I’m not sure living in the city off handouts, charity, and free tax payer provided facilities exactly promotes his no money philosophy. His life relies on the things he despises, if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death.
Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans
I've heard the nobility of homelessness and joblessness expressed as an ethos countless times by people who wouldn't care for the work of living off-grid. I happen to work in a town with some of the highest taxes in the country that's also one of the most attractive places for indigent campers. The park across from where I live has become a tent city. I get the pleasure of paying for its "upkeep" while also having to step over needles and human waste every day. A natural extension of the philosophy that people who work for a living are amoral slaves, and that only the indigent are noble is, of course, that it's permissible to steal anything any worker drone has. When I got to the part in this article about his glee at erecting tent cities I really became disgusted. What's beautiful about it? It produces nothing of lasting value. It erodes the physical and social landscape. At best as a society itself, it's a drum circle, getting high, talking about the universe without doing anything much, and escaping. What future is there for anyone who wants all the parks filled with tent cities?
The one thing you can't do without money, without an economy, is take care of anyone else. You can give them things that other people gave you - castaways of castaways. But you can't produce anything new to help anyone. So what claims to be cooperative and egalitarian is really just parasitic.
Maybe it's not surprising that the largest effort made on behalf of parasitism is its attempt to disguise itself as something moral.
No, I think he's missing out on the best part of life - building creative things for others to enjoy and to improve their lives. And elevating the total refusal to add an iota of value to the world from your own existence into a form of sainthood is the apogee of lazy Gen Z culture, isn't it? I pity the guy, as any sane person should, but I also think it's grotesque that hangers-on are attracted to his lame opinions.
Did you read the article? He wrote and distributed multiple books, and is also coding some kind of video game on a flash drive with whatever computers he has access to. I would wager he's building more creative things for others to enjoy than most people who have jobs, and I say this as someone who would not give this man any money or food.
He's entitled to point out how he thinks tax he is paying is being wasted. Deriving multiple traits from this seems irrational. Especially given its based on a paragraph or two of text.
He also has an unhealthy relationship with money. Withholding money from being spent is immoral because that money is needed to pay debts and saving money causes unemployment. Spending all the money you get is moral. Of course you are allowed to spend your money on stocks and bonds to maintain real savings.
It's a pretty natural conclusion from many economics teachings that will highlight money only has value in the middle of a transaction and is virtually ethereal while sitting in any account.
It reduces the multiplier on money supply, which can be harmful in aggregate if it is sufficient to create a deflationary monetary environment. Given how little impact a single earner who isn't Jeff Bezos can make, or even Bezos himself in the face of offsets from central banks, I highly doubt any individual's savings efforts are doing any harm in practice.
You may as well say that taking any water out of the ocean is immoral because if all water was removed, the fish would die.
If you accept that living exclusively off the handouts of others is immoral, then saving money of course is not inherently immoral. It helps you not do that.
You're talking to someone who lived on the road for 10+ years and spent plenty of time in music circles on beaches discussing the nature of the universe. All of which came to very little. I don't work and earn to chase a new car. I do it to give my life meaning and to afford a good future for myself and my family. And yeah, I have every right to look down at the people who think they're being so smart by "not getting in that game". Even on the road, I always worked. I didn't do drugs regularly. And I never begged. I wasn't a parasite, like so many. Often, other travelers would look down on me for that. Where are they now? Lying in ditches, muttering to themselves.
In 99.99% of the cases, they weren't homeless by choice, or ideology.
But yes--most of them thought they were there by choice.
It must be some ego defense mechanism?
For some reason a disproportionate amount were former Programmers? I knew Jim Fox. He was a cocreator of Wordstar, but got zero credit. I watched him slip from employment to wearing a Penguin outfit playing a ukleee begging for change. We used to talk tech, and he would notice someone walking towards us. He would jump out, and do his dance. He was always positive. He once got a job. He went to Goodwill to buy a suit. (He thought he needed a suit for a startup.) He was fired a few days in. That whole cultural fit. He always used to tell me, I just hope I don't die of pneumonia in an alley. Well he didn't get his wish. He died homeless.
There is a saying amoung homeless, and it's this, "Homeless for a year, homeless for life."
Meaning the mind is gone after living like they do. I have watched our local police departments make there guys life more miserable for 30 years.
I'm glad you weren't an entrenched homeless person.
The homeless we have need help. Most are not their by choice if you get them to let their guard down.
