- Exposure to money increases endorsement of free-market systems and social inequality.
- Moneytoxosis infection activates a part of the human's brain normally engaged in sexual attraction.
- Another definition of the word “virus” is ... “a corrupting influence on morals or the intellect”.
- Moneytoxosis is known to affect our personalities. Moneytoxosis infection is linked to neuroticism in both men and women. “Neuroticism” as defined by psychology “ is ...an enduring tendency to experience negative emotional states,“ including depression, guilt and insecurity.
- The negative impact of wealth on individuals’ ability to enjoy life undermines the positive effects of money on their happiness.
- No one today can account for all the money in existence, no one really knows where it all came from and where it's all going. More and more of it comes into existence and each time it multiplies it creates more slaves and kills more of the organic life that we need for the continuance of our biological/botanical ecosystem.
MONEYTOXOSIS part one
It seems to me that capitalism was born the first time a person lent another person something they had an excess of but the other person needed. The capitalism part comes in when the first person charged the second person a fee for doing so, a fee that more than covered the wear and tear on the item in question. In effect the first person was making a profit without actually doing any work. I say “it seems to me” because Karl Mark probably said something more like “Capitalism is founded on a principle of private ownership where the owners of the means of production are dependant on wage labour to create profits” or something similar. I mean no disrespect to Karl, however, I'm interested in something else. I'm interested in “why” people are capitalists, why do we give so much importance to money? Why is it that a person who owns shares in some bank or business or other, can lie about in bed all morning reading the news paper or watching television or scratching an itch, but a person who has been made unemployed so that the bankers, entrepreneurs, business people etc. can increase their profits by reducing their wage bill, is called a “shirker” or to put it another way “a lazy bastard”.
You see, I'm not exactly writing from an objective point of view, if objectivity even exists - I'll leave the discussions about quantum physics, Zen Buddhism and the nature of reality for another day - no, I am that lazy, work shy, soap dodging, drain on the country's economy.... or at least I was, I work freelance now, which means the state no longer has to support me and in return... I'm not a slave. Hang on, how did that happen? More on that later.
I've been lying in bed, bored, depressed, trying to save on heating, wondering why I felt so bad when if I were a rich man I would probably be lying in bed counting my money. What I didn't know in the good old days of blissful ignorance was that my feeling rejected made me desire money but thinking about the money I wasn't making, in effect losing, made social rejection all the more hard to bear - I've had to wait a couple of decades for someone to do that research, but now it's official.
When fired from your job, you feel rejected and you want money to compensate for this, but if you've just been fired from your job then you are losing money by the minute - thereby increasing your feelings of rejection.
Money re-wires our brains to make us behave in all sorts of normal ways. Yes, “normal” because we can't, won't and don't see what's wrong with what we're doing, and if we do see a problem we - I say “we” because I'm including myself as a member of the human race - we think the solution is to throw money at it. Take the environment for example. The planet is heating up because of our economic activity that often require us to burn fossil fuels. However, the fossil fuel companies would have us believe that the alternatives are “too expensive”. So we can't afford to fix the planet whilst we are in an economic crisis. Hmm. Environmental crisis that will shut down the ecosystem on one hand versus an economic crisis that will shut down the banking system. The first one will effect almost all living things on the planet, the second one effects a few layabout shareholders.
Another example is the “food crisis” - a billion people suffer from obesity whilst a billion people are starving. Why don't the obese billion share their meals with the starving billion? Why do the overweight have to pay to exercise and pay a nutritionist to work out a slimming diet and pay for drugs to help them lose weight, while governments in the developing world, charities and NGO's are desperately trying to raise money to feed the poor?
The way our brains have been wired we say “NO, we can't afford a future, we must use our resources to make more money for the 1% of humans that own 90% of everything. Their survival is paramount, who cares about a few billion species of ORGANIC life.” And of course, the capitalist myth tells us that we can all “achieve greatness”. The “Rags to Riches” story, the lottery that promises “it could be you”; “You've gotta be in it to win it” - innit?
I've often wondered if our polluting activities were fulfilling a purpose - to prepare the planet for some alien presence. . . but what if that alien presence is already with us? What if the economy were a form of non-organic life? And what if capitalism is the bacteria that the money virus exploits to establish itself as the dominant life on this planet? You can't get more alien than a non-organic life form.
A virus isn't in itself a life form, but it's half-way there.
Most people think that when they catch a cold their sneezes are the body's own defence mechanism to rid itself of the cold virus. Actually that's wrong, in fact it's the virus's way to spread itself and infect more people. Now ain't evolution wonderful? An even more amazing behaviour can be seen in the life cycle of toxoplasmosis:
For obvious reasons, rats normally avoid cats. In the presence of cat urine they become very timid — unless they’re infected with Toxoplasma. Research over the past 10 years has shown that infected rats drop their normal fearful “freezing” response, and instead go exploring. They even approach the cat smell.
Bad news for the rats, but very good news for the parasite, because Toxoplasma reproduces sexually only in cats. Parasite infects rat. Cat eats rat. Parasite reproduces.
The parasite can also infect all sorts of other animals, including humans, in which it causes toxoplasmosis — one of many good reasons to avoid contact with cat droppings. But outside of cats, its reproductive cycle cannot be completed.
If this puppet-master behaviour were not strange enough, scientists have now found out how the parasite may change rat behaviour.
Toxoplasma infection activates a part of the rat’s brain normally engaged in sexual attraction. The smell of cat urine revs up this set of neurons like the presence of a sexually receptive female rat normally would.
The neurons that trigger the rat’s normal “freezing” reaction to cats continue to fire. But their message may get swamped by the overactive sexual attraction signalling, the researchers suspect. - NY Times/Science/Aug 17 2011
A virus isn't conscious, it's not even alive in the way we define “life” - it's generally defined as:
a microorganism composed of an RNA or DNA core and a protein coat, that cannot grow or reproduce outside a living cell. To keep itself alive and to replicate it must invade living cells and use their chemical machinery.
Another definition of the word is: a corrupting influence on morals or the intellect
. . . . now, that smells like money.
So what is “capitalism”?
As far as I can see, capitalism is the system where money commands. It's the environment best suited to monetary reproduction, or “economic growth”. But there is a difference between money in the bank accumulating interest and a country's economy growing. The rich get richer regardless of the state of the economy.
As the recent “financial crisis” has shown, it was a crisis for the people who lost their jobs and their homes, their family life etc, but it was Christmas time for the 1% that saw their financial assets grow out of all proportion to the actual goods or capital that was, is or will be on this planet.
Capitalism is antithetical to freedom, although most capitalists believe that it IS freedom, and it aims to destroy or enslave all life forms that exist on this planet. Under the capitalist system we are all slaves.
Pre-industrialization we, the working class, or “serfs” as we were known as, were tied to a piece of land which we had to work to both feed ourselves and to feed the landowner (landowners got their position through violence, cunning and superior genes... really? OK, the first one is definitely true, the second one is probably true and the third one is what they would like to think is true). As a serf you had no freedom, you couldn't go to the seaside for a holiday, there was no free press and no vote. Human rights hadn't been invented yet. On the other hand there was a certain amount of stability. The landlord had to ensure you had food, clothes and a roof over your head. So, they invented freedom. All you slaves, good news, you're free. Now get off my land. The modern equivalent is working from home, working “freelance” on short term contracts, temping or agency work.
Fortunately the capitalists invented industry, factories, colonialism and all sorts of devices to keep the free slaves believing they were free and mistresses and masters of their own destinies. Yippee!
Capitalism has gone through an evolution until today it's no longer cool be an industrial economy i.e. engineering, manufacturing etc, instead the serfs are kept busy in service “industries”. Services can be anything from “d'you want fries with that?” to “let me supersize your loan sir”.
There was a time when people made things and governments made promises they could keep, even if they didn't. The unions would put up a semblance of a fight and everyone made a mad dash to mad cash. The words to the “Red Flag” were re-written: “The working class can kiss my arse, I've got the bosses job at last”.
At this point you might think that I'm arguing for slavery and serfdom and against freedom. That's not what I'm trying to do, I'm all for freedom, but I think it's an impossible dream while we remain slaves to the money virus.
In a study of working adults, the wealthier individuals were less able to enjoy and prolong positive emotional experience, undermining the positive effects that money could have on their happiness. It seems that too much money is as bad as too little money.- Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: the Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness - May 18 2010
However, we tend to think that the cure for the kind of depression resulting from having too much is the same as that for having too little - in other words whether we have too much or too little money, we always want more.
The welfare state was replaced by easy credit. Your debt became someone else's asset. Now we no longer provide for the future, we spend it today. Today's slaves have spent their future consuming as much as they possibly can in the present. If you don't spend everything you have and possibly will have, the economy won't grow and it will be your fault that you're lying in bed trying to think of a reason why not to throw yourself out of the window.
What scientists really wanted to understand is whether Toxoplasma affects people with no prior disposition to psychological problems. They were in luck: in Denmark, serum antibody levels for Toxoplasma gondii were taken from the children of over 45,000 women as a part of a neonatal screening study to better understand how the parasite is transmitted from mother to child.
The results were clear. Women with Toxoplasma infections were 54% more likely to attempt suicide – and twice as likely to succeed. In particular, these women were more likely to attempt violent suicides (using a knife or gun, for example, instead of overdosing on pills). But even more disturbing: suicide attempt risk was positively correlated with the level of infection. Those with the highest levels of antibodies were 91% more likely to attempt suicide than uninfected women.
While these results might seem frightening, they make sense when you think about how Toxoplasma is known to affect our personalities. In 2006, researchers linked Toxoplasma infection to neuroticism in both men and women. Neuroticism – as defined by psychology – is the “an enduring tendency to experience negative emotional states,” including depression, guilt and insecurity. The link between neuroticism and suicide is well established, thus if the parasite does make people more neurotic, it’s not surprising that it influences rates of self-violence.
