Green New Money
The broken system that is hurting Gaia and endangering our own survival is the old money, ironically described as green even as US bank notes get more colorful with new security elements and design features. The old money is not green, and it is and always has been destructive of green and wild spaces, as well as commons based production by ordinary people of the earth. The so called enclosure movement turned land into property and commoners into homeless wanderers in search of a place in the world. We found nothing for us but wage slavery while other great pirates raid other cultures in the great crime of modern slave trade. In post modern dystopia the slave trade is outlawed yet still continues. This is neither freedom nor liberty. The rich man can buy politicians and governments while the poor man is free to take what he leaves or starve.
What we need is the new kind of money that supports the people and helps communities repossess their birthrights as human beings. What we need is a kind of currency that doesn't divide us through greed, but instead helps us visualize value flows and how to remake our built worlds into creative spaces where we can live and create wonderful things and events together and share the experiences along the way. We will certainly share and experience our highs and lows, great successes and utter failures. In the coming future we are sure to see more tragedy, maybe more that in all the stories that have come down to us in an ever more digitized recent history.
This technological bubble may burst leaving little that we would recognize as human in its wake. Even if we manage well enough, our children will need to endure much before a clear path to an open future can emerge. It is our faith that such futures are out there if we can find the paths out of the darkness of the current era. There is hope to avoid the worst if we start pulling together and in the right directions.
The new money needs to empower networks of exchange of value that leads to care of all that we care for. There is nothing else at the center of a Green New Deal than what we care for individually and collectively. We all know instinctively that care for our families and the people we love and join with in communal projects are the only values that truly matter.
The old economic paradigms of greed expressed as market value are not useless; however, they are just below and dependent on the relationship values represented in our networks of care. The new money needs to recognize care and gifts of self, and not merely getting more for me and mine. We need to recover from the illusion that the old money ever represented a true kind of enduring value at all. The real value is in what the economy provides for our home and household. The very word economy originally referred to the home and hearth, where one shares food and conversation with our familiars. This externallized abstracted economic idea is a lie. The idealized rational actor is totally a myth, economic man, the rational animal. This model cannot stand even a simple analysis. It is implicated in all of the systemic problems that are just symptomatic of the real crisis, that we have systems of value and sense making that are totally alienated from reality. The advocates of this failed theory continue to run the world based on their snake oil remedies for much more serious ailments.
The new money will be connected to the living cycles of people and the earth. It will be abundant where the valued flows are abundant and designed to conserve and cycle limited resources that are vital to us and to our living home, Gaia.