I do have some hope in CA. The government might actually do something besides jaw boning about what needs to be done.
Besides long term shelter, I hear talk of safe places to park, and sleep, without getting a ticket, or worse?
Homeless in Dunphy Park, got tickets for not obeying a rule. The ticket was $500. The issuing officer told the IJ, fee is high because we know they won't ever pay it.
I just threw up my hands.
How is issuing a ticket that can eventually turn into a warrant helping out anyone?
I done. I'm starting to get angry. Homelessness has always been a sore spot for myself.
This is a thoughtful answer. I should be clear that I draw a bright distinction between young traveling punks sleeping rough (often by choice) and people who are long-term homeless not by choice. I knew a lot of the former, but only encountered some of the latter as the graybeards in mostly young communities. And I'd say most of them still had some choice, they just didn't see a reason to go back to normal society.
I'm just objecting to the glorification of homelessness as an ethos, and the diminution of people who work as a consequence. I'm not saying the ethos is responsible for all or even most homelessness. It can, and does, draw some intelligent people into making really bad decisions, though.
I'd also add that I've known many people living rough who were happy to have work, and worked hard when they could. And I don't include them in any of what I'm saying about the ethics of surviving on other people's charity, because they indeed did not wish to.
It is realy easy to look down on people for all kinds of reasons. It is much harder to empathize with the challenges and point of views that are alien to your perspective.
Our society needs more people willing to take on that challenge instead of allowing their own insecurities to drive them into contempt.
There's a difference between being empathetic to those that have problems and need help and those that choose knowingly to opt out of the surface level of the system while still receiving its benefits.
While GP comment may be painting groups with an overly broad brush, I'm not sure I see any fault with the criticism of the specific type of person they describe, which does exist, even if it may not be all of that group (or even a sizable minority).
Any policy that is followed, such as "help and show empathy for those less fortunate" should be actually examined and understood, not just blindly applied. People that wish to participate in society but have fallen on hard times deserve our sympathy and help. People that have health problems that cause their situation deserve our sympathy and help. People that decide to opt out of most of our society and so remove themselves from most of the society deserve our respect, or at least our ambivalence. People that say they want to opt out of society but really just don't want to give anything to society (whether that's time, effort, restraint, whatever) but want to get some benefit of society deserve our scorn.
Far too many people get stuck following the actions of an ideology rather than the precepts. Not everyone that appears homeless is "less fortunate" in their own eyes, and giving to them is not necessarily helping in a way that the precept of helping those less fortunate espouses, but instead a way to trick yourself into thinking you are doing something good without having to put thought into whether you actually are.
In general, we could all do with a lot more introspection as to what our actions are actually doing and whether they serve the purpose we think they are. As a side benefit, a lot of bullshit from both sides of the political spectrum wouldn't survive the light of day some critical thought brings.
You seem to be aligning me with one side or the other. I think my criticism applies equally to the people who look down on people for particpating in the system as to those who call them parasites.
Critical rational thought can take you all sorts of violent and negative places if you don't make an effort to pair it with empathy and a genuine effort to understand the perspectives of those you are tempted to despise.
Giving in to "rational" dehumanization and hatred is not going to actually help anything and will probably make things worse.
> You seem to be aligning me with one side or the other.
I'm not sure why you think that, or even what the "sides" are in this case. I thought your response seemed a bit canned, so used it as a jumping point to talk about how I think a bit more critical thinking is good in some of these cases.
And critical it the operative word, not necessarily rational (as many seem to interpret it at least, to me rationalism without accounting for how it affects the human condition is somewhat worthless). The only reason critical thought would take you to violent and negative places is if you're doing it wrong. Lack of critical thinking leads to violence and negative places far more often from what I've seen.
> Giving in to "rational" dehumanization and hatred is not going to actually help anything and will probably make things worse.
This isn't about dehumanization. It's about not blandly lumping people together without forethought. That works for not assuming all homeless are drug addicts and criminals as well as it does for not assuming they're all completely upstanding citizens that for the quick right type of help could be your neighbor. They are an amalgamation of many people in many circumstances, and we should remember that and consider that.
If you are going to split hairs between "rational thought" and "critical thought", you'll have to elaborate because the two seem to be pretty much synonymous.
Generally, anytime you find yourself looking down with scorn on something, that is a great indication that there probably is something you don't understand and an attitude of contempt certainly won't help you figure out what that is.