The next step will be for scientists to affirm if and how these parasites cause negative thoughts. Not only could such research help target at-risk individuals, it may help scientists understand the dark neurological pathways that lead to depression and suicide that the sinister protozoan has tapped into. But even more disconcerting is that scientists predict that Toxoplasma prevalence is on the rise, both due to how we live and climate change. - Scientific American - July 4 2012
Money is a type of non-organic virus, like a meme but far more powerful.
“Life by number” is an interesting idea, I think we need to see ourselves from a different perspective to appreciate “what is life”. Richard Dawkins says that all living things have the function of replicating their genes and he also coined the term “meme” to describe the way ideas replicate and take on a life of their own. (Writers often say that their characters dictate the plots of their stories) If an idea can come alive, why not a number?
“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
The fact that money came before capitalism suggests to me that money is the virus and capitalism is the organism. Capitalism itself didn't appear from nowhere. Capitalism is what feudalism and colonialism evolved into.
“I am not a number, I'm a free man” - The Prisoner, Number 6
Whereas memes need people to pass them on and to make them multiply, money, in the capitalist system, has a life of its own. No one today can account for all the money in existence, no one really knows where it all came from and where it’s all going. More and more of it comes into existence and each time it multiplies it creates more slaves and kills more of the organic life that we need for the continuance of our biological/botanical ecosystem.
Three billion years after inanimate chemistry first became animate life, a newly synthesized laboratory compound is behaving in uncannily lifelike ways.
The particles aren’t truly alive — but they’re not far off, either. Exposed to light and fed by chemicals, they form crystals that move, break apart and form again.
“There is a blurry frontier between active and alive,” said biophysicist Jérémie Palacci of New York University. “That is exactly the kind of question that such works raise.”
. . . The ultimate goal of the work is to study how complicated collective behaviors arise from simple individual properties, perhaps informing molecular self-assembly projects, but it’s hard not to think about the origin-of-life implications. - Wired, 31 Jan 2013
Capitalists don’t care about the planet because their belief system tells them that the profit motive will always find a way. The profit motive is just one of the ways that money reproduces. It is attractive to capitalists because they convince themselves that their greed is somehow good for society, in fact the richest capitalists - called “billionaires” simply suck all the money out of one economy and invest it in another economy. Investing is money’s reproductive act. The economy is where money operates.
However, what these billionaires don’t understand is that money doesn’t need us, once it has eaten this planet it will lie dormant until the next life form passes by. Money doesn’t live as we do, it infects our brains making us feel powerful, keeping us drugged and complacent because most humans can hardly understand that the plants and animals they eat have a life of their own. They have been prepared for this by monotheistic religion that teaches them that human life is the only “sacred” life on this planet, all other life lacks a “soul” and is therefore simply biological mechanical devices. In this way money behaves like toxoplasmosis.
Mere Exposure to Money Increases Endorsement of Free-Market Systems and Social Inequality.
The present research tested whether incidental exposure to money affects people’s endorsement of social systems that legitimize social inequality. We found that subtle reminders of the concept of money, relative to nonmoney concepts, led participants to endorse more strongly the existing social system in the United States in general (Experiment 1) and free-market capitalism in particular (Experiment 4), to assert more strongly that victims deserve their fate (Experiment 2), and to believe more strongly that socially advantaged groups should dominate socially disadvantaged groups (Experiment 3). We further found that reminders of money increased preference for a free-market system of organ transplants that benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor even though this was not the prevailing system (Experiment 5) and that this effect was moderated by participants’ nationality. These results demonstrate how merely thinking about money can influence beliefs about the social order and the extent to which people deserve their station in life. - (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The possession of wealth and even the handling of someone else's wealth gives a person an enormous kick. It turns people into psychopaths. Of course I'm generalising, but the more money a person handles, the less empathy they tend to show. And this is in line with the toxoplasmosis analogy. “Moneytoxosis” needs its host to concentrate on reproducing the “money infection” - and this usually runs counter to showing empathy towards organic life.
Marx’s analysis was always spot on. The problem is what to do about it?
I don’t think we will ever be able to find and maintain a political and economic system that distributes resources fairly and is sustainable until we have dealt with the problem of money.
What can we learn from this? If this analogy is to be at all useful we should use it to change the way we think about money, capitalism and the economy. We need to find a vaccine. We can't simply “eat the rich” or legislate against wealth - it doesn't work. Stronger laws, more intrusive policing.... do me a favour. Religion? Well, we all know what happened to Jesus don't we? He spent most of his time warning us about the dangers of money and no time warning us against contraception or gay marriage, but the multi billion dollar religious institutions that claim to preach his gospel have simply inverted his teachings. Religion is not the cure and even if there is a religion that can eradicate moneytoxosis from our minds, our economies and our planet, it hasn't done it yet. We need a meme that will spread quickly before the virus can have a chance to get inside it and hijack it for its own ends.
Religion doesn't work, politics doesn't work, art, music, comedy hasn't worked so far. Whatever will be the solution, I think it will have to evolve out of the same place that the virus came from originally. I'm guessing from what I understand of how vaccines are made.
Vaccines can be made by injecting small doses of the bacteria or virus into an animal and extracting the antibodies from the animals' blood. All vaccines have the same objective, that is to weaken the virus or bacteria in a way that allows the immune system to response without developing any symptoms of infection. Vaccines are made using the same elements that are found in the natural virus or bacteria, so that our immune system will recognize it and create antibodies to defend against it.
What's the equivalent of an immune system for memes? Scepticism? What are the antibodies? Words? Where can they be found? In our heads? Or is there a gene that can be identified? Could it be due to the way our brains are wired?
I think if we can stop getting a kick out of money and start seeing it for what it is or should be, then we would be able to let a system evolve that will distribute wealth more fairly and better connect the price of a commodity to what it costs our ecosystem, our society and our dignity as humans beings.
I'll write about the problem of finding a vaccine next time, and I'll also try to answer some of the inevitable questions that arise when discussing this concept.
As long as we have a system that needs money to survive, we are going to be its slave, unless and until we can find and distribute a vaccine. Until that day all our economic and political speculation will be - to use an analogy - arguing about which is the most efficient way to spread the virus: by coughing or sneezing?
© February 2013 no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.
“I'll write about the problem of finding a vaccine next time, and I'll also try to answer some of the inevitable questions that arise when discussing this concept.
As long as we have a system that needs money to survive, we are going to be its slave, unless and until we can find and distribute a vaccine. Until that day all our economic and political speculation will be - to use an analogy - arguing about which is the most efficient way to spread the virus: by coughing or sneezing?”
These are the words I finished on when writing “Moneytoxosis”. Several months have passed and it's probably about time I expanded on this idea.
Vaccine v Inoculation?
An inoculation, in medicine, is the introduction of a serum, vaccine, or antigenic substance into the body of a human or animal, to boost immunity to a specific disease, but there is also another form of inoculation, inoculation against a meme. If you want to strengthen someone's belief (or faith) in something you present them with a counter argument. By responding to your argument they will build up their own defences, ready for when someone else presents them with a similar argument.
“... The argument that is presented through inoculation must be strong enough to initiate motivation to maintain current attitudes and beliefs, but weak enough that the receiver will refute the counterargument. Inoculation has been proven successful through many different trials and research.” - Wikipedia
This accounts for those spurious but earnest arguments you sometimes hear being made against anthropogenic global warming (AGW) (the idea that human activity is contributing to heating up the atmosphere) or in favour of intelligent design (ID) (the idea that life cannot come about through random events but such complexity must have been designed).
To inoculate a person or a group of people against the problem of greenhouse gasses it is sufficient to argue that CO2 is “bad for the environment”. This argument relies on blurring the distinction between “greenhouse effect” and “global warming” - to many people they are simply different expressions to describe the same thing, the warming of the atmosphere due to the presence of “greenhouse gasses” such as carbon dioxide (CO2). There is more to it than that, the “greenhouse effect” is a natural phenomena, without which our planet would be a freezing -18 degrees Celsius. On the other hand “global warming” describes the result of human activity which increases this effect, resulting in a measurable rise in the Earth's temperature.
A common “inoculation” against the theory of evolution is the often quoted misconception that “according to Charles Darwin, humans evolved from chimpanzees”. The counter argument goes along the lines of “if we evolved from chimpanzees, then why haven't all the other chimpanzees evolved into humans”. Well, that's because we didn't evolve from chimps, we share a common ancestor, but we diverged from them over 4 million years ago.
By the way “It's only a theory” is often used as an anti-science argument, unfortunately this is based on the confusion non-scientists have about the meanings of the words “theory” and “hypothesis”. Although in science they have precise meanings, in everyday language they are used interchangeably.
“Money is the root of all evil” is an argument against the hoarding of money. It tells us that all things evil are caused by money. Arguments against this are, for example, “how do you trade goods or pay for services without money?” or “a prudent person saves money against any future mishaps so they don't become a 'burden' on society”. Soon enough money goes from being “the root of all evil” to making “the world go around”.
From here on the argument moves from the inherent evil of money, to the inherent evil of greedy bankers, insurance companies, pension funds, people of other cultural or ethnic backgrounds and anyone else you care to victimize ... including the sick, the elderly and the unemployed.
“Money makes the world go round” and the less money we “moneyrats” have, the more anxious we become. The recent financial “crisis” was engineered for this reason - to make us work harder and make more sacrifices so we can scrape up every last drop of money to feed the money cats. We moneyrats are constantly looking for ways to make, steal or borrow money to satisfy this drive. Food and rent are the initial motivators, but to satisfy these requirements we perforce, driven by the virus, constantly create new excuses to waste our resources and keep us in debt - effectively money rats are slaves to the money cats.
“Austerity” measures are implemented (1) to make sure the moneyrats don't hoard their money (2) to drive them into finding new ways of making money (for the money cats).
