How is Peter Joseph limited regarding "Revolution Now!"?

[Loving Radiance]

Listening to Peter Joseph's podcast Revolution Now! I am getting increasingly conscious of the corruption in the system. I am at awe how the system upholds itself and am thinking very highly of Peter Joseph.

I have wondered, how is the perspective he offers in the podcast limited? This question is to those who are very well acquainted with his person.

 

Here are some links:

https://m.youtube.com/@RevolutionNowPodcast

https://youtu.be/NVDLkL8Nvjw?t=57

 

Edited May 7 by Loving Radiance

[Loving Radiance]

@aurum

[aurum]

5 hours ago, Loving Radiance said:

@aurum

I'm not familiar with his work specifically, but I've skimmed the video and the ideas are familiar to me.

It's a strong critique of SD Orange from a leftist, SD Green perspective.

There is much to integrate here. But he also makes a lot of mistakes nearly every leftist falls into, since leftism is mostly just group-think.

For example, he over-focuses on capitalism and the profit-motive as the problem. Huge mistake. No one is getting rid of the profit-motive. 

He also over-emphasizes collaboration. Another huge mistake. The world is not going to be a hippie Win/Win paradise where no one loses.

So beware of his bias here. He is filtering all of politics through his SD Green value system.

[Loving Radiance]

@aurum Thank you!

 

How is his project looking to you?

 

"[...] this paper I’m hoping to release soon, outlining the Integral project I keep talking about.

In my 17 or so years of activism, largely in the grassroots social movement sphere, combined with ongoing education in system science, particularly aware of where the limits are in the spectrum of traditional activism.

This project is what I have concluded is the best chance for long-term advancement, not relying on appeals to power — but building.

So I’m going to walk through the opening summation of this paper explaining as I go.

“The following presents a comprehensive theoretical and technical blueprint for a federated, post-monetary cooperative economy that replaces market-based exchange, profit-driven production, and hierarchical governance with a cybernetically coordinated, commons-oriented system of labor reciprocity and decentralized design.”

Okay, “federated.”

This simply means joined together with autonomy maintained in each node.

“Post-monetary.”

Of course, this is a connection point to the existing system, which is important because this is a transitional system, not just an imposed final stage construct, even though obviously a fully realized non-monetary stage is embedded within.

And “cooperative,” of course, is self-evident, but still radical, as it should be understood as an active function, not just some kind of intangible value structure.

Just as competition is a regulatory mechanism in the market today, as is cooperation in Integral.

As touched upon in a prior episode, the transitional nature of this isn’t just technical but cultural, something that’s rarely addressed in the post-scarcity community.

Without the needed value change away from competitive sensibilities, which takes time, it’s hard to expect this type of thing to expand.

Economic transformation must include cultural transformation at the same time.

This is explicit in the way things get done in this idea, and competition has no technical place whatsoever.

It’s not rewarded, there’s no incentive, but that doesn’t mean competition can’t still interfere in other ways, psychologically, as a reverberation of the market system.

But I think the more people engage the new system, the more it erodes that old primitive conditioning in the same way, early hunter-gatherer society is used to reject people’s behavior that implied dominance, such as a feeling of superiority or some kind of competitive win.

You can read about this work in the writings of Christopher Boehm and Marshall Salins, David Graber as well realizing our variability long before in fact the creation of markets.

And it proves that we are not inherently competitive by nature.

Once again, these early societies had regulatory processes in their culture, if you will, termed “reverse dominance hierarchy” to shut down people who leaned into such immature, elitist, and destabilizing views.

But in the case of integral, once again, regulation is not an issue of group expression, but rather exists in the codified structure.

That says ‘the only way this idea will be successful is if everyone is collaborative’ and there’s no other option for the system to organize.

And if such conditioning is indeed successful, I think it will also contribute to the reduction of all sorts of other destructive competitive tendencies we see in the world today.

As the sickness of competition is certainly not restricted only to the economic sphere, but it is indeed invigorated by it.

I mean, you can’t go two feet today without running into somebody with an incredible ego disorder out there, based on insecurity, ultimately, acting competitive.

Again, as I talked about with Alfie Kohn in the last podcast, it’s like a public health disaster when it comes to people’s competitive insecurity.

