Demonetising society

In building a human-centred society, basing everything around money tends to dehumanise people. Perhaps we need to find alternatives.

Money-based systems try to express all value in monetary terms, but that makes it easier for those having power and wealth to exploit everyone else by reducing them to a value that the wealthy specify. This makes it easier to discount the needs of those exploited as being secondary to their value as productive units that help the wealthy gain more. If we want a society that serves the needs of people as a priority, does everything have to be defined by its monetary value?

Money allows a degree of social mobility because we can transfer our labour value. We are still at the whim of those who are willing to pay for our labour, but conversely, we can choose who we work for. The problem is that what work is available has always been principally defined by the wealthy and powerful, so any social mobility has been restricted to what they deem allowable.

The other benefit of money relates to what the so-called marketplace is supposed to guarantee, and that is that by buying goods or services, we are voting for what we think is important, and thus collectively signalling to their suppliers what to focus upon. It allows people to innovate and create without having to be told what to do or not do. It decentralises the control of effort and focus to individuals. This too has been sabotaged by the wealthy, using advertising propaganda that distorts desires into needs to promote addiction to what they produce.

All democratic efforts have been to wrest control of our societies from the rich and powerful so that there is equity in choice of what people can do and what sort of society they want to live in. While the wealthy have resisted this push by promoting the idea of their own superiority while distracting us as much as possible from being able to challenge them, the push continues. However, we strike a significant hurdle in that a society based upon economic value favours those who have successfully hoarded that value.

Within our current economic systems, most constructs like Universal Basic Income (UBI), that could really bring a huge amount of independence to people, do not scale well because they appear to be uneconomical to fully implement on a wide scale. This is because these systems try to define every societal resource in monetary terms, which tend to force governments to use commercial intermediaries to provide services, resulting in surcharges due to having to provide profits for them.

The outsourcing is designed to hobble governments' effectiveness because using businesses subsumes the mandate to serve people mandate into commercial agendas that are serving the very small subset of people who are shareholders. This is not restricted to governments though, as many businesses are outsourcing services to turn themselves into profit machines rather than actually producing anything of value. Being a supreme parasite is now the new status symbol, further feeding exploitation and devaluing people. All this further concentrates wealth into the hands of the already wealthy.

It is not enough to just try and make businesses have a social conscience. We need to let governments provide more to people directly, and that necessitates them directing more of our societies' resources. This brings us back to the need to balance societal control with personal freedoms. To properly determine that balance, we need to define what the goals of our societies are. Most economic systems promise personal freedom, but they usually result in only a very wealthy few really having freedom, while everyone else is exploited and caught up in permanent stress and servitude.

To maximise freedom for all of us as much as possible, measures are required to limit the ability of each of us to gather so much wealth that we can exploit our fellow citizens, let alone let us get anywhere to controlling our societies. We have to devalue money as a ticket to power. A key to power has been property ownership, principally because that restricted who could use it, and thus minimising its ability to provide maximum utility to as many people as possible. Limiting the maximum property each of us can have will enable far more of us to have property.

Governments could provide building materials with guidance for how they are to be used, but leaving up to individuals to customise the layout of their homes to suit their lifestyle. Governments could then take advantage of new designs and materials to maximise the extent of their utilisation. This is the type of balance between governments and personal freedom that fosters creativity while containing excesses, as opposed to just building a bunch of non-descript apartment blocks to sardine-can people into. This provides the economies of scale without locking down peoples' lifestyle choices.

Such direct government provision of goods and services can extend to appliances, computers, phones, musical instruments, transport, and many others. The difference is that all these could be provided to us instead of a UBI. Maximum limits and provisions to prevent hoarding would apply. This simplifies the supply chains while being more responsive to our collective needs, as there can be centralised request mechanisms put in place. This maximises our individual freedom of choice while minimising exploitation. Some money would be included for personal discretionary spending.

It is these sorts of government provision of fairly essential goods and services, with strong request and feedback systems to make sure that supply does actually meet demand, that can transform our societies from money-based to cooperative, but without unnecessary government control. On top of this there can then be a market economy that allows some indulgence and ad-hoc monetary exchanges for things we desire. We could choose to sell our labour or what we make, or just do it for ourselves. This facilitates creativity that might be used to improve what the government provides.

Inequality comes because some think they are more entitled than others. But what is wrong with everyone having their basic needs met and having some extra? Does being able to work harder really entitle us to take more, and especially to prevent others being able to have what we have? Equality of outcome means everyone can have a decent life. If some want to work harder, that is their prerogative, but their reasons, whether they claim merit, divine right or whatever, are not a criteria to base our societies upon. Fulfilling all our needs must take priority over individual aggrandisement.

That does not mean we all have the same boring life, but that we are not excessive in what we want to achieve in life. Modest pursuits can bring us just as much satisfaction and fulfilment as hyper-ambitious ones, unless they are more about status in the eyes of others, but is rewarding those with the biggest egos a basis for structuring our societies? Selfishness is what distorts our thinking into justifying inequality, which is why it is promoted by the most wealthy. We must undo that selfish thinking so that we all have lives we can enjoy, not just a few.

We can envision and work towards societies that operate differently, as those who have brought us to our current rampant exploitation did to get us here. Whatever they have done can be undone, but at a faster rate than leaving it up to a progressive series of groups of downtrodden peoples realising that they had enough power to have a share of the pie that monarchs ruled over. We have to be conscious and ambitious in our vision for better societies that fulfil our needs, but also our reasonable desires, and in a way that does not require intrusive government control.