If moneytoxosis is a disease like smallpox or polio, for example, then we need to find people who have some level of immunity so we can isolate the antibodies that their immune system has produced and then make a vaccine. If, however, it's similar to a meme, in the sense of being information based rather than carbon based, then inoculation may be possible through the dissemination of ideas that challenge both the “money makes the world go around” type of mantra and the quasi-religious “money is the root of all evil”.
A project has been launched to see whether games can help increase people's interest in environmental issues. - BBC News, 7 March 2013
The project uses the concepts and and mechanics of games but in a non-gaming environment. The aim is to encourage people to change their behaviour and reduce their environmental impacts, but according to game designer Jane McGonigal, it is already possible to change people's lives for the better:
My best effort so far? SuperBetter, a game that has helped more than 250,000 players so far tackle real-life health challenges like depression, anxiety, chronic pain and traumatic brain injury. -- www.janemcgonigal.com
In this 21st century world we are living in, it may be the game designers that have the strategies to make this work. By connecting our organically grown virtual machines via an electronic computer network, we are quite possibly creating a “super brain” - could this be the battle ground where we will begin to take back our humanity? This is also the environment where moneytoxosis is most powerful.
A good game should spill over into the real world as gamers get together to organise their lives without money.
The idea of using games to transmit ideas, or memes, is similar to other cultural activities but with one crucial difference. The gamer must actively participate in the activity, while religion and politics usually involve few active individuals, most of those being “menials” - simply followers whose job is to recruit other followers. Games not only help gamers to familiarise themselves with new ideas, but also to use those ideas and concepts as tools which in turn help them to play the game at a deeper level. These skills may or may not affect a change in their “real world” activities. Of course a sophisticated game can blur the distinction between the game world and the real world in a way that art, music and literature can only achieve with the use of drugs or amongst the mentally ill.
The games should be structured in such a way as to encourage the gamers to see money as a virus and think of ways to reduce their dependence on money as well as understand that our consumerism is simply the result of a virus that has rewired our brains. Consumerism is leading to the destruction of our planet and closer to home, the breakdown in social structures that we need for our own individual survival and happiness. However, just as an infected rat gets a hard on when he smells cat's piss, our re-wired brains tell us it's sexy to display a high level of personal debt - running a car that is unnecessarily expensive, going on holidays we can't afford, wearing “designer” clothes that will be obsolete before the year is up... All of these, and many more, behaviours are our way of running towards teeth and claws with a hard on.
Some may argue that sport does this.... I have my doubts.
Religion
Religion, at least some religions, seem to me to have been attempts at countering moneytoxosis. Christianity, for example, contained many memes against the money virus. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, Jesus often criticises material wealth, explaining that riches will not get you into heaven and exhorting his followers to give away their wealth:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God”
“If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven”.
And, probably the most famous of Jesus' teachings on the subject of wealth:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
However, these memes were not spread fast enough to be effective and have mutated into their opposites. You can see this easily by simply visiting religious places of worship, for example the Vatican (Roman Catholic), The Golden Temple (Sikh), Shwedagon Pagoda (Buddhist) or Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque (Muslim).
Religion no longer confers an evolutionary advantage to its followers, but it actually works against human evolution in its attempts to turn back the clock to a pre-scientific age. It could be argued that religious memes such as “children are a gift from god” help spread the genes of the religious followers; over population, however, is a challenge that techno-phobic religion has no answer for.
Sex
Another clear example of an “evolutionary dead end” is pornography. Men like looking at porn. Women, on the other hand, rarely watch pornography, or so I thought. Since writing that sentence I've done a quick bit of research and it appears that women are fast catching up with men, either way, human beings are ready for sex whenever they see an opportunity, whether real or imagined. This has conferred an evolutionary advantage on homo sapiens by helping to distribute their genes far and wide. Unfortunately, it seems that the downside to this that many men prefer watching internet porn to having real sex and forming sexual and emotional relationships.
According to a survey of 28,000 Italian men, researchers found “gradual but devastating” effects of repeated exposure to pornography over long period of time. According to the head of the study, Carlos Forsta, the problem “starts with lower reactions to porn sites, then there is a general drop in libido and in the end it becomes impossible to get an erection.” -- http://www.psychologytoday.com/
Politics
Politics and politicians are, depressingly, pretty much the same as priests and religions. Democracy quite clearly doesn't work, even if it “is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” to quote Winston Churchill. Maybe a better description of democracy can be found in a quote from an American pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, who said “Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.” Unfortunately the “extraordinary possibilities” of an “ordinary person” are as likely to lead to the senseless slaughter of millions of people as to lead us to a utopia where the hungry are fed, the sick are cured and the homeless are housed.
“Every cobbler, carpenter, mechanic, electrician, mason, etc., has to fulfil very strict demands made on his abilities. A politician, on the other hand, is not subject to the necessity of such legitimation. All he needs to reach the highest positions in human society—particularly when social conditions are chaotic—are a good dose of cleverness, neurotic ambition, and ruthlessness. The past 25 years have shown how a mediocre journalist was able to brutalize 50 million Italian people and lead them to disaster. For 22 years there was a big noise about nothing, until one day the whole thing collapsed overnight, leaving one with the feeling, 'And nothing has happened'.” - Wilhelm Reich, writing about “Work Democracy” in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism”.
Politics and religion are ways that human society has found to organize itself. To be able to share resources and to live together we have had to find ways of regulating society. Religion works on the unconscious, using the language of symbols - it is often credited with giving our civilisations sublime art, inspiring music, awesome architecture and beautiful poetry - politics on the other hand works on the conscious, rational mind and is responsible for some of our worst failures, such as world wars, as well as some of our greatest successes, for example the end of apartheid in South Africa. But, like pornography, they have also substituted the world of rhetoric and fine words for actual solutions to problems that are facing us today. World summits are expensive talking shops, the cost of which could go towards alleviating the problems they are convened to discuss. Similarly, prayer has never stopped a genocide nor has it been successful at halting global warming. Maybe that's why so many religious followers also deny that humans are causing global warming and blame “godless atheists” for genocide.
The Brain
If we consider the brain as a kind of organic computer, an amazingly complex computer with more possible connections than there are atoms in the universe, then we can consider the “mind” as the operating system (OS) that allows all sorts of programs to run. In fact the brain has two processors, the left hemisphere is a serial processor and the right hemisphere is a parallel processor. The mind evolves independently of the brain, just as, for example, “Java” updates itself every so often, even if the computer's hardware remains the same. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is a piece of software that allows any program written in, or compiled into, Java to run on any computer that has a native JVM. This allows all kinds of programs to run on a wide variety of devices despite having vastly different hardware and operating systems. I have referred to the mind as both the OS and a VM.... I know. In my opinion, we need to consider “the mind” as having at least two components, the “unconscious” mind and the “conscious” mind. The unconscious mind is the operating system that operates much closer to the hardware of the brain and the nervous system, whereas the conscious mind is the “virtual machine” that allows people who may be physically and ethnically quite different to nevertheless understand similar concepts and carry out similar functions. For example, every human language has the same functions, such as talking about the past or describing an animal's behaviour, even if the grammar and lexis are quite different from one language to another, it is still possible to communicate the same ideas.
This virtual machine allows ideas or memes to pass from one generation to the next, that may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people whose ideas they are, or to influence the survival of the ideas themselves. Prof. Richard Dawkins argues that people can be seen as “hosts” for replicating memes, in a similar way to being hosts for replicating molecules we call “genes”. A successful meme might not necessarily provide any benefit to its individual host as a gene carrier. This seems paradoxical, why would I want to have an idea, like a piece of computer code, running on my virtual machine if it doesn't benefit me? Let me re-write that.... “Why would the organic, gene host, physical entity called 'I', want to think in ways that don't benefit the distribution of my genes?” We all know of people who would rather die than renounce their religion, or who would sacrifice themselves for “freedom”, “equality” or a political ideal. Suicide bombers are a genetic dead end, but their memes are spread far and wide by the publicity they generate for their cause. And the beauty is that even if you passionately disagree with their memes, you will continue to spread them, horizontally, by arguing and discussing them with other people.
So from the point of view of memes, religion and politics are not at all at a dead end. It may be that politics and religion are creating an overpopulated planet full of ignorant people who only want to reproduce and consume in a self destructive orgy of materialistic consumerism.
Renata Salecl is an internationally acclaimed philosopher and sociologist, who believes that too much choice, as is found in the capitalist world, leads to depression, anxiety and neurosis. Paradoxically, a lack of choice also leads to depression, anxiety and neurosis. In a recent interview she said: “Capitalism is the neurosis of humanity.”
John Maynard Keynes, the economist, is often quoted as saying “in the long run we're all dead”, which gives the impression that we shouldn't really care about the future, after all we won't be around to see it. Actually what he said was “In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” In other words, we really do need to think deeply about these problems now, and not leave it to “time, the great healer”.
“Money” is a concept, a name for something which humans need. What it represents is a means of exchanging stuff with some reference to the “value” of the stuff and the “status” of the exchangers. These concepts have to be thoroughly analysed and internalised before we can make headway with the actual abolition of money - Marx has done the analysis but “Capital” is a massive work, that few workers have time or inclination to read or study...
In volume I Marx looks at the nature of value to show that the modern capitalist system of production and exchange is not what it seems. Production and exchange are social institutions, and their organization has social consequences. Marx points out that the production of commodities is a process that depends on exploitation and leads to antagonistic relationships between workers and capitalists. He then goes on to explain that the mechanism of exploitation that is built into the capitalist system will eventually lead to the dismantling of capitalism itself by the exploited working classes... but we know better. The workers are money rats, the capitalists are money cats, and we are all dancing to the tune of Moneytoxosis.
Meme or virus?
It's tempting to compare a meme with a virus. In some ways they are the same, for example, they both exist independently of their hosts, depending on infecting suitable hosts to reproduce and disseminate. In that sense they are parasites because they make use of their host's (human or non-human) physical or mental processes for their own transmission. Some people see memes as “viruses of the mind”, but I disagree, a virus, is antagonistic, whereas memes can be considered the building blocks of human culture.