As next, it reads, “That replaces market-based exchange, profit-driven production, and hierarchical governance with a cybernetically coordinated, commons-oriented system of labor reciprocity and decentralized design.”

“Cybernetically coordinated commons-oriented system of labor reciprocity and decentralized design.”

The notion of “cybernetic” means based on built-in feedback structures for control, as integrated as technically possible, and like most things, this will be an ongoing development because there will always be something new to influence such processes, needless to say.

But the approach itself is straightforward.

Through the open-source process by which these systems come to be, hence the democratic nature of it, the organizational intention is to eliminate the need for third-party intervention or management as much as possible.

It’s a difficult subject if people aren’t familiar with this.

It needs a lot more elaboration, but this is at the heart of the cybernetic concept, which is about proper self-regulation.

In the same way, actually, early political anarchists would crudely theorize an ideal governance system without coercive force, such as police and prisons.

So, it’s economic democracy, and it starts with collaborative engineering of the regulating component systems.

Now, as far as the notion of a “commons-oriented system of labor reciprocity and decentralized design,” this has different levels of application.

Sharing is key, and hence the commons.

All design structures are open for contribution guided by sustainability and efficiency parameters, while labor reciprocity exists in a mutual aid structure, as will be talked about next.

Next sentence, “Anchored in a time credit mechanism that functions not as a currency, but as a non-transferable reputation-based ledger of contribution. the system enables individuals to access the fruits of collective production across a distributed network of autonomous cooperatives.”

So, there is no currency, and the concept of exchange or barter is not coherent here.

Now superficially, some may look at labor reciprocity or the existence of time credits, as common to time bank systems historically, as a kind of barter, but that’s simply a familiar lens.

While this time credit subsystem is indeed a variation of time banks and mutual credit or aid systems that have existed in the past, the context changes within a federated commons.

Rather, it is a record of contribution that incentivizes reciprocity.

The value of contribution is not derived from what others are willing to give in return, but how the cooperative or federation values and integrates that work into the whole.

Community stewardship, not transactional entitlement.

Everyone is contributing to the same positive end, which by nature of thatultimately includes individual ends.

Let’s not forget that old, annoying, propagandized idea of having to choose between your own self-interest and social interest.

That false duality needs to be exposed and everyone needs to realize that it’s all one interest fully intertwined by nature of existence.

It’s an issue of technical fact.

It doesn’t matter how well to do, some wealthy person is, as they walk down the street, someone alienated by that inequality may decide to shoot and kill them.

If there’s anything epidemiological study has proven, it’s that social stability is directly tied to equity and fairness.

A lesson a society unfortunately continues to learn the hard way.

Hence, this non-transferable reputation-based ledger of contribution is grounded in the reality that we all contribute to not only our own well-being, but to public well-being, and the system is designed in exactly that way.

“Enabling individuals to access the fruits of collective production across a distributed network of autonomous cooperatives.”

The cooperatives that will be discussed are the second most important part of the structure.

Tangible means of production.

Just as the regional nodes of integral operate independently, yet federated, so does the network of cooperatives within a node.

In the world today, different kinds of cooperatives already exist.

Worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and so on.

There’s lots of variations.

And what I’m proposing here is you have another variation where notably the only people to access what the cooperative produces are people within the Integral network itself, while collectively that network of co-ops can also be thought about as a single entity with many organs.

So you have a co-op commons, a unification.

Integration with the reputation-based ledger of contribution to this commons translates labor into reciprocal support for the total network, even though it’s easy to consider variations of circumstance such as more simple peer-to-peer, person-to-person approaches, which work as well.

But I think you get the idea.

And while the outputs of the cooperatives are reciprocal to labor contribution through this time credit system, it is important to note that if the system works as intended, such credit becomes less required over time.

For the system is also designed, as I talked about in the prior podcast, to move forward post-scarcity.

And I’m going to talk about this a little bit more so in a moment as well.

By which the more efficient Integral becomes doing more with less, the more reciprocal gains exist for the least amount of labor, making things free eventually.

