Nothing grabs people’s attention these days like a discussion about the future of money. Yet few subjects diverge as wildly. The stakes are high since personal and political fortunes are cast against the ideals of what money is, what it has been, and what it will become. The temptation to cast the future of money in one’s own image is a tale as old as time and likely the source of most social conflict.
The Future of Time
There are two futures of money being foretold today. One is predicated on the demise of Capitalism and persistent denial that scarcity is a real economic element, despite the obvious scarcity of time in one’s life, for instance. The other future seeks to correct the flaw in Market Capitalism so that one’s scarce time may become more equitably allocated and less easily exploited by others. Social values such as freedom, liberty, family, community, trust, health and welfare are derived from how one is allowed to prioritizes their own time, not how one is able to prioritizes the time of others.
The United States of Mind
The reason why this distinction is important is that no great economic paradigm of human civilization ever came about as a result of wholesale collapse of the prior economic paradigm. Rather, each new state of human social organization was derived from the prior state through an integration of tools created in that prior state.
It is now time to take account of these tools and figure out how to integrate them correctly. This is the only way to foresee where we need to go and how we can get there. The only way to defeat gravity is to understand gravity. The work will be difficult, it will be scientific, it will be intellectually challenging, and it will be inclusive of all living systems – including those that we seek to change. The trick to the future of money business will be to cure the disease without killing the patient.