Memes are comparable to genes in that they are fully functioning units, they create their own momentum, they reproduce and mutate in the process. On the other hand, the money virus is barely recognisable outside of the memes it has hijacked. Economic, political and even moral ideas have been infected with moneytoxosis in such a way that it becomes almost impossible to imagine those memes without “money” at their heart. I hope that during this series of essays we will be able to make a start at separating out the virus from the meme.
Why is it that I describe money as a virus, “moneytoxosis”, but not politics or religion? For one thing, politics and religion are not simply one idea, one meme, but lots of memes. For example “god loves you”, “children are a gift from god”, “my god is more powerful than yours”. Political memes are born from concepts such as the nature of freedom, power, equality, justice, democracy, and authority.
Moneytoxosis, on the other hand, works behind the scenes infecting even the best intentions and mutating harmless and benevolent memes, such as “love thy neighbour” into “keeping up with the Joneses”. Why is it that our religions of peace permit, and sometimes even encourage, war? Our politicians talk about freedom and equality whilst building ever more prisons and passing ever more restrictive legislation?
The virus has taken root in the unconscious mind, the operating system, or maybe even more frighteningly, the kernel of the OS. The kernel is a program that constitutes the central core of an operating system. It has complete control over everything that occurs in the system!
What I'm trying to say here is that I believe that the money virus, moneytoxosis, is embedded deep within the psyche and controls many of our interactions. Those of us who are infected, and that includes most of the human population of the planet, are so controlled by this virus that we don't even realise it. If we return for a moment to my example of toxoplasmosis, I'm quite sure that neither the rats nor the cats are aware of having the virus because their actions are governed by their intrinsic motivation. In the case of rats, their brains are re-wired to make them feel sexy when they should feel fear when sensing the presence of a cat. As to the cats' behaviour they are just doing what they have evolved to do: chase and kill rodents.
Moneytoxosis v money
When I talk about this with acquaintances they always insist that they can't be infected because they identify the virus with the substance, that is, cash. So they think, “well, I haven't got any money, so I can't be infected”. Not true, as I pointed out earlier with the analogy with toxoplasmosis, we poor people are the rats, attracted by the lights and the smell of commerce, we can't wait to offer up our meagre supply of cash we have worked so hard to scrape together, we offer it up to the big fat cats in their cathedrals of commerce so they can stash it away in some kind of electronic storage centre where it can, and will, multiply endlessly. As money rats, we believe we are satisfying some more basic urge: to buy goods that will make our lives more comfortable or tasty, fatty, sugary food products that will satisfy a craving... or some cheap garment that will increase our sex appeal. These are basic needs, we all need food and we all need to reproduce and we all need a comfortable home to live in, don't we?
The money cats on the other hand crave status, power and independence. For them the profit motive is not about money but about “esteem needs” - number four on Maslow's hierarchy of needs:
1. Biological and Physiological needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.
2. Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, limits, stability, etc.
3. Social Needs - Belongingness and Love, - work group, family, affection, relationships, etc.
4. Esteem needs - self-esteem, achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.
5. Cognitive needs - knowledge, meaning, etc.
6. Aesthetic needs - appreciation and search for beauty, balance, form, etc.
7. Self-Actualization needs - realizing personal potential, self-fulfilment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.
8. Transcendence needs - helping others to achieve self actualization.
Abraham Maslow was a humanist psychologist who first introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”. This hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to fulfil basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs.
Despite the fact that Maslow did no experiments to support his theory, research from neuroscience and evolutionary biology support many of Maslow's claims. Although research by the University of Illinois showed that people from cultures all over the world report that self-actualization and social needs are important even when many of the most basic needs are unfulfilled. Maybe this accounts for the lack of profit motive amongst the unemployed.
Black boxes, where big money is made.
Most trading these days does not take place in places like the New York or the London Stock Exchange. Instead it takes place in vast electronic trading facilities housing rows of computer servers. Billions of dollars are invested in faster, smarter computers, and in the fastest possible connections. Traders pay enormous fees to “co-locate” their servers as near as possible to the world's stock exchanges. Connected to these servers are the robot trading firms that use computer algorithms to exploit the complex, automated trading patterns to make a profit by rapid buying and selling.
Different traders use different strategies to identify trading opportunities and react to them faster than anyone else, when a trade starts to become profitable the trading system algorithm will take care of routing the orders to the broker faster and more conveniently by eliminating human involvement.
“TradeBullet routes the orders to your broker within fractions of a second. And in today's competitive markets, seconds can mean the difference between a winning trade and a losing trade.” - tradebullet.com
While most trading software programs offer a database that can store quotes data, QuantShare allows you to create any number of historical and intraday databases. You can store any data in these databases (Call-Put ratios, News, Dividend & Split data, Short Selling data, Fundamental data, Insiders data...) , and use this data in charting, analysis, backtesting… - www.quantshare.com/
Few people actually understand what is happening inside these “black boxes”. Soon the world's financial markets will be controlled by computer software, designed to make the highest profits in the fastest time. In other words moneytoxosis has moved from deep within the human psyche into a barely more comprehensible environment in the computer servers of the world's financial centres.
The life cycle of the money virus starts by hijacking the unconscious desires of human beings, then moving into the cash registers of the supermarkets and shopping malls as those desires for material goods are satisfied.
The profits from these trades eventually take on an electronic life, multiplying many thousands of time a second inside vast computer servers.
The money virus has now evolved from hijacking carbon based organic life to silicon based electronic life. In other words, it started off its life as electrical signals in the brain but eventually multiplies as electronic signals in the computer systems. Quantum life forms?
What’s Possible When Brains and Computers Work Together?
We're electromagnetic beings. Quantum particles, quarks etc, don't/can't obey the same laws of physics that we do. The quantum world, with its many universes, only exists on a sub-atomic level. Although all possibilities are played out by these particles, they average out to the “physical”, ie obeying the laws of physics, universe we live in. In other words, on a macro level, this is it. This is the only possible universe that can exist, instead “quantum life” would be a very strange form of life existing in all possible states and in dimensions and universes where everything is possible, indeed, everything is compulsory. We poor unfortunate mortals are commended to live and die constrained by the three dimensions of space (with some possibility to move around within them) and one dimension of time which hurtles forward regardless of the psycholinguistic restraints we try to impose on it, i.e. by recording our histories in memory and projecting our dreams into the “future” - a place we will never visit because, unlike the quantum particles that are the building blocks of our electromagnetic universe, we must live in an eternal present until we die. Money, as a virus, will not disappear with human beings; as long as there are still some electronic or quantum storage devices/processors, money will live on - that's what I mean by “quantum life”. Driven by the needs to make money and war, we have invented the perfect host for moneytoxosis. Consider: the internet is almost indestructible; power can come directly from sunlight; energy requirements of processors is always diminishing; with 3d printers and robot assembly lines... who needs a human?
"Understanding the performance capabilities that could be achieved by an efficient union between brains and machines is a central theme of Coleman’s research and he envisions endless applications in areas such as military operations, gaming, education and consumer electronics". -- http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/2011_08coleman.asp
“The brain-machine interface paradigm is very exciting and I think it need not be limited to thinking about prosthetics or people with some type of motor deficit,” said Coleman. “I think taking the lens of the human and computer interacting, and if you could evolve a very nice coupling that is remarkably natural and almost ubiquitous, I think there are applications that we haven’t even imagined. That is what really fascinates me – really the coupling between the biological system and the computer system.” -- Professor Todd Coleman, Department of Bioengineering, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
All very exciting and frightening stuff, but it still doesn't answer the question of “what to do about the moneytoxosis virus?”
I'll concentrate on that in the next, and probably final, part of this essay.
© June 2013 no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author
As long as we have a system that needs money to survive, we are going to be its slave, unless and until we can find and distribute a vaccine. Until that day all our economic and political speculation will be - to use an analogy - arguing about which is the most efficient way to spread the virus: by coughing or sneezing?”
These are the words I finished on when writing “Moneytoxosis”. Several months have passed and it's probably about time I expanded on this idea.
Vaccine v Inoculation?
An inoculation, in medicine, is the introduction of a serum, vaccine, or antigenic substance into the body of a human or animal, to boost immunity to a specific disease, but there is also another form of inoculation, inoculation against a meme. If you want to strengthen someone's belief (or faith) in something you present them with a counter argument. By responding to your argument they will build up their own defences, ready for when someone else presents them with a similar argument.
“... The argument that is presented through inoculation must be strong enough to initiate motivation to maintain current attitudes and beliefs, but weak enough that the receiver will refute the counterargument. Inoculation has been proven successful through many different trials and research.” - Wikipedia
This accounts for those spurious but earnest arguments you sometimes hear being made against anthropogenic global warming (AGW) (the idea that human activity is contributing to heating up the atmosphere) or in favour of intelligent design (ID) (the idea that life cannot come about through random events but such complexity must have been designed).
To inoculate a person or a group of people against the problem of greenhouse gasses it is sufficient to argue that CO2 is “bad for the environment”. This argument relies on blurring the distinction between “greenhouse effect” and “global warming” - to many people they are simply different expressions to describe the same thing, the warming of the atmosphere due to the presence of “greenhouse gasses” such as carbon dioxide (CO2). There is more to it than that, the “greenhouse effect” is a natural phenomena, without which our planet would be a freezing -18 degrees Celsius. On the other hand “global warming” describes the result of human activity which increases this effect, resulting in a measurable rise in the Earth's temperature.
A common “inoculation” against the theory of evolution is the often quoted misconception that “according to Charles Darwin, humans evolved from chimpanzees”. The counter argument goes along the lines of “if we evolved from chimpanzees, then why haven't all the other chimpanzees evolved into humans”. Well, that's because we didn't evolve from chimps, we share a common ancestor, but we diverged from them over 4 million years ago.