Moving on:

“Each cooperative, be it in food, housing, manufacturing, or education, operates according to local governance, while remaining interoperable with the broader network through shared protocols, open source design, and efficiency constraints.”

So, each cooperative is autonomous, but connected with the rest of the broader network, sharing processes, particularly an open source design system, which is a very important component.

This is an open access AI assisted crowd source design CAD type platform that has among other things built in what we could term “efficiency constraints” to ensure design optimization, which includes critically, critically — environmental constraints. Analysis tools for sustainability, which I will talk about more so in a moment.

This crowdsource approach is a focal point of how things get created in a technical and truly democratic sense, allowing consensus to be reached coming from the actual source of demand, not a company boardroom or central planning body.

And as these designs reach consensus and are culminated, they go into a public repository, building a universal catalog of them with the specifics of how they are to be made and so forth.

And, of course, the ability to continue adding to evolve that design at any time, building on itself.

And I have to say the power of this concept cannot be overstated in terms of exponential advancement, potential exponential advancement as related to post scarcity.

Think about it. The corporate world today operates based on restriction, inhibiting, constantly, the flow of information.

This is inherent to the very nature of market economics with little deviation.

And if you end that, moving the other direction, without competition, allowing ideas to freely flow, the power of advancement of ideas will be far more rapid and efficient.

And that said, more practically, when a design is needed by the community, it is freely available to utilize for the relevant cooperative.

In some cases, it might require a new cooperative to be established, depending on the nature of the use.

And, of course, this all sounds extremely complex I’m sure, but the trick is to simply start simple and scale as you go.

Now one more important aspect of this worth expanding upon is the use of AI feedback subsystems to guide design optimization within the interface.

I think of them as filters, and it’s perhaps the most technically complex of the programming, but it’s actually commonly done today in the context of modern IT organization for stability.

It’s just a different application.

And one thing that’s interesting as the years have gone by, this kind of thinking, you know, researching these ideas about dynamic feedback driven self-diagnosing system filters that guide the design activity…it was just so foreign as an idea with the kind of self regulatory subprograms required.

But today, the advancement potential is staring us right in the face in the form of AI, from neural networks to coding.

Generative AI language models, especially in the coding space, has raised the technical capacity greatly, and we can build these regulatory models now. And in time, they will start to probably even build themselves, based on the objective goals presented to them.

This is the trend, and it’s also the beauty of a true focus on technical efficiency and sustainability, as it’s all really a calculation process.

And a given design becomes self-evident as you move toward optimization.

The problem really is attenuating the variety properly in the vast complexity of it all, which is what these systems are going to help do.

And again, you start simple, but as the system grows, you start to incorporate more and more things, such as feedback from the environment in regard to scarcity levels of raw materials and so on, contributing to that general, universal calculation.

I hope that makes sense.

The broad goal, of course, is homeostasis for the ecosystem at large and balance between all the general components.

Okay, moving on.

“labor valuation is dynamically weighted through feedback, reflecting real-time demand, skill specificity, and sustainability priorities.”

Okay, coming back to the issue of labor.

In the world today, there are different kinds of mutual credit and aid systems from traditional time banks which technically and philosophically embrace a one hour equals one hour framework, regardless of the type of work, to more complex variation, such as LETS that functions more like a barter structure with exchange negotiation occurring between parties like in markets, meaning how many credit units are required for a given good or service.

People negotiate. And neither of these ideas are appropriate for what we need.

We need more flexibility than a time bank, but we don’t want any characteristics of monetary exchange, such as competitive, subjective negotiation or the time credit being transferable outside of the system and so forth.

And again, it is also important, this is all framed correctly.

Integral credits, if you want to call them, that are not spent.

They represent reciprocal contribution to the commons, gaining benefits of the entire network as a universal collaboration.

In the early stages, I think a one-to-one, hour-to-hour basis is workable as in a traditional time bank, given the very minimal nature of what’s being done, but as things expand and more complexity is introduced, the building of a weighted system of collaboration, where different tasks have different values, depending on various factors, dynamically adjust based on feedback in a self-regulatory manner.

This I think is a good strategy and quite feasible and practical.

Notice this isn’t about trade competition and exploitation.

There is no surplus value in this system.