> If you are going to split hairs between "rational thought" and "critical thought", you'll have to elaborate because the two seem to be pretty much synonymous.
I thought my aside about "rationalism" did that. For some people "rational" is loaded, and since you brought it up, I wanted to address it somehow. Whether true or not, some people equate rational with rationalism, and rationalism with not accounting for feelings and how people are in reality.
> Generally, anytime you find yourself looking down with scorn on something, that is a great indication that there probably is something you don't understand and an attitude of contempt certainly won't help you figure out what that is.
I agree in the general sense. But the only way that can be true in every sense is if nobody ever deserves scorn, and I think we can agree there are plenty of people that do deserve it because of their actions, from the extreme such as rapists and murderers to the mundane such as narcissists that they deserve whatever good fortune they can find or take, regardless of impact on others.
If you agree there are people worth scorning, the question in not whether "generally" this is a time or not, but given the specific subgroup in question has been described as those that decide they don't want to contribute to society and state that as the reason to live mostly outside it, but then want to receive the benefits of society, deserve that scorn. That is, to be clear, and as has been stated previously a few times, not all homeless people, but specifically those mentioned by the original commenter.
If you want to make a case that those people are misunderstood and perhaps their reasoning is X, Y or Z, feel free to do so, and I'll consider it. If you just want to defend them because they're part of a larger group you think deserves help, or because you feel compelled to defend them on principle, I ask you what purpose that serves? Critically thinking about the subject and coming to a better understanding is laudable, and defending something to cause some critical thought is as well, but I think we're beyond the point you could say no critical thought is being given to this, so unless you have actual points to add about this subject, I'm not sure what merit is left in calling out negative assessments as inherently bad or based only on not understanding.
Another way of looking at this is that if I had said serial rapists deserve our scorn, would you say that I'm just not understanding the situation or the people in question? If not, then that's an example of when scorn is sometimes acceptable, and we're left with whether the subject in question is actually deserving of it. In this case, you aren't providing any evidence one way or the other, just making broad assertions about thinking.
I don't despise, dehuminize, wish violence upon, or lack empathy for crusty street kids, because I can fully relate to them. And when I was one - or at least traveled as one - I was one of the few who bore no ill-will toward the people who chose to have cars and homes and careers and children. When I was 22 I thought the careerists had a limited view of the world: I still do. I just realize now that the punkabestia have a limited view, too. As you say, no one should be blinded by their social status into dehumanizing anyone else. But by the same token, it's possible to arrive at the conclusion that some things lead to objectively less miserable personal and social outcomes than others, based on experience, without apologizing to people who are still blinkered by certain views.
I'm talking about an individual's relationship to society, not a born condition. It's a choice. This particular guy made it his life's mission to act in a parasitic fashion. No one's dehumanizing him, they're lionizing him. He's degraded himself more than any external characterization of him could do justice to. The word fits.
>You're talking to someone who lived on the road for 10+ years
>I have every right
>I always worked. I didn't do drugs regularly. And I never begged. I wasn't a parasite, like so many
>Where are they now? Lying in ditches, muttering to themselves.
Dude, you're a narcissist. You're free to change your values over time but no one else is? Maybe the next person squatting in your town square is a former you.
Once again, people have different values. Maybe that leads them to your hypothetical ditch, maybe it gives them motivation to be like yourself. Or maybe they find happyness some other way.
If someones choice of values leads them to wilfully and proudly become a parasite and a burden to the people around them, then they are the ones with the mental disorder.
> Maybe the next person squatting in your town square is a former you.
Maybe they are! And if they are, eventually I hope they stop listening to the romantic rubbish about what "freedom" consists of and what capitalist society owes them, as spewed by the leaders of camps and troupes who are mainly interested in keeping a parasitic lifestyle surrounded by runaway girls and boys who'll do what they say. Those
visionary camp leaders are the real narcissists. This one gives his game away when he talks about how he should be the one to manage the shit show when money is abolished. It's all wankerish nihilism dressed up as Marxist dialectics, with the dialectic controlled by someone with slightly more reading than their followers.
FWIW, I upvoted this comment. I agree it's fine for people to have different values. Eventually, me-on-a-beach will hopefully find values that lead toward self-actualization and personal growth, and away from sloth and the bitterness and wasted time of jealousy towards people who have more. In the interim I don't blame them, I just think their philosophy is childish and poorly conceived. If that makes me a narcissist, so be it.