By the way “It's only a theory” is often used as an anti-science argument, unfortunately this is based on the confusion non-scientists have about the meanings of the words “theory” and “hypothesis”. Although in science they have precise meanings, in everyday language they are used interchangeably.
“Money is the root of all evil” is an argument against the hoarding of money. It tells us that all things evil are caused by money. Arguments against this are, for example, “how do you trade goods or pay for services without money?” or “a prudent person saves money against any future mishaps so they don't become a 'burden' on society”. Soon enough money goes from being “the root of all evil” to making “the world go around”.
From here on the argument moves from the inherent evil of money, to the inherent evil of greedy bankers, insurance companies, pension funds, people of other cultural or ethnic backgrounds and anyone else you care to victimize ... including the sick, the elderly and the unemployed.
“Money makes the world go round” and the less money we “moneyrats” have, the more anxious we become. The recent financial “crisis” was engineered for this reason - to make us work harder and make more sacrifices so we can scrape up every last drop of money to feed the money cats. We moneyrats are constantly looking for ways to make, steal or borrow money to satisfy this drive. Food and rent are the initial motivators, but to satisfy these requirements we perforce, driven by the virus, constantly create new excuses to waste our resources and keep us in debt - effectively money rats are slaves to the money cats.
“Austerity” measures are implemented (1) to make sure the moneyrats don't hoard their money (2) to drive them into finding new ways of making money (for the money cats).
If moneytoxosis is a disease like smallpox or polio, for example, then we need to find people who have some level of immunity so we can isolate the antibodies that their immune system has produced and then make a vaccine. If, however, it's similar to a meme, in the sense of being information based rather than carbon based, then inoculation may be possible through the dissemination of ideas that challenge both the “money makes the world go around” type of mantra and the quasi-religious “money is the root of all evil”.
A project has been launched to see whether games can help increase people's interest in environmental issues. - BBC News, 7 March 2013
The project uses the concepts and and mechanics of games but in a non-gaming environment. The aim is to encourage people to change their behaviour and reduce their environmental impacts, but according to game designer Jane McGonigal, it is already possible to change people's lives for the better:
My best effort so far? SuperBetter, a game that has helped more than 250,000 players so far tackle real-life health challenges like depression, anxiety, chronic pain and traumatic brain injury. -- www.janemcgonigal.com
In this 21st century world we are living in, it may be the game designers that have the strategies to make this work. By connecting our organically grown virtual machines via an electronic computer network, we are quite possibly creating a “super brain” - could this be the battle ground where we will begin to take back our humanity? This is also the environment where moneytoxosis is most powerful.
A good game should spill over into the real world as gamers get together to organise their lives without money.
The idea of using games to transmit ideas, or memes, is similar to other cultural activities but with one crucial difference. The gamer must actively participate in the activity, while religion and politics usually involve few active individuals, most of those being “menials” - simply followers whose job is to recruit other followers. Games not only help gamers to familiarise themselves with new ideas, but also to use those ideas and concepts as tools which in turn help them to play the game at a deeper level. These skills may or may not affect a change in their “real world” activities. Of course a sophisticated game can blur the distinction between the game world and the real world in a way that art, music and literature can only achieve with the use of drugs or amongst the mentally ill.
The games should be structured in such a way as to encourage the gamers to see money as a virus and think of ways to reduce their dependence on money as well as understand that our consumerism is simply the result of a virus that has rewired our brains. Consumerism is leading to the destruction of our planet and closer to home, the breakdown in social structures that we need for our own individual survival and happiness. However, just as an infected rat gets a hard on when he smells cat's piss, our re-wired brains tell us it's sexy to display a high level of personal debt - running a car that is unnecessarily expensive, going on holidays we can't afford, wearing “designer” clothes that will be obsolete before the year is up... All of these, and many more, behaviours are our way of running towards teeth and claws with a hard on.
Some may argue that sport does this.... I have my doubts.
Religion
Religion, at least some religions, seem to me to have been attempts at countering moneytoxosis. Christianity, for example, contained many memes against the money virus. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, Jesus often criticises material wealth, explaining that riches will not get you into heaven and exhorting his followers to give away their wealth:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God”
“If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven”.
And, probably the most famous of Jesus' teachings on the subject of wealth:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
However, these memes were not spread fast enough to be effective and have mutated into their opposites. You can see this easily by simply visiting religious places of worship, for example the Vatican (Roman Catholic), The Golden Temple (Sikh), Shwedagon Pagoda (Buddhist) or Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque (Muslim).
Religion no longer confers an evolutionary advantage to its followers, but it actually works against human evolution in its attempts to turn back the clock to a pre-scientific age. It could be argued that religious memes such as “children are a gift from god” help spread the genes of the religious followers; over population, however, is a challenge that techno-phobic religion has no answer for.
Sex
Another clear example of an “evolutionary dead end” is pornography. Men like looking at porn. Women, on the other hand, rarely watch pornography, or so I thought. Since writing that sentence I've done a quick bit of research and it appears that women are fast catching up with men, either way, human beings are ready for sex whenever they see an opportunity, whether real or imagined. This has conferred an evolutionary advantage on homo sapiens by helping to distribute their genes far and wide. Unfortunately, it seems that the downside to this that many men prefer watching internet porn to having real sex and forming sexual and emotional relationships.
According to a survey of 28,000 Italian men, researchers found “gradual but devastating” effects of repeated exposure to pornography over long period of time. According to the head of the study, Carlos Forsta, the problem “starts with lower reactions to porn sites, then there is a general drop in libido and in the end it becomes impossible to get an erection.” -- http://www.psychologytoday.com/
Politics
Politics and politicians are, depressingly, pretty much the same as priests and religions. Democracy quite clearly doesn't work, even if it “is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” to quote Winston Churchill. Maybe a better description of democracy can be found in a quote from an American pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, who said “Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.” Unfortunately the “extraordinary possibilities” of an “ordinary person” are as likely to lead to the senseless slaughter of millions of people as to lead us to a utopia where the hungry are fed, the sick are cured and the homeless are housed.
“Every cobbler, carpenter, mechanic, electrician, mason, etc., has to fulfil very strict demands made on his abilities. A politician, on the other hand, is not subject to the necessity of such legitimation. All he needs to reach the highest positions in human society—particularly when social conditions are chaotic—are a good dose of cleverness, neurotic ambition, and ruthlessness. The past 25 years have shown how a mediocre journalist was able to brutalize 50 million Italian people and lead them to disaster. For 22 years there was a big noise about nothing, until one day the whole thing collapsed overnight, leaving one with the feeling, 'And nothing has happened'.” - Wilhelm Reich, writing about “Work Democracy” in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism”.
Politics and religion are ways that human society has found to organize itself. To be able to share resources and to live together we have had to find ways of regulating society. Religion works on the unconscious, using the language of symbols - it is often credited with giving our civilisations sublime art, inspiring music, awesome architecture and beautiful poetry - politics on the other hand works on the conscious, rational mind and is responsible for some of our worst failures, such as world wars, as well as some of our greatest successes, for example the end of apartheid in South Africa. But, like pornography, they have also substituted the world of rhetoric and fine words for actual solutions to problems that are facing us today. World summits are expensive talking shops, the cost of which could go towards alleviating the problems they are convened to discuss. Similarly, prayer has never stopped a genocide nor has it been successful at halting global warming. Maybe that's why so many religious followers also deny that humans are causing global warming and blame “godless atheists” for genocide.
The Brain
If we consider the brain as a kind of organic computer, an amazingly complex computer with more possible connections than there are atoms in the universe, then we can consider the “mind” as the operating system (OS) that allows all sorts of programs to run. In fact the brain has two processors, the left hemisphere is a serial processor and the right hemisphere is a parallel processor. The mind evolves independently of the brain, just as, for example, “Java” updates itself every so often, even if the computer's hardware remains the same. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is a piece of software that allows any program written in, or compiled into, Java to run on any computer that has a native JVM. This allows all kinds of programs to run on a wide variety of devices despite having vastly different hardware and operating systems. I have referred to the mind as both the OS and a VM.... I know. In my opinion, we need to consider “the mind” as having at least two components, the “unconscious” mind and the “conscious” mind. The unconscious mind is the operating system that operates much closer to the hardware of the brain and the nervous system, whereas the conscious mind is the “virtual machine” that allows people who may be physically and ethnically quite different to nevertheless understand similar concepts and carry out similar functions. For example, every human language has the same functions, such as talking about the past or describing an animal's behaviour, even if the grammar and lexis are quite different from one language to another, it is still possible to communicate the same ideas.
This virtual machine allows ideas or memes to pass from one generation to the next, that may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people whose ideas they are, or to influence the survival of the ideas themselves. Prof. Richard Dawkins argues that people can be seen as “hosts” for replicating memes, in a similar way to being hosts for replicating molecules we call “genes”. A successful meme might not necessarily provide any benefit to its individual host as a gene carrier. This seems paradoxical, why would I want to have an idea, like a piece of computer code, running on my virtual machine if it doesn't benefit me? Let me re-write that.... “Why would the organic, gene host, physical entity called 'I', want to think in ways that don't benefit the distribution of my genes?” We all know of people who would rather die than renounce their religion, or who would sacrifice themselves for “freedom”, “equality” or a political ideal. Suicide bombers are a genetic dead end, but their memes are spread far and wide by the publicity they generate for their cause. And the beauty is that even if you passionately disagree with their memes, you will continue to spread them, horizontally, by arguing and discussing them with other people.
So from the point of view of memes, religion and politics are not at all at a dead end. It may be that politics and religion are creating an overpopulated planet full of ignorant people who only want to reproduce and consume in a self destructive orgy of materialistic consumerism.
Renata Salecl is an internationally acclaimed philosopher and sociologist, who believes that too much choice, as is found in the capitalist world, leads to depression, anxiety and neurosis. Paradoxically, a lack of choice also leads to depression, anxiety and neurosis. In a recent interview she said: “Capitalism is the neurosis of humanity.”