Rewards for labor do not increase individual advantage or wealth in the market sense, but rather balance complexity that is realized across the network itself.

For example: Changing labor demand. Imagine in a community or node, there is a needed demand for some specific type of service. It’s scarce for some reason.

Well, in a price-based market, through a sloppy, nonlinear and highly delayed process, increased labor demand often equates to a higher financial award for that labor, supply and demand.

This type of weight is automatic and dynamic in the Integral system based on feedback from direct engagement.

Hence, a method to dynamically change the time-value credit of different forms of labor based on what the totality of the system is doing.

Human action and needs. That’s a big subject, of course, and will be explained more so in the paper. But let’s move on.

“Meanwhile, interface mechanisms serve as transitional, legal, and economic buffers, enabling the acquisition of resources from the existing market system without allowing market logic to re-enter the internal network.”

Okay.

Interface mechanisms.

So we understand the Integral cooperative.

A community wants to create, say, a vertical farm, participants start with crowdsource design reaching consensus.

Then the challenge is to figure out how to bring it to physical reality.

The most intuitive route, if physical resources are not adequately available in the network, is to simply crowd fund from the emerging node community, emerging in the sense that they’re all stuck in the market system to some degree.

And once raised, land and production resources can be acquired from the external market.

But other ideas can be employed as well, such as grant seeking.

Or in rare cases, perhaps a public interface cooperative that fund raises to the external, but only for that one-time thing.

You know what I mean? Just a short-term purpose of raising funds in the event one of the co-ops of a given node has something to offer the broader community.

But beyond that, everything stays internal. Many variations can be considered, but they all lead to the same goal, simply getting the required fiat money needed to acquire things a node it can’t do without to persevere.

And once that money is used to gain needed materials, acquired tools, resources, and land get absorbed into the general community trust, a transformation.

For example, the creation of a shared tool repository, which all co-ops have access to and so forth, you know, tool libraries.

Let’s continue.

Next:
”A distributed technical backbone built on holochain supports modular applications for tracking labor, cooperative design governance and sustainability screening, enabling both transparency and scalability.”

Now this could change as the decentralized IT space moves very quickly these days.

But as of now, Holochain appears to be the best solution.

Holochain is a peer-to-peer application network that’s scalable, secure, and decentralized without relying on central servers or global consensus, as is the case with blockchains that enforce a single ledger through often energy-intensive consensus mechanisms.

Holochain gives each user their own tamper-proof record or source chain while data is coordinated through a distributed hash table and validated.

In other words, it’s an agent-centric approach that’s scalable and appears more efficient and adaptable.

As of now, there’s a beta version at 0.2.6 with lots of developer tools.

And I’m sure there are plenty of opinions by folks out there that embrace these peer-to-peer type development communities, and I’m certainly open to opinions.

There might be something far better out there on the horizon than I’m simply not aware of yet I am a generalist but I do my best.

But at this stage it’s the principle that matters.

And naturally in the initial stages there’s nothing wrong with a traditional centralized network for program websites.

But over time for lots of obvious reasons such as security, transparency and information integrity — it all needs to move to a more advanced decentralized infrastructure.

Next, moving on.

“This document also addresses key transitional challenges, legal compliance, hybrid business integration, education, and the construction of a parallel political movement to protect and normalize post-monetary infrastructure.”

Okay, let’s start with Education.

Now you might ask, what does education have to do with any of this, really?

Well, if feedback can inform things like values for labor reciprocity, hence labor demand, so it can with skill demand, which precedes labor.

Naturally, the first stage of any kind of labor skill development starts with education.

This is likely a more distant ambition of the system, but it’s worth the thought exercise here at the moment, where a larger order awareness of societal needs is fostered by network feedback, incentivizing youth to learn skills that are more useful to the Integral ecosystem and hence general social good.

You know, we never think of education in a truly comprehensive way in modern society, though it is inherent that one goal of any educational system is, of course, to produce social contributors through skill specialization and so forth.

The problem, of course, is today the driver of interest tends to be money, not contribution or even personal interest, and hence the whole thing is skewed at the root.

It’s not difficult to imagine an Integral cooperative established for public education based around the same time credit system, but instead incentivizing students to seek advanced education for the needs of the society — and using time credits to incentivize them.

