Weaving a Unifying Narrative: the Money Thread
"Life is a tapestry woven by the decisions we make." Sherrilyn Kenyon
Word
I am often humbled by the wealth of knowledge, creativity and skill that human’s possess. I feel a little presumptuous that I could contribute to a unifying narrative that could bring us all together to take responsibility for our steadily growing debt to the natural world. However, we must do this before it forecloses on us. Our current story is dominated by our economy and like a tapestry that has worn thin from abuse is in tatters, disintegrating. We need to weave a new tapestry, one rich and diverse in color and texture.
A tapestry is made by repeatedly weaving the horizontal (weft) threads, those which provide the color and texture, over and under the vertical (warp) threads, those that provide structure, then tamping the horizontal threads down so they are very close together completely hiding the vertical threads from view. The warp thread in this metaphorical tapestry is our hidden money system, a social agreement embodied in law made tangible with something used to symbolize it, a currency.
Money actually predates civilization and originated in human cultures who worshiped the Great Mother architype as a sacred way to acknowledge our debt to the Earth, the Great Mother, from which all life springs and is sustained. Our ecology and our economy are deeply related. Being sacred, money was never created for personal profit.
The advent of civilization saw the repression of the Great Mother archetype displaced by a powerful and angry male God, a sovereign/tyrant over all establishing a patriarchy. This patriarchy made women property instead of partners in the dance of life. With patriarchy came a psychological darkness, what Daniel Quinn called “the great forgetting,” the shadow side of the Great Mother where greed, scarcity and a whole host of fearful and violent attributes reside. From this imperialism arose deforesting the commons and mining the fertility of the soil leaving behind deserts, our most enduring human legacy, by giving nothing back. The money was also corrupted, which the Priest/Kings issued as debt for personal gain, a practice known as usury.
The Warp Threads
Our new tapestry will need structure, strong and resilient warp threads so our tapestry can withstand the march of time. We can determine the structural strength of a thread by how the thread is created, or the nature of the agreement creating our money. The broken and weak ‘warp threads’ of our old tapestry are due to money being replaced with credit, it was legalized usury. Jesus, Plato, Aristotle, Dante and many great thinkers have condemned the practice. Once regarded a great sin by every religion because it was a source of spiritual darkness. Despite some notable challenges to the dominant forces of usury, it has dominated the history of civilization and dominates the world today.
The struggle between privately controlled money and publicly controlled money has gone on for centuries with the private money dominating most of history. The American Revolution challenged the private money power of England. The colonists had learned the power of public money and funded their revolution with it. While the war was won the power struggle that ensued saw farmer Jefferson's vision of publicly issued money for a free democratic society crushed by the power of banker money and Hamilton's vision of creating an industrial giant, a world dominating colossus. Our nation was harnessed in service to international capital but we were an unruly team which continued to threaten the financial elite of the world. The civil war was an effort to break the nation up into more manageable parts but failed due to the power of publicly issued money, greenbacks which Lincoln used to fight off the dissolution of the nation. Thus the struggle between private and public money continued until the bankers eventually conspired and tricked the nation in giving its sovereignty to the big private banks in 1913. These are the same private institutions that the Pujo Committee investigation in 1912 revealed that through interlocking directorates controlled every industry in the nation.
"We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." - Justice Louis Brandeis
Opposition
Money is power over public policy. The monetary authority is power and progressives of the 19th century understood this; demands for issuing more greenbacks was in the platforms of all the progressive parties in that era. The capitalist bankers bribed professors, clergy, Congress and the press to support their proposal and they won their Federal Reserve Act of 1913 which officially ceded the monetary authority to the private banking system creating a convoluted process to give it a quasi-governmental cover. Two years later they won mandatory mass schooling, taking the children away from their parents to inculcate them with the values that industrialists found most useful for social management. The study of Political Economy was taken apart and divided into Economics and Political Science departments. Political Economy studies the relationship between wealth and power in a society. The bankers did not want that. Any professor in a university today that names a class ‘Political Economy’ will be questioned by their superiors. So we get Political Science which studies power without looking at wealth and Economics which studies wealth without looking at power and if the bankers have their way “never the twain shall meet.”
History supports the growing recognition that capitalism is destroying our natural life support system and must change. Socialism is an industrial age ideology as well despite efforts to tack on a nod to the ecology. The Communist/socialist experiments suffered due to using the same money system. Usury money has psychological consequences erecting barriers to social intimacy and collaboration. It was a poor choice for trying to organize a society of cooperative enterprises.
The problem is that Marx, like Adam Smith, believed in the defunct ‘commodity theory of money’ thus missing that money itself is a force of production comprising both means and social relations. Socialists ignore this central feature of capitalist power. Capitalism, however, is not just as an economic system; it is a way of destroying the relations between humans and the rest of the natural world. This severing of human society from its life giving relationship with nature is why the Green Party seeks to replace capitalism with a socially and ecologically responsible democracy.
The Weft Threads
Now that we’ve established our strong warp thread structural base of publicly issued money let’s begin to weave in the “weft threads” of this tapestry, those that give color and texture to this unifying narrative. These are all the things we want in our society, many of which have long been festering or denied, worn thin and broken in the old tapestry. The new weft threads represent the socially responsible solutions to the many issues and problems facing society. It is our fiscal and public policy solutions to poverty, racism, war, healthcare, education, and environmental degradation. Let’s see what they might look like in our new tapestry.