John Maynard Keynes, the economist, is often quoted as saying “in the long run we're all dead”, which gives the impression that we shouldn't really care about the future, after all we won't be around to see it. Actually what he said was “In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” In other words, we really do need to think deeply about these problems now, and not leave it to “time, the great healer”.
“Money” is a concept, a name for something which humans need. What it represents is a means of exchanging stuff with some reference to the “value” of the stuff and the “status” of the exchangers. These concepts have to be thoroughly analysed and internalised before we can make headway with the actual abolition of money - Marx has done the analysis but “Capital” is a massive work, that few workers have time or inclination to read or study...
In volume I Marx looks at the nature of value to show that the modern capitalist system of production and exchange is not what it seems. Production and exchange are social institutions, and their organization has social consequences. Marx points out that the production of commodities is a process that depends on exploitation and leads to antagonistic relationships between workers and capitalists. He then goes on to explain that the mechanism of exploitation that is built into the capitalist system will eventually lead to the dismantling of capitalism itself by the exploited working classes... but we know better. The workers are money rats, the capitalists are money cats, and we are all dancing to the tune of Moneytoxosis.
Meme or virus?
It's tempting to compare a meme with a virus. In some ways they are the same, for example, they both exist independently of their hosts, depending on infecting suitable hosts to reproduce and disseminate. In that sense they are parasites because they make use of their host's (human or non-human) physical or mental processes for their own transmission. Some people see memes as “viruses of the mind”, but I disagree, a virus, is antagonistic, whereas memes can be considered the building blocks of human culture.
Memes are comparable to genes in that they are fully functioning units, they create their own momentum, they reproduce and mutate in the process. On the other hand, the money virus is barely recognisable outside of the memes it has hijacked. Economic, political and even moral ideas have been infected with moneytoxosis in such a way that it becomes almost impossible to imagine those memes without “money” at their heart. I hope that during this series of essays we will be able to make a start at separating out the virus from the meme.
Why is it that I describe money as a virus, “moneytoxosis”, but not politics or religion? For one thing, politics and religion are not simply one idea, one meme, but lots of memes. For example “god loves you”, “children are a gift from god”, “my god is more powerful than yours”. Political memes are born from concepts such as the nature of freedom, power, equality, justice, democracy, and authority.
Moneytoxosis, on the other hand, works behind the scenes infecting even the best intentions and mutating harmless and benevolent memes, such as “love thy neighbour” into “keeping up with the Joneses”. Why is it that our religions of peace permit, and sometimes even encourage, war? Our politicians talk about freedom and equality whilst building ever more prisons and passing ever more restrictive legislation?
The virus has taken root in the unconscious mind, the operating system, or maybe even more frighteningly, the kernel of the OS. The kernel is a program that constitutes the central core of an operating system. It has complete control over everything that occurs in the system!
What I'm trying to say here is that I believe that the money virus, moneytoxosis, is embedded deep within the psyche and controls many of our interactions. Those of us who are infected, and that includes most of the human population of the planet, are so controlled by this virus that we don't even realise it. If we return for a moment to my example of toxoplasmosis, I'm quite sure that neither the rats nor the cats are aware of having the virus because their actions are governed by their intrinsic motivation. In the case of rats, their brains are re-wired to make them feel sexy when they should feel fear when sensing the presence of a cat. As to the cats' behaviour they are just doing what they have evolved to do: chase and kill rodents.
Moneytoxosis v money
When I talk about this with acquaintances they always insist that they can't be infected because they identify the virus with the substance, that is, cash. So they think, “well, I haven't got any money, so I can't be infected”. Not true, as I pointed out earlier with the analogy with toxoplasmosis, we poor people are the rats, attracted by the lights and the smell of commerce, we can't wait to offer up our meagre supply of cash we have worked so hard to scrape together, we offer it up to the big fat cats in their cathedrals of commerce so they can stash it away in some kind of electronic storage centre where it can, and will, multiply endlessly. As money rats, we believe we are satisfying some more basic urge: to buy goods that will make our lives more comfortable or tasty, fatty, sugary food products that will satisfy a craving... or some cheap garment that will increase our sex appeal. These are basic needs, we all need food and we all need to reproduce and we all need a comfortable home to live in, don't we?
The money cats on the other hand crave status, power and independence. For them the profit motive is not about money but about “esteem needs” - number four on Maslow's hierarchy of needs:
1. Biological and Physiological needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.
2. Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, limits, stability, etc.
3. Social Needs - Belongingness and Love, - work group, family, affection, relationships, etc.
4. Esteem needs - self-esteem, achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.
5. Cognitive needs - knowledge, meaning, etc.
6. Aesthetic needs - appreciation and search for beauty, balance, form, etc.
7. Self-Actualization needs - realizing personal potential, self-fulfilment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.
8. Transcendence needs - helping others to achieve self actualization.
Abraham Maslow was a humanist psychologist who first introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”. This hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to fulfil basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs.
Despite the fact that Maslow did no experiments to support his theory, research from neuroscience and evolutionary biology support many of Maslow's claims. Although research by the University of Illinois showed that people from cultures all over the world report that self-actualization and social needs are important even when many of the most basic needs are unfulfilled. Maybe this accounts for the lack of profit motive amongst the unemployed.
Black boxes, where big money is made.
Most trading these days does not take place in places like the New York or the London Stock Exchange. Instead it takes place in vast electronic trading facilities housing rows of computer servers. Billions of dollars are invested in faster, smarter computers, and in the fastest possible connections. Traders pay enormous fees to “co-locate” their servers as near as possible to the world's stock exchanges. Connected to these servers are the robot trading firms that use computer algorithms to exploit the complex, automated trading patterns to make a profit by rapid buying and selling.
Different traders use different strategies to identify trading opportunities and react to them faster than anyone else, when a trade starts to become profitable the trading system algorithm will take care of routing the orders to the broker faster and more conveniently by eliminating human involvement.
“TradeBullet routes the orders to your broker within fractions of a second. And in today's competitive markets, seconds can mean the difference between a winning trade and a losing trade.” - tradebullet.com
While most trading software programs offer a database that can store quotes data, QuantShare allows you to create any number of historical and intraday databases. You can store any data in these databases (Call-Put ratios, News, Dividend & Split data, Short Selling data, Fundamental data, Insiders data...) , and use this data in charting, analysis, backtesting… - www.quantshare.com/
Few people actually understand what is happening inside these “black boxes”. Soon the world's financial markets will be controlled by computer software, designed to make the highest profits in the fastest time. In other words moneytoxosis has moved from deep within the human psyche into a barely more comprehensible environment in the computer servers of the world's financial centres.
The life cycle of the money virus starts by hijacking the unconscious desires of human beings, then moving into the cash registers of the supermarkets and shopping malls as those desires for material goods are satisfied.
The profits from these trades eventually take on an electronic life, multiplying many thousands of time a second inside vast computer servers.
The money virus has now evolved from hijacking carbon based organic life to silicon based electronic life. In other words, it started off its life as electrical signals in the brain but eventually multiplies as electronic signals in the computer systems. Quantum life forms?
What’s Possible When Brains and Computers Work Together?
We're electromagnetic beings. Quantum particles, quarks etc, don't/can't obey the same laws of physics that we do. The quantum world, with its many universes, only exists on a sub-atomic level. Although all possibilities are played out by these particles, they average out to the “physical”, ie obeying the laws of physics, universe we live in. In other words, on a macro level, this is it. This is the only possible universe that can exist, instead “quantum life” would be a very strange form of life existing in all possible states and in dimensions and universes where everything is possible, indeed, everything is compulsory. We poor unfortunate mortals are commended to live and die constrained by the three dimensions of space (with some possibility to move around within them) and one dimension of time which hurtles forward regardless of the psycholinguistic restraints we try to impose on it, i.e. by recording our histories in memory and projecting our dreams into the “future” - a place we will never visit because, unlike the quantum particles that are the building blocks of our electromagnetic universe, we must live in an eternal present until we die. Money, as a virus, will not disappear with human beings; as long as there are still some electronic or quantum storage devices/processors, money will live on - that's what I mean by “quantum life”. Driven by the needs to make money and war, we have invented the perfect host for moneytoxosis. Consider: the internet is almost indestructible; power can come directly from sunlight; energy requirements of processors is always diminishing; with 3d printers and robot assembly lines... who needs a human?
"Understanding the performance capabilities that could be achieved by an efficient union between brains and machines is a central theme of Coleman’s research and he envisions endless applications in areas such as military operations, gaming, education and consumer electronics". -- http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/2011_08coleman.asp
“The brain-machine interface paradigm is very exciting and I think it need not be limited to thinking about prosthetics or people with some type of motor deficit,” said Coleman. “I think taking the lens of the human and computer interacting, and if you could evolve a very nice coupling that is remarkably natural and almost ubiquitous, I think there are applications that we haven’t even imagined. That is what really fascinates me – really the coupling between the biological system and the computer system.” -- Professor Todd Coleman, Department of Bioengineering, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
All very exciting and frightening stuff, but it still doesn't answer the question of “what to do about the moneytoxosis virus?”
I'll concentrate on that in the next, and probably final, part of this essay.
© June 2013 no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author
MONEYTOXOSIS III
This is the age of information. Stone age, bronze age, iron age, industrial age, information age. Except the information age didn’t start with the invention of information technology. The information age started with the big bang.
There is a multiverse of information. We are living in, we are part of, and we have inside us, an infinite number of universes. The multiverse, whether internal or external, subjective or objective, is a universe of information. By information I mean “a change in state”. Our bodies don’t acknowledge the velocity at which we are travelling until we accelerate or decelerate. A flashing light catches our attention. Vibrations in the air are perceived as sounds, sometime pleasant - we call that music, sometimes unpleasant and we call that noise. But it’s the changing state that tells us something, a static quantity is simply data, a dynamic quantity can be organised by our senses and our reason as information.