Put another way, deficiency found in the system where something needs to get done, but there’s a lack of labor to do it: the system feeds back and establishes credits to be granted to those in reciprocation to help education toward that goal.

And again, this is a more advanced idea, but it’s worth thinking about, especially by comparison to everything in the modern day where advanced education is one of the greatest financial burdens out there at least in the United States. Where in reality, so to speak, people should be rewarded to go to school directly, not punished.

It’s one of the more catastrophic failures of the modern world.

Okay, and next, we have “hybrid business integration.”

This is another more advanced stage concept.

So we’ve already discussed the ground up development of cooperatives, allowing, for example, a 3D printing house co-op to take designs from the open access design system and convert them into tools or furniture, etc.

I hope this part of the network is clear. It’s very straightforward.

Now what about existing establishments, money-based restaurants or local shops?

Well one idea is to establish ways to interface with such willing capitalist institutions, in the interest to pull them in incentivizing them to morph their structure in favor of integral.

The leverage point is to have partial payment for labor or partial sales for customers to use the Integral time credits, along with other merger points such as a co-op, maybe providing some material support to the business once again.

As stated before, the goal of the co-ops is to be 100% off the grid from the market, to whatever degree, and I know this may seem like a contradiction.

However, this interfacing is strategic, and it’s about absorption; about getting that older market establishment to morph into integral, which is advantageous in a few ways, needless to say.

As I said in the last podcast, it is the transitional factors that will determine the outcome more than any idealized model goal.

When we view the world today, we see all these commercial institutions.

Instead of seeing them as something to override or replace, we try to see them as becoming repurposed.

And part of Integral is to carve a path to do that.

And this hybrid idea, which may sound far-fetched, is not unheard of.

In Sardinia, there is a complementary currency called the Sardex, which was started in the early 2000s as a kind of closed network exchange method, encouraging more local activity.

Existing businesses and consumers would use the Sardex in parallel to normal currency.

Nothing radical about it, but it did create a kind of hybrid system that emphasizes the local community, which is exactly what Integral does.

The same incentive exists for Integral, which I think existing businesses will embrace.

This hybrid potential, I think, is very strong, once sustainability aspects of the system are more understood by the public. Most people today you’ll find shrug their shoulders when it comes to how to be actively sustainable in their lives, beyond throwing things into a recycling bin.

Integral gives them a system level solution, at least in part.

I think it will be an attractive aspect once understood once again.

In the same way people go to package free shops or whatever kind of so-called conscious consumption many fashionably pursue.

So many people out there want to find a deeper way to be more sustainable in their daily lives.

And while it may take time for integral to really establish itself in a notable way, the principles will be very attractive to a lot of people in the sustainability movements out there.

So much so that I would even anticipate major existing environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace to rapidly support it.

There’s really no other option out there.

It is time people realize that they cannot affect the world with contrary individual actions alone, such as buying products from seemingly moral sources and processes.

There is no such thing in the market system.

And finally, at the end of that sentence, it says:

“And the construction of a parallel political movement to protect and normalize post-monetary infrastructure.”

This isn’t about acquiescing to the toxic political system, but understanding the need to influence public opinion and in effect lobby for this social transition protecting what is being done.

I will add that even if part of society moved into this kind of system, it would still be proportionally helpful in increasing public health and environmental sustainability.

And as these communities form, so does political identity. This identity is ideally global.

Political parties could be established regionally in the name of Integral showing solidarity even if they have no perceived significant impact on elections occurring.

It is the presence that is important. In the same way, third-party candidates can change the tone or focus of mainstream outcomes, even though they are never elected or they are marginalized or perceived to have no effect.

Hope that makes sense. This kind of political cloud is going to be important to preserve this system as it expands, essentially justifying it and getting the public to support its sustainability protocols, which is its biggest strength.

Okay:

“In rejecting both capitalism and state socialism, the model synthesizes principles from systems theory, commons governance, and open-source collaboration to propose a third economic form, one that is non-exploitative, self-organizing, and materially sufficient.”

This summation is to simply emphasize the historical and conceptual differences in this decentralized, fundamentally horizontal approach.