> Dude, you're a narcissist. You're free to change your values over time but no one else is? Maybe the next person squatting in your town square is a former you.
This was exactly what was going through my head while reading their post. That, or that they are making up a BS backstory to gain some sort of credibility, but there is no point in that sort of speculating.
Please don't think I meant literally saving money to buy a lambo. More a general trend towards unhealthy materialism that is seen as only being a positive. ie my bank account is bigger than yours beause I'm better than you.
A parasite he may be, but people can do a lot more harm as part of the economy than that.
It’s simply a question of leverage, even something as seemingly pleasant as Disney World causes significant direct and indirect ecological harm in ways a homeless person doesn’t. And frankly you can find plenty of far worse examples than Disney World.
“you can't produce anything new to help anyone.” Suggests only economic activity is a benefit, as if talking to another person or giving a hug can’t enrich their lives.
Pointing out a moral standpoint is more harmful than what’s being criticized is hardly whataboutism. It’s a demonstration that taking part in the economy is not inherently superior rather than the posters personal preference. Which therefore directly counters their morality argument.
But it's not just about economic benefit. Most people don't work to afford toys for themselves, they work to support others. At the end of the article, this guy expresses sadness that he's estranged from his two children as a result of his choices, but then attempts to justify it by saying he's not going to let having children keep him from making a better world for his children - a world in which there is no money. I would think his kids would probably prefer having a father who was present for them than one who couldn't see them because he'd deluded himself into thinking that a complete lack of effort was his way of saving the world.
If you can't take part in your children's lives as a result of your choice not to take part in the economy, then you're sort of failing at both moral standards aren't you?
> If you can’t take part in your children’s lives…
That’s a question without an objective answer. For example some people are better off in the foster system. It’s an oversimplification to assume some kind of standard life for other life choices.
But by the guy's own standard, the most important thing for him is to make the world better for his children. Even at the cost of actually knowing his children. Subjectively or objectively they may be better off with him not in their lives, but I fail to see how that bolsters his moral argument for how society should work.
What moral standpoint does Disneyland represent? You've far from proved the net harm of Disneyland, but what has that got to do with homelessness in BC?
> It’s a demonstration that taking part in the economy is not inherently superior
sure, but this is a straw-man. The proposition isn't that participating in the economy is automatically of greater value, it's that not participating (other than to leech off it) produces non.
> What moral standpoint does Disneyland represent?
The GP listed doing anything productive as a moral stance, Disneyland is therefore part of that anything.
> net harm of Disneyland
Promoting millions to take longer trips and regularly visit the middle of Florida directly causes travel related pollution. Simply developing that land is harmful to the local ecosystems. Producing all the merchandising is similarly an issue.
> It’s possible to oppose this guy and Disneyland.
If you oppose Disneyland for environmental reasons you’re hard pressed to then support the most of the rest of the economy. I would welcome an argument that draws a line there without excluding say suburbs.
So does any activity that produces CO2, including natural forest fires, and breathing.
The whole idea that CO2 is harmful, came from modern scientific knowledge - also part and product of the economy/society. The same economy could come up with solutions e.g. carbon taxes or other tech advances.
You are taking a complex issue, CO2, the economy and its planetary effects, and turning it into a simplified concept of "harm". Humans have consumed some amount of CO2 forever, it's only an issue now because there are significantly more humans (who also create more CO2, but that's beside the point of the first).
Nothing about this the hobo lifestyle suggests it will produce a solution to this problem beyond the fact that it's unlikely to support communities of a certain size for other reasons.
> Supporting the odd philosopher poet is the exact function of society, in my opinion.
Have you considered that society should also be the natural predator of the odd philosopher poet so that their numbers do not become problematic for their environment?
Why would society need to even be a predator though? The whole point of society is that we organized into large enough groups that what the "natural order" was no longer applies: societies literally rise above the natural order by replacing that order with something we as society control.
That means things like corporations, and working hard for your money, but also means things like "meaningless art", and allowing people with permanent disabilities to still live a normal life, where the fruits of society get to be enjoyed by everyone in society, skewed towards different demographics based on your favourite -ism. And it doesn't matter which -ism you subscribe to: the whole point of society is that we don't need this ridiculous "natural" nonsense. We beat it. It can stay outside. We replaced it with society.