The universe is dynamic. It flows, expands, contracts explodes, shrinks, there is entropy and there is life. Every living being struggles between its natural urgency to die and give up its energy and its genetic program to live long enough to pass on its, mutated, genes. By “life” I mean the whole process of exchanging information by consuming, transforming and passing on to other living entities or “hatch, match and despatch”.
Every particle of matter, every non particle of anti-matter is a vibration of information.
We are biological, organic machines, that have evolved to exchange information. Whether in the form of genes or memes, our function is to gather, create and distribute information in one form or another.
DO THE MATHS
The only objective truth in our universe is mathematics. Whereas the laws of physics can change under extreme conditions in different parts of the universe, only mathematics is true wherever and whenever you are in space-time. Even if numbers themselves have no physical existence, mathematics describes the physical universe in a way that is always true. Numbers represent quantities. Even negative quantities. Numbers are the building blocks of maths. If maths is the language, then numbers are the alphabet. If mathematics were an animal, then numbers would be its genes.
“Space-time” is the history of the entire universe, containing every event that ever happens, happened or is going to happen. Instead the “universe” is everything that exists within space-time at any given moment. The universe evolves, but space-time is.
Our internal universe is an ever shifting kaleidoscope of multiverses that both filter external stimuli and create reality.
“What we recognize as our full-blown conscious life, using ‘conscious’ in its common vernacular sense, is actually a complex, multi-layered dialogue between the quantum aspect (the ground state) and a whole symphony of interactions that cause patterns to develop in the ground state - interactions with our computing facilities in our cerebral cortex, with our instinctual and emotional capabilities in the primitive forebrain, with our appetites and our twitches (or pains), with a host of activities going on in the body, and to some extent with the conscious lives of other people and creatures. It is the quality of play by the various members of this symphony which ultimately determines the overall quality and content of the music played - our conscious life.” - from “The Quantum Self” by Danah Zohar
Both internal and external realities result from an interplay of numbers. Our consciousness is a god. It creates its own unique habitat, giving us an unpredictable but objective world that combines an “out there” of gravity, energy and time with an “in here” of memories, thoughts and apparent free will which gives us a modicum of control over ourselves and the external world which we think we inhabit.
There is no real distinction between “in here” and “out there”. It's all just an interplay of energy. Energy, information, numbers. So what is human life? A self-aware bundle of energy that distinguishes itself from its surroundings in an arbitrary way in order to take the exchange of information to another level.
“Every person lives in different umwelt (emic reality - see below) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel.” - from “Quantum Psychology” by Robert Anton Wilson
“It's so simple it sounds idiotic. For a seer, men are luminous beings. Our luminosity is made up of that portion of the Eagle's emanations (see below) which is encased in our egg-like cocoon. That particular portion, that handful of emanations that is encased, is what makes us men. To perceive is to match the emanations contained inside our cocoon with those that are outside” - from “The Fire from Within” by Carlos Castaneda
Notes:
(1) “Umwelt” - The outer world as perceived by organisms within it.
(2)“Emic Reality” - the unified field made up of thoughts, feelings, and apparent sense impressions that organize our experiences into meaningful patterns.
(3)“The Eagle” is a name given to the “indescribable force” that permeates reality.
The human mind is “what the brain does”. The brain gathers data, organises it and generates new information. Human beings have evolved to spread ideas, “memes”, that multiply even more quickly than bacteria and evolve in ever more unpredictable ways.
THE ART OF NOISE
According to some psychologists and neuro-scientists, our ability to make choices, what we think of as “free will”, may well be the product of random fluctuations in the brain’s background electrical noise - in other words, random fluctuations in the electrical signals that are transmitted from one neuron to the next as part of the processes that the mind is responsible for (language, thought, memory etc) that originate in the brain’s electro-chemical activity. Fluctuations in background noise can determine the decisions to act before the person is presented with a choice of actions. It may be that conscious volition is exercised in the form of a veto or “free won't”. This may account for our experience of suppressing inappropriate impulse actions, such as stealing a policeman’s helmet.
“Bertie Wooster: Oh, what ho, Sir Watkyn!
Sir Watkyn Bassett: Kindly do not address me in that familiar way, Wooster. I happen to know that once again you've yielded to the awful temptation to steal a policeman's helmet!” - from The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
So although it is possible that conciousness plays no part in the instigation of volitional acts, it has a part to play in suppressing or withholding acts instigated by the unconscious. So if our brain is preparing to act before we know we are going to act, how do we make a conscious decision to act? It may be that “brain noise” might actually create “free will” by inserting a random effect that allows us to be freed from simple cause and effect. “Cause and effect” are therefore simply the way our reasoning facilities arrange events.
Just as our organic cellular structure can and is constantly threatened by bacteria and viruses, so is our non-organic network of information exchange. Just as our digital electronic systems are prone to viruses that can compromise their functioning even up to the point of causing fatal errors, so is “wetware” (the neural networks of the brain), and the information that we store in it, also be compromised by a “mimetic virus”.
Numbers are not alive but inhabit our worlds on every level. To most human beings the most attractive numbers are those that represent power. And what is more powerful for a human than money? Money represents everything both good and bad about our world. In some ways money could be compared to the Norse god Loki, “the doer of good and the doer of evil”. Our fate is closely tied to our accumulation and consumption of money.
But these concepts “good” and “evil” are pretty subjective. What was good for the “Third Reich” was evil for the rest of the “free world”. In reality money is simply a means to an end, money, like number, represents quantity. And like number it doesn't have a point of view. It doesn't have malice or compassion.
Like Loki, it can't be trusted, it can't be expected to “work for the common good”. It's not evil. It's not saintly. Communists and capitalists, billionaires and vagabonds have a love-hate relationship with this virus never realising that “money” is just a virus that infects our memes with the sole end of reducing all life to pure numbers. And we'd better wake up to this fact or we as a species will be entropy, all our information and energy sucked out of us and transformed into ever increasing numbers in some alien supercomputer bank account on a frozen wasteland that once was planet Earth.
I call this viral infection “moneytoxosis” and if you're reading this then chances are you've already read the first two chapters in which I explain what the money virus is and how it works.
Human beings and other apes evolved from a common primate ancestor. The split from chimpanzees, bonobo etc. happened about 4 million years ago. Homo sapiens arrived on the scene a few hundred thousand years ago and “homo economicus”, our species, a few thousand years ago.
Human beings have been “civilised” - that is “city dwellers” since 4000 BC. Why did people decide to live in vast collections of dwellings? Conurbations of disease, dirt, distrust and general stinkyness?
ARE WE NOT MEN?
Why we descended from the trees and eventually came to live in caves is generally explained by evolutionary scientists as a response to our changing environment and the climate, which for a period became almost too hot for our ancestors so they resorted to living very close to, and at least for part of their time, in water. This aquatic period explains many differences there are between “men” and “apes”.
There are lots of reasons why people started living together in cities. Before cities there were villages and small towns that were close to or surrounded by fields and woodlands that provided food, fuel and the essentials. The modern equivalent would be the city centre, surrounded by shops, bars, petrol stations, schools, hospitals... all that stuff we need for survival. Living in cities has detached us from our “natural environment” and put us on a collision course that is leading us so near to wiping out almost everything that lives on this planet. We can see the problem . . . or can we?
From the perspective of the universe as “information soup” glued together by reason that makes sense of it all, then who cares? Living beings are just information exchangers; humans are witnesses to this, without consciousness then “information” is simply a changing state, a flicker, a vibration. Without us and other similar beings that may or may not exist in the “data broth” that is the space-time continuum we call home, there is no information. The probability of existence collapses.
The universe only exists because it can. And we, our conscious, and unconscious, perceptions are here to prove it. “I think, therefore I am”. We are here, therefore “here” exists. No “god”, no “creator”, only consciousness.
Viruses threaten this. The money virus hijacks living beings, more precisely “memes”, the building blocks of our culture, our humanity, and reproduces in our electronic systems.
So we need a vaccine.
Like all viruses, I believe, there is always a vaccine. Vaccines are generally made from the virus itself. The idea being that a small dose of the virus will wake up and prepare the body's immune system so that if and when a full blown infection threatens, the body is ready to fight off the intruders. Vaccines are made by taking a little of the virus and injecting it into the organism and allowing the organism's own immune system to create anti-bodies. Now here is the not-so-secret secret to freedom. Freedom from being manipulated by a virus that will reduce all human civilization to self replicating numbers on some electronic system somewhere “out there”. Inject everyone with the vaccine. In other words give everyone a small, but useful, guaranteed income.
There is a multiverse of information. We are living in, we are part of, and we have inside us, an infinite number of universes. The multiverse, whether internal or external, subjective or objective, is a universe of information. By information I mean “a change in state”. Our bodies don’t acknowledge the velocity at which we are travelling until we accelerate or decelerate. A flashing light catches our attention. Vibrations in the air are perceived as sounds, sometime pleasant - we call that music, sometimes unpleasant and we call that noise. But it’s the changing state that tells us something, a static quantity is simply data, a dynamic quantity can be organised by our senses and our reason as information.
The universe is dynamic. It flows, expands, contracts explodes, shrinks, there is entropy and there is life. Every living being struggles between its natural urgency to die and give up its energy and its genetic program to live long enough to pass on its, mutated, genes. By “life” I mean the whole process of exchanging information by consuming, transforming and passing on to other living entities or “hatch, match and despatch”.
Every particle of matter, every non particle of anti-matter is a vibration of information.
We are biological, organic machines, that have evolved to exchange information. Whether in the form of genes or memes, our function is to gather, create and distribute information in one form or another.
DO THE MATHS
The only objective truth in our universe is mathematics. Whereas the laws of physics can change under extreme conditions in different parts of the universe, only mathematics is true wherever and whenever you are in space-time. Even if numbers themselves have no physical existence, mathematics describes the physical universe in a way that is always true. Numbers represent quantities. Even negative quantities. Numbers are the building blocks of maths. If maths is the language, then numbers are the alphabet. If mathematics were an animal, then numbers would be its genes.