A system rooted in an active democratic process that doesn’t merely vote on some particular thing in society, but rather through integrative participation that gets to the heart of cybernetic feedback once again.

It works on different levels, including collaboratively designing the very self-regulatory mechanisms that govern the society itself: the infrastructure underneath the systems, if you will.

Such is completely different from everything major world powers have done thus far, and very much outside of the awareness of the average person, still locked into a capitalism versus socialism false duality.

The only semi-workable example I can think of that attempted something like this was Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn in Chile.

And I will add that while Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model not talked about explicitly in the description of this paper as of yet, it is implicit because the logic behind that thinking is very effective.

And finally,:

“Emphasizing recursive organization, participatory democracy, and ecological accountability, this document offers a path beyond market scarcity and bureaucratic centrism toward a post-capitalist civilization grounded in cooperation, sustainability, and cybernetic coordination.”

And I think I’ve covered most of this.

“Recursive” nature allows for coherence and scaling.

“Participatory democracy” is rooted in the process of engagement itself, not exactly voting, even though, in, say, the realm of a co-op, management may still use older consensus processes, as we see with board members of a nonprofit today.

And the notion of “moving past market scarcity” is again important because, As I talked about in the prior podcast, the system doesn’t exploit scarcity and is rooted in technical efficiency, not market efficiency.

And this means the system will naturally gravitate toward post-scarcity, constantly doing more with less, if it is allowed to.

And over time, what will happen with the cooperatives is access to the fruits of the network will increasingly require less labor and hence ultimately become free over time."

Edited May 21 by Loving Radiance

[aurum]

8 hours ago, Loving Radiance said:

How is his project looking to you?

Anyone who hinges their political philosophy on being “post-monetary” is delusional. 

Money is not going anywhere.

This whole project needs to be rethought from scratch.

[High-valance]

Can you expand on why you think money is going nowhere? 

His critique of the current system is that it being a monetary system is the root cause of the problem, and while i think he agnowledges it's going to be difficult, he thinks it's going to be possible at least partly through some of the ways he outlines.

[aurum]

1 hour ago, High-valance said:

Can you expand on why you think money is going nowhere? 

His critique of the current system is that it being a monetary system is the root cause of the problem, and while i think he agnowledges it's going to be difficult, he thinks it's going to be possible at least partly through some of the ways he outlines.

I don't think money is going anywhere because it's too valuable of a tool.

If you want to live in a village with 50 people, you don't need money. But we don't live in villages, we live in an interconnected modern society with billions of people.

To get that kind of scale, you need money. Because you need an abstract proxy for kind of relationships in a small village. 

That's money. Money is the proxy.

The genius of money is that it's completely abstracted from any tangible value. Thus, it can be used in exchange for anything.

The more tangible something is in value, the less versatility it has in exchange.

So you could attempt to replace money with something like Time-banking. But time-banking cannot possibly scale like money can. So either it would be a failure, or you would change the definition of "time-banking" so much that it functionally became money again. Either way, you've not really gotten rid of money.

Time-banking can work in a situation like within a local community. That's its niche. Don't try to expand something beyond its niche.

[High-valance]

I appreciate your respons.

Maybe. I wonder though if that's just how it looks from within the system. Like we take it for granted so much because it's all we know, so we can't even imagine other systems that might also work but which don't cause as many catastrophic problems. 

Interesting to note though is that according to thinkers like david graeber, money was invented by the state so that it could pay its armies in something long lasting & that could be used for exchanging a wide range of goods. And then they essentially forced the rest of the population to use it so that the money would have value. 

So if it was invented like that, then maybe we can also re-invent something new. 

Peter Joseph suggests that new system is something like a resource-based & access ecomony, based on science & systems thinking rather than market dynamics. 

As uncertain as these things are, i think we need to take the problems with our current system seriously as well. Acknowledge it's strengths while being brutally honest about its weaknesses. And being seriously open to considering other methods of distributing resources, because (despite it's strengths) things aren't going well with the one we have currently. 

[aurum]

18 hours ago, High-valance said:

As uncertain as these things are, i think we need to take the problems with our current system seriously as well. Acknowledge it's strengths while being brutally honest about its weaknesses. And being seriously open to considering other methods of distributing resources, because (despite it's strengths) things aren't going well with the one we have currently. 

