas in 1917. It is available in the libraries of www.socialcredit.com.au
The biggest problem in the economy now (2015) from an environmental and organic standpoint is that it is so constructed that it must continually grow, or it falls into recession and drastic dysfunction. Growth, growth and more growth is not needed in the developed world where productive capacity is already sufficient to meet all sane needs. The difficulty is in selling the production, not in making it. It is a problem of distribution, and this problem is financial in nature.
If we can assume that there is at any time insufficient purchasing power in the hands of consumers to allow their purchase of what is currently on offer to them (proof of this is available, but it is not for this essay … see the website above) then businesses will be unable to sell a portion of their product. This will cause a contraction of production and employment, which reduces the purchasing power distributed through employment further again. This worsens the situation and brings on another contraction of money available for consuming available product. This continues if unremedied through the stages of recession and then depression until the economy is pretty much totally inoperable. The social consequences of such a state are self-evident.
Only two suggestions have ever been made as to how to solve this dilemma.
One is to increase the money supply by banks increasing debt. This issue of additional money may be for government works or services, private capital production (whether for domestic use or export), or for consumer loans. These debts then increase future taxes, flow into future prices, or increase future private loan repayments respectively.
However temporarily, until the future arrives, purchasing power in the hands of consumers is increased. This happens directly in the case of consumer loans, and indirectly from wages, salaries, dividends, commissions, contractual services etc. which flow as a result from governmental and commercial loans. After the future arrives, increased taxes, prices and repayments assist in reducing consumer purchasing power in relation to available production. Thus we are compelled onto the next round of the revolving door, lest recession take us, demanding more debt and more unnecessary growth to increase our immediate ability to buy now.
The other option is to distribute economic votes (money) in the same way as are distributed political votes, that is, free of charge and on the basis that we all get an equal share, and in an amount equal to the deficiency of purchasing power at the time.
This re-empowering of individual choice is the road to economic democracy. Its tendency to progressively reduce activity inspired only by the compulsion to expand the money supply through growth, and to engage us less in those needless activities decreed by the allocation of money to them by our banking system masters, will allow the motivating force in the economy to be increasingly ours and aimed at human satisfaction.
The purpose of organic society is in increasing efficiency in terms of human satisfaction.