“Space-time” is the history of the entire universe, containing every event that ever happens, happened or is going to happen. Instead the “universe” is everything that exists within space-time at any given moment. The universe evolves, but space-time is.
Our internal universe is an ever shifting kaleidoscope of multiverses that both filter external stimuli and create reality.
“What we recognize as our full-blown conscious life, using ‘conscious’ in its common vernacular sense, is actually a complex, multi-layered dialogue between the quantum aspect (the ground state) and a whole symphony of interactions that cause patterns to develop in the ground state - interactions with our computing facilities in our cerebral cortex, with our instinctual and emotional capabilities in the primitive forebrain, with our appetites and our twitches (or pains), with a host of activities going on in the body, and to some extent with the conscious lives of other people and creatures. It is the quality of play by the various members of this symphony which ultimately determines the overall quality and content of the music played - our conscious life.” - from “The Quantum Self” by Danah Zohar
Both internal and external realities result from an interplay of numbers. Our consciousness is a god. It creates its own unique habitat, giving us an unpredictable but objective world that combines an “out there” of gravity, energy and time with an “in here” of memories, thoughts and apparent free will which gives us a modicum of control over ourselves and the external world which we think we inhabit.
There is no real distinction between “in here” and “out there”. It's all just an interplay of energy. Energy, information, numbers. So what is human life? A self-aware bundle of energy that distinguishes itself from its surroundings in an arbitrary way in order to take the exchange of information to another level.
“Every person lives in different umwelt (emic reality - see below) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel.” - from “Quantum Psychology” by Robert Anton Wilson
“It's so simple it sounds idiotic. For a seer, men are luminous beings. Our luminosity is made up of that portion of the Eagle's emanations (see below) which is encased in our egg-like cocoon. That particular portion, that handful of emanations that is encased, is what makes us men. To perceive is to match the emanations contained inside our cocoon with those that are outside” - from “The Fire from Within” by Carlos Castaneda
Notes:
(1) “Umwelt” - The outer world as perceived by organisms within it.
(2)“Emic Reality” - the unified field made up of thoughts, feelings, and apparent sense impressions that organize our experiences into meaningful patterns.
(3)“The Eagle” is a name given to the “indescribable force” that permeates reality.
The human mind is “what the brain does”. The brain gathers data, organises it and generates new information. Human beings have evolved to spread ideas, “memes”, that multiply even more quickly than bacteria and evolve in ever more unpredictable ways.
THE ART OF NOISE
According to some psychologists and neuro-scientists, our ability to make choices, what we think of as “free will”, may well be the product of random fluctuations in the brain’s background electrical noise - in other words, random fluctuations in the electrical signals that are transmitted from one neuron to the next as part of the processes that the mind is responsible for (language, thought, memory etc) that originate in the brain’s electro-chemical activity. Fluctuations in background noise can determine the decisions to act before the person is presented with a choice of actions. It may be that conscious volition is exercised in the form of a veto or “free won't”. This may account for our experience of suppressing inappropriate impulse actions, such as stealing a policeman’s helmet.
“Bertie Wooster: Oh, what ho, Sir Watkyn!
Sir Watkyn Bassett: Kindly do not address me in that familiar way, Wooster. I happen to know that once again you've yielded to the awful temptation to steal a policeman's helmet!” - from The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
So although it is possible that conciousness plays no part in the instigation of volitional acts, it has a part to play in suppressing or withholding acts instigated by the unconscious. So if our brain is preparing to act before we know we are going to act, how do we make a conscious decision to act? It may be that “brain noise” might actually create “free will” by inserting a random effect that allows us to be freed from simple cause and effect. “Cause and effect” are therefore simply the way our reasoning facilities arrange events.
Just as our organic cellular structure can and is constantly threatened by bacteria and viruses, so is our non-organic network of information exchange. Just as our digital electronic systems are prone to viruses that can compromise their functioning even up to the point of causing fatal errors, so is “wetware” (the neural networks of the brain), and the information that we store in it, also be compromised by a “mimetic virus”.
Numbers are not alive but inhabit our worlds on every level. To most human beings the most attractive numbers are those that represent power. And what is more powerful for a human than money? Money represents everything both good and bad about our world. In some ways money could be compared to the Norse god Loki, “the doer of good and the doer of evil”. Our fate is closely tied to our accumulation and consumption of money.
But these concepts “good” and “evil” are pretty subjective. What was good for the “Third Reich” was evil for the rest of the “free world”. In reality money is simply a means to an end, money, like number, represents quantity. And like number it doesn't have a point of view. It doesn't have malice or compassion.
Like Loki, it can't be trusted, it can't be expected to “work for the common good”. It's not evil. It's not saintly. Communists and capitalists, billionaires and vagabonds have a love-hate relationship with this virus never realising that “money” is just a virus that infects our memes with the sole end of reducing all life to pure numbers. And we'd better wake up to this fact or we as a species will be entropy, all our information and energy sucked out of us and transformed into ever increasing numbers in some alien supercomputer bank account on a frozen wasteland that once was planet Earth.
I call this viral infection “moneytoxosis” and if you're reading this then chances are you've already read the first two chapters in which I explain what the money virus is and how it works.
Human beings and other apes evolved from a common primate ancestor. The split from chimpanzees, bonobo etc. happened about 4 million years ago. Homo sapiens arrived on the scene a few hundred thousand years ago and “homo economicus”, our species, a few thousand years ago.
Human beings have been “civilised” - that is “city dwellers” since 4000 BC. Why did people decide to live in vast collections of dwellings? Conurbations of disease, dirt, distrust and general stinkyness?
ARE WE NOT MEN?
Why we descended from the trees and eventually came to live in caves is generally explained by evolutionary scientists as a response to our changing environment and the climate, which for a period became almost too hot for our ancestors so they resorted to living very close to, and at least for part of their time, in water. This aquatic period explains many differences there are between “men” and “apes”.
There are lots of reasons why people started living together in cities. Before cities there were villages and small towns that were close to or surrounded by fields and woodlands that provided food, fuel and the essentials. The modern equivalent would be the city centre, surrounded by shops, bars, petrol stations, schools, hospitals... all that stuff we need for survival. Living in cities has detached us from our “natural environment” and put us on a collision course that is leading us so near to wiping out almost everything that lives on this planet. We can see the problem . . . or can we?
From the perspective of the universe as “information soup” glued together by reason that makes sense of it all, then who cares? Living beings are just information exchangers; humans are witnesses to this, without consciousness then “information” is simply a changing state, a flicker, a vibration. Without us and other similar beings that may or may not exist in the “data broth” that is the space-time continuum we call home, there is no information. The probability of existence collapses.
The universe only exists because it can. And we, our conscious, and unconscious, perceptions are here to prove it. “I think, therefore I am”. We are here, therefore “here” exists. No “god”, no “creator”, only consciousness.
Viruses threaten this. The money virus hijacks living beings, more precisely “memes”, the building blocks of our culture, our humanity, and reproduces in our electronic systems.
So we need a vaccine.
Like all viruses, I believe, there is always a vaccine. Vaccines are generally made from the virus itself. The idea being that a small dose of the virus will wake up and prepare the body's immune system so that if and when a full blown infection threatens, the body is ready to fight off the intruders. Vaccines are made by taking a little of the virus and injecting it into the organism and allowing the organism's own immune system to create anti-bodies. Now here is the not-so-secret secret to freedom. Freedom from being manipulated by a virus that will reduce all human civilization to self replicating numbers on some electronic system somewhere “out there”. Inject everyone with the vaccine. In other words give everyone a small, but useful, guaranteed income.
MONEYFIX
So what is the vaccine against moneytoxosis? Simple. A small, but effective, regular income. Sometimes known as “basic income” or “citizen’s income”. A pension for all. Anyone who remembers “Just William” will probably remember William’s campaign for “pensions for boys”!
Why not? It could be argued that by giving everyone an income that allows them to live without having to work, you would be encouraging laziness, because we need an incentive to go to work. The problem with that argument is that if it were true we’d only do the bare minimum that allows us to eat, drink and pay the bills. Quite clearly this is not the case.
An income that allows each and everyone of us to live in dignity does not dis-incentivise us from working, quite probably it would encourage us to work.
A basic income is simply the starting point, just because you can live without going to work, it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want to earn more than the basic income. There’s no reason to assume that people prefer to stay in bed rather than do something with their time.
Money is often seen as a reward for good behaviour, an incentive for the “lazy” and “feckless” poor to work hard and become good citizen consumers. But as I have shown in these pages, money is a virus, it has no “ethics”, nor does it seek to reward or penalise human behaviour. As a virus it’s a mechanism that multiplies itself by hijacking our “memes” and using them to transmit itself from the poor “moneyrats” to the rich “moneycats”. There’s no moral judgement involved, just as a flu virus doesn’t choose to infect the poor because they are bad people, if it favours the poor then that’s because they can’t afford a decent diet or the right kind of education that would help them choose a healthier lifestyle.
There will be objections to this simple concept. Let the objectors object. There must be a debate. The idea is not new, it's called a “citizen's income”. There are variations in the details but the concept is that by giving everyone an income you free the individual's creativity. People should be able to live their lives without fear. Fear of poverty, which is a motivator, but not a positive one.
Imagine being able to choose how to organise your life according to your emotional and creative needs, instead of living under the constraint of having to make money.
Most people have little or no choice about the job they do and where and when they work. We are used to believing the lie that we should be a cog in the machine because without the machine we all starve. The profit motive is given the credit for innovation, despite the fact that the science that underpins our technology has not been discovered for profit or greed but curiosity.
A citizen’s income provides people with a financial base which allows them to pursue an activity that satisfies them, even if it is poorly paid, or they can dedicate their time to earning as much as possible as they would be doing without the citizen’s income.
How would it be paid for? This will addressed in part 4.....