Taking our problems seriously does not necessarily involve radical change all at once.

Resource-Based Economies are a fantasy. Scarcity, competition, hierarchy, profit-motive and unequal distribution of resources are all inherent aspects of human survival. They will never go away.

In addition, humans are way too selfish and underdeveloped to dramatically improve current systems. All problems will just be recreated under new labels and systems.

Real projects must include and account for everything I've just mentioned.

[High-valance]

Sure not all at once. I agree that we probably shouldn't try to make any drastic changes to the economy or try to transition into a non-monetary system too quickly. That would probably destabalize things and wouldn't be an optimal, gentle enough transition (insofar as any form of real change will or can be gentle in the next few decades & centuries). 

At the same time, i think we should be skeptical of the idea that a market-system is somehow better than a non-market system. Pointing at isolated little efficiencies here and there doesn't really justify a preference for one over the other. And frankly these issues are far too serious to be dismissed as mere utopian fantasies. That just sounds like collective ego trying to maintain itself desguised as realism. 

I think part of the point is the notion that this system that we have currently is somehow working, is itself a fantasy.

Inequality, poverty, mass slavery, war, etc, etc. 

A market based system incentivises competition for monetary gain, drive towards competitive advantage, growth, inefficiency & fundamentally prioritizes profit over human wellbeing. This is not a system that works. 

Yes, the collective consciousness of humanity now is very low. Is that causing exploitation, war, inequality, etc? Or do the incentive structures within a market based system affect people in these ways to where they become competitive, less compationate & even exploitative? 

It might be both. Collective humanity probably already has a fairly low level of consciousness. But then we also have the market system. And its functions are antithetical to human flourishing, or even to a true ecomony in any functional sense. 

Is that going to work if we're not already at green or higher? Is it even going to work at that point? 

In any case, conserving the market-based system doesn't seem like it's going help us elivate human consciousness at this point. 

In the future, there might be some room here and there for some sort of market-like exchange. But probably we'll have an ecomony based on cooperation & systems science rather than competition, fraud & ideology. 

 

Edited May 28 by High-valance

[aurum]

1 hour ago, High-valance said:

At the same time, i think we should be skeptical of the idea that a market-system is somehow better than a non-market system.Pointing at isolated little efficiencies here and there doesn't really justify a preference for one over the other. And frankly these issues are far too serious to be dismissed as mere utopian fantasies.

Market system is superior at scale.

You cannot scale non-market dynamics. At all.

1 hour ago, High-valance said:

I think part of the point is the notion that this system that we have currently is somehow working, is itself a fantasy.

It works better and is more intelligent than almost anyone appreciates.

1 hour ago, High-valance said:

A market based system incentivises competition for monetary gain, drive towards competitive advantage, growth, inefficiency & fundamentally prioritizes profit over human wellbeing. This is not a system that works. 

That's not because of markets, that's because of survival.

Survival is the most fundamental.

1 hour ago, High-valance said:

Yes, the collective consciousness of humanity now is very low. Is that causing exploitation, war, inequality, etc? Or do the incentive structures within a market based system affect people in these ways to where they become competitive, less compationate & even exploitative? 

It's the first one primarily.

People are competitive and exploitative, which then gets formalized in market dynamics.

1 hour ago, High-valance said:

It might be both. Collective humanity probably already has a fairly low level of consciousness. But then we also have the market system. 

It is both, but it's not equally both.

One of these things is more essential. 

1 hour ago, High-valance said:

In any case, conserving the market-based system doesn't seem like it's going help us elivate human consciousness at this point.

Conserving the market-system is the only thing that will elevate human consciousness.

You are not going to develop anything superior to markets. So we must use markets to develop ourselves higher.

1 hour ago, High-valance said:

But probably we'll have an ecomony based on cooperation & systems science rather than competition, fraud & ideology. 

You're not getting rid of competition.

 

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Ultimately, these are the results of my own contemplation on this topic. Think about it for yourself. I can't do your contemplation for you, nor would I want to.

Beware of easy answers and SD Green fantasies.