The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [139]
Just as important, every currency enforces some behaviors and punishes others. Debt-based money is very good at motivating people to get out of bed and work extremely hard, but it’s not very good at fostering long-range thinking, cooperation, or generational investing. Debt-based money enforces short-range thinking and a perpetual sense of scarcity.
But some communities want to foster long-range thinking and a sense of mutual abundance. The easiest and surest way to do this is to introduce a new money type or system that can operate in parallel with the current system—or perhaps even multiple new types and systems. This way, if the status quo fails for any reason, there will be backups. As I said in Chapter 26 (The Good News), these can operate like wetlands during a drought, continuing to feed the river of commerce even if the main tributary has run dry.
My prediction is that enormous opportunities exist for specialists to introduce and operate new money systems for local communities, perhaps even at the municipal, state, or provincial levels. Some of these types of money will be purely electronic, like mutual credit systems, and some may actually be backed by something tangible, such as a commodity like energy, food, or even gold or silver.
It would be a shame to suffer through a damaged economy simply because we relied on a single mismanaged money unit and failed to provide ourselves with an appropriate backup that could facilitate our economic exchanges in a time of need. It’s time to recognize that our current money system is no longer serving us; we’re serving it. We can both better control our risks and enjoy a future of our own design if we implement new, different, and improved money systems. Bernard Lietaer, one of the world’s leading experts on monetary systems and alternative currencies, said this about money:
While economic textbooks claim that people and corporations are competing for markets and resources, I claim that in reality they are competing for money—using markets and resources to do so. So designing new money systems really amounts to redesigning the target that orients much human effort.
Furthermore, I believe that greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament; I’ve come to the conclusion that greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we’re using.
For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there’s definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there’s clearly not enough money to pay for it all.
The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.2
Our current money system is damaged, its chances of survival aren’t robust, and we’d do well to build some redundancy and resilience into our experience by introducing and using other forms of money now, while we can. It’s my prediction that the difference between communities that merely survive and those that thrive in the future will depend, in part, on which ones have parallel currency systems in place.
Change Management
The enormity of the scope of the changes that I see coming will require whole new skill sets and specialties to be developed and delivered to individuals, companies, and governments alike.
Managing for growth is one skill set; managing for stasis or even shrinkage is a different skill set altogether. Consider the hapless municipal manager who only has experience in growing yearly operational budgets. Every department and function gains a little more in their budget each year. The manager develops skills in negotiating how much goes to each area and keeping everybody reasonably happy with their allotment.
But the reverse of that situation is an entirely different process. Cutting budgets requires knowing which items