How to Save the World
Or how transactional economy impedes our societies
Truly, one picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes even more. As I was thinking about how our transactional society impacts each and every one of us, I tried to construct a graph of various interactions that run our day to day lives. It turned out pretty rudimentary, as plotting everything I could think of would make it rather unreadable, but also quite revealing. Though, not at all that surprising.
I started with a simple premise of asset flow: there are natural resources which we extract and which we turn into energy and basic materials, which we either directly use or process further. Utilizing the energy and plethora of materials we acquire this way, we manufacture various products that we finally distribute among each other. All these aspects of production are carried out by people who either directly execute any particular task associated with extraction, processing, manufacture, and distribution, or people who are responsible for organizing and coordinating the whole endeavor, all of them contributing the assets of their skill and energy.
This simple model can be applied to anything from food production (where the resource would be wheat, the processed material would be flour, and the final product to distribute would be bread), to creating a smartphone from a range of materials with various levels of processing. It could be also applied to energy as such (here the resource might be e.g. water and the extracted product electricity, or natural gas, which would be more or less also the final product itself), or even garbage, which is a valid resource, too.
But then I’ve added that which makes our societies transactional, that which we argue about the most, the staple of our daily diet that makes many into thieves, scammers, and even killers. That is to say, I’ve introduced into the graph the flow of compensation, a societal marvel invented in Sumer six millennia ago that also gave us strife and wars. Well, what can I say, I was sarcastic when I wrote “marvel.” Just see for yourself:
As you may have noticed, the compensation flow hinges on the concept of owning. And as is clear, this concept not only does not contribute to the asset flow in any way, it makes the asset flow more restricted and also less efficient. After all, the modus operandi is that when there is no compensation, the asset flow is reduced or stopped completely exactly at the connection point where the compensation failed. Be it unpaid bill and stopped internet services, or unpaid wages and workers’ strike — the essence is the same.
What’s also quite obvious from the graph is the implication that, since the owning entity (be it a single individual or group of people such as an enterprise or even a “social class”) is kinda leech, a parasite held in its social place only by arbitrary legal agreements, it has to incentivize the management to loyalty. Which is the very reason why, under this system, CEOs and politicians will always earn several magnitudes more than the people who actually execute the creative tasks.
And while I’m talking about politicians, see those two purplish boxes at the bottom of the image — those are all the “jobs” that exist only to keep all the compensations flow smoothly. Be it law enforcement (which basically boils down to raw, more often than not also armed, physical force), or anything from marketing or unions (as tools to hype up, validate, or extort one’s compensation value) to banking and state institutions which basically run the whole compensation show. Which is also why bankers, investors, or politicians (and people associated with them) are more probably to appear as the owning entities.
Well, that’s also why we shouldn’t be surprised that when we made products out of exploring the world or self-discovery, we got religion, and later academia and the utterly disgusting self-help industry. It’s also no secret that when we make information sharing compensation dependent, we get restricted access to ideas, even though vast majority of those ideas for sale are not worth a dime. And there definitely should be no surprise that when we are treating healing and medicine as products, we end up with health insurances, which are by definition a con, or that we have to deal with the pharmaceutical lobby, on top of many natural remedies being heavily regulated or straight out forbidden on so-called “legal” grounds.
Frankly, I want to live in a world where there are none of those purple, royally fucked up things. Imagine if all that potential was freed for creative purposes. Sure, as we are today, we have to buy lest we die from hunger, thirst, or some banal cold, homeless. But we don’t have to ask for compensation for every little thing we do. And that’s not restricted to money or material goods. That’s how we can truly change the world. Not by polishing the same broken system, or waiting that someone will create such new world for us.
But to have the guts for that, one must be certain that that’s the only way. And to be certain, one has to know. And for that to happen, one has to let their ego die and be born again. One must see firsthand, as a matter of unassailable fact, how and why continuing with asking for compensations in any form damages and harms the Paradise we inhabit right here and now. There’s no escaping it.
And in the end, ignorance does not excuse.