>the whole point of society is that we don't need this ridiculous "natural" nonsense. We beat it. It can stay outside. We replaced it with society.
When the silent part is said out loud. "We" didn't beat anything, and "we" certainly aren't gods that managed to counter natural law, despite the current zeitgeist that likes to pretend it is so.
Humans are predators, and to pretend otherwise will be the folly of our species. One need not look any further than the political, corporate, or social elite to see what predators look like in so-called civilized society.
What a wonderfully Machiavellian and incomplete argument, given the history of societies all the way up to today. You'll go far, kid.
Next time though, don't make the classic mistake of talking about the group by talking about individuals in the group. Society is, and this one's confusing if no one taught you this before, not the same as the sum of the behaviour of individuals in that society. They're entirely different rungs on the ladder of abstraction.
Clever condescension, you'll go a long way with intellect like that, kid.
Nice job dropping 'given history' in there, you win! History shows that is a fantastic argument and adds significant value to your post.
Next time, though, try to use that big brain of yours to figure out how to address what I said instead of resorting to reddit level dialog and a straw man.
Did you genuinely believe that I was referring to every individual human? That's an awfully Machiavellian take on what I said.
Illustration counter to assertion (not an argument): "Of course humans have red hair, just google 'natural redhead'"
Society is, and this might be confusing if nobody's taught you this before, filled with people with disproportionate amounts of power, whether social, capital, political, corporate, legal, or other. This might be scary to your sensibilities, but predators are attracted to positions of power. I don't think anyone of consequence disagrees with this.
We obviously agree here, because you based your entire straw man on the fact that they don't represent every single human everywhere.
I would however like to understand how you think we beat 'natural law' and the predators with this mythical society when you also think that they are the richest and most powerful in said society.
Society "beat" predators? I think most people who have been victims of systemic or institutional oppression would disagree here. I know every police victim I have worked with sure would.
Or maybe I'm wrong and they are all just misunderstood when they beat, steal, lie, and kill the underclass while they destroy our planet and laugh about it.
Foraging scavengers, who figured out that the stone used to crack skulls of already-dead animals could also crack the one of animals that were still alive.
I mean, to some extend they’re self regulating. Few people have the stomach for a life like that so the total amount of philosopher poets is likely a function of your total population.
How many crazed homeless drug addicts per philosopher poet do you find acceptable? Is it somewhere near the current 10k to 1 level? Of course you are willing to patronize a cabal of homeless on your block as well.
Our society used to have places for these people, like farmhand jobs, cheap poor houses in the city, etc. Perhaps it is a failure on our part that we have now have nothing better for these people then a desire to push them out of sight. It seems they get a lot of blame for not being able to keep up with an increasingly demanding modern consumerist society.
> How many crazed homeless drug addicts per philosopher poet do you find acceptable?
I think the only acceptable number is zero. The philosopher poet clearly desires this life. The crazed homeless drug addict would much rather inject his morphine at home.
In other words, I think the fact that a drug addict is homeless is incidental. They should be treated because they’re a drug addict, not because they’re homeless.
Look: a “social Darwinist”! I should get a spotter's guide.
If society preys on philosopher poets, we don't get philosophy or poetry, our ethics never develops, and the fundamental principles of society don't improve, limiting how much technological progress can raise the standard of living. I personally call that a bad outcome.
I don't think it's accurate to claim that ethics follows moral philosophy, and certainly most philosophers would not endorse that viewpoint. Philosophy doesn't tell society how to improve or behave. Philosophy helps question and understand, it hasn't historically been a driver of change.
Driver? No. Heck, I hardly know any philosophers. But most of our big ideas were written down by a philosopher and then, decades later, read by to-be-important people at the beginnings of a social movement.
Social philosophy influences societal change, by providing ideas. Without philosophers, activists have to be more visionary than they already are, making them rarer.
(Moral philosophy, not really, I'll agree with you.)
On the other hand there is such a thing as a statist parasite (think politicians, bureaucrats, crony capitalists, etc.), and hobos with a belief they're superior to others and love to do virtue signaling as making a life decision to live until the end of their lives supported by others, directly or indirectly, is something very, very wise.
I think you misunderstand the scale at which I’m thinking.
This guy has amused me for, say half an hour of reading the article, and for a bunch more while replying to the comments.
It’s possible I would have been as amused by a corporate drone’s story, but it’s doubtful. I read enough of those, so the marginal utility of one extra story is very low.
That said, I’ve met philosopher poets on the street before, and the encounters are always memorable.
A guy of whom we have only embellished apocryphal stories, and who I have the suspicion either never existed or wasn’t nothing as portrayed afterwards.
The various “legends” around him like meeting Alexander the Great and dying at the same time are also suspect as hell.
And for all of that, what we have is what exactly? A philosophical justification for being an asshole I guess? The world would have been pretty much the same if he had not existed.
Socrates was a stonemason --- effectively a skilled labourer or tradesman, but not wealthy. He was a footsoldier. In a culture where most were slaves, he was a citizen, but not a member of the aristocracy (notably contrasting with Plato). His long-suffering wife Xanthippe complained of his failure to provide for the family, and Socrates lived simply.
Socrates as a citizen was likely the third of Athens' four classes: slaves, metics, citizens, nobles. Not destitute, but neither wealthy.
It is easy to radically underestimate how much food a human needs every day and how hard it is to acquire, especially when living a non-sedentary life as a hunter/gatherer.
Trying to accumulate 2000+ calories per day growing food requires a rather significant farm and skill (and weather); doing so with meat requires daily hunting, or a permanent storage facility with refrigeration (unless you like salt and pickled meat).
Doing this while trying not to die from exposure or injury is even more challenging.
I don't think that comment is underestimating it, but rather saying that living off the grid would be impressive because it's hard. Living off of charity or the work of others isn't impressive.
It's also a little harder these days with how barren the environment is, comparatively. The oceans and shorelines especially, past generations could walk on down and gather lobsters by hand. Good luck now. Maybe after a few hundred years of human population collapse.
I grew up on Long Island in 60's, which is a bay (called a "sound", like Long Island Sound) bordered by states CT, RI, Mass, and NY/Long Island. Many relatives caught lobster there, but no more. In the summer we would walk down to low tide and pull steamers clams out of the sand and cook them on holidays, along with periwinkles which are 4" snails (not the same as French periwinkles which are tiny!!) Now all areas are polluted and shellfish cannot be eaten. Is it crazy/sad? Yes.
Yes, and in the northern hemisphere at least, you quickly realize that foraging for plants is a waste of time. There just isn’t enough calories.
Re daily hunting, meat actually keeps for quite a while when hung in cooler temps (heat is not your friend when hunting). This is routinely done with eg deer. And it is easy to dry meat of all sorts, or even smoke it as that has the same effect and also makes it even more delicious.
There's a lot of plant and mushroom-based food to be had during the end of the summer, though, and one would have to forage for plants first thing when spring came in order to get a nutritionally complete diet.
That's far more complicated than you'd suspect, at least in the US. There are a litany of policies that criminalize self-sustainment. Granted I suppose one could consume pests without being harangued for poaching, but that doesn't mitigate property laws, and all property is owned if not privately then publicly and in either case most often requires license to be there, whether explicit or implicit. Certainly doing any reasonable amount of cultivation is seriously complicated by this. So you're legally barred from hunting, barred from cultivation, and you're left with scavenging or gathering and that's highly dependent on a number of factors. Granted the probability of being found out in the depths of the wild are minute, it is nonetheless a serious existential threat. Let's just say we're at the mercy of our captors.
Having addressed the question of legality of rogue individuals... And if an individual exploiting the wild is illegal, so is the group. Humans are social animals. Going it alone at length in the arboreal breast of mother nature would be extraordinarily taxing mentally for most people. That alone is a crucial disincentive, and with the legal disincentive it atomizes people and forces even the highest aspirants to dissolution of the ideal. And that's before the process is even allowed to occur. The impacts of each added person to a group of rogues would compound, and I'd posit exponentially. And with that impact the footprint naturally grows, and with the footprint the risk of detection. At the end of the day the risk assessment points to certain failure.
So the next best thing is urbanized scavenging, not because it's the idyllic means, but because it's the only certainty. If you offered these people license to fuck off, I suspect they would do just that, perhaps not all, but most. I know if I was given license, alongside my friends, to get out of dodge we might just take up that offer. But the whole concept of real liberty, real autonomy, real independence - that's an existential threat to the status quo, to the system, and to the policy makers and corporations that own them, and to the very few of those who pull the strings.
Reminds me to recommend "Grapes of wrath" as a wonderful book to read, surprisingly relevant today, off my head there is the description about apples being too expensive to buy fresh so being sold to be canned... and the old