“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. You can be the regeneration. Let greatness blossom.”— Nelson Mandela
Poverty
Broadly based prosperity is the solution to poverty. Prosperity is an economic state without poverty. What most of us have experienced as “prosperity,” however, has been the ability to get a job as you watch enormous wealth whistling by on its way to the top. When the bubble bursts you can’t get a job but you still watch enormous wealth whistling by on its way to the top. This is prosperity for the few. We’ve really never seen prosperity for all which is what a public money system can do. Rather than ever greater exploitation of the commons, prosperity for all will be the sharing of the commons with all the life therein, as we learn to work with instead of against nature, creating an economics of care. The wellbeing and security this provides will have positive psychological effects, reversing the diseased effects of usury. A public money system will put money into people’s pockets so the exchange for needed goods and services can go on unimpeded by the lack of money. We produce enough food and housing, and we can produce enough healthcare and education for all a well. We are not short of the resources to do this, we’ve just not been allowed the money to do this by the current system.
Racism
To address racism we need to first end institutional racism. We do that with authentic democracy, a system that provides an equitable distribution of wealth. White men have held the money power for centuries which is the root of “white supremacy,” they considered themselves supreme. They were rich and powerful, and most people were not. They could dominate industry and government policy to suit themselves. They could control the media and academia to support whatever served their interests best. They could use the schools and media to inculcate their distorted values and divide the people by race and class to keep them in conflict. By reclaiming our sovereign prerogative to have Government issue the money for the general welfare of all, we can end institutional racism. This will go a long way toward ending social racism, a learned behavior where one imagines others are somehow inferior. This is an indication of deep psychological issues with self-worth. Many of us have presuppositions of others but when judgement becomes pathological it can lead to violent behavior. Compassion is the opposite of judgment. Public money can fund public programs to teach about the roles compassion and empathy play in in healing individuals and communities.
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness." ~ Victor Hugo
Food
Food production is intimately tied to our Earth’s natural systems, soil, water, climate and to our hidden money system. Everyone needs food everyday making it a huge industry. The industrialized and centralized agriculture industry is dominated by the banks because they lend the money for these massive mono-cropping operations. The banks have used their power to massively displace smaller farmers as they expand operations.
Ecological balance means we have to curtail emissions, deforestation, mass mono-crop agriculture and private control of the money. The truth is centralized agribusiness does not feed the world but rather it constricts the feeding of the world due to its profit motive. By dumping vast grain surpluses into poor nations who were providing ample and nutritious food for themselves, local economies are destroyed making people dependent on them. The industrialized system also destroys the living food bearing capacity of soil. If small farmers continue to lose the basis of their production, the land, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself.
A public money system can fund and promote the massive shift to intensive organic local food production capable of feeding the world with better food, using less water and no need for soil killing chemicals. Soil research indicates that fertility is directly proportional to the life within the soil. This research has also shown us how we can grow purely biological fertile soil that feeds on carbon from the air, soil that holds more water, soil that provides all the nutrients needed for healthy food. This is regenerative agriculture stabilizing the natural systems that give rise to life. Like a healthy economy healthy soil is engaged in constant and robust exchange.
Healthcare
We have all the resources we need to provide the best healthcare and education possible. In our new tapestry healthcare will be fully funded and focused on prevention of health threats as well as care for injury and disease. Public money can assure that the latest medical knowledge is available, easily accessed and applied. Plant based medicines with its thousands of therapeutic compounds will transform human health that has been used for profit instead of for genuine care. Research will not be limited to creating product for treating symptoms to maintain an illness but on actual cures and prevention. The power of the media can be directed toward promoting good public health.
"Schooling is something someone else gives you. Education is something you give yourself!"
- Mark Twain
Education
Our mass schooling system was devised and implemented by the industrialists two years after they got control of the money. It allowed the children to be taken away from their parents to inculcate industrial values and to assure that they had a compliant labor force. Using publicly issued money our education would be transformed and integrated into the community allowing real experience to teach children the connections between our lives and the natural world. Education programs would seek to inspire each learner to explore, understand and play their unique role in making the world a better place. Education would not be an instructional process but a facilitative one that provides a supportive atmosphere in which each learner feels free to explore their beliefs and express them. Both creative and critical thinking abilities would be used to help create a whole, compassionate and empathetic person.
A New Tapestry
Our tapestry is far from complete but I hope you see how the monetary system we allow provides the foundational structure for our economy and how we relate to the Earth. Because the system is a global system all nations need to exert their sovereign right to self-governance by issuing their own nation’s money. Once we end centralized monetary authority we can look at ways to further decentralize power and wealth. It will require an extraordinary human collaboration to overcome the cultural and political barriers to change. However I witnessed something in rush hour traffic a few weeks ago that gave me some hope.
There was an accident between two major intersections less than a block apart. A large SUV had been spun sideways and was blocking two lanes of traffic and the other car was wrecked and blocking a third lane leaving just two lanes on one side open. Despite the huge amount of traffic pouring into these intersections and no emergency vehicles on the scene, drivers immediately began shifting into a single file lane from each direction allowing a steady flow of traffic past the accident. This was not a major problem but consider this; there was no leader, no one giving any directions, there were no politics, there was no divisive rhetoric, there wasn’t even any discussion, people simply recognized and understood the problem and in cooperation with one another created the remedy
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Howard, a beautiful, perceptive article. Thank you.
Howard, I just reread your beautiful, perceptive article. It's even better the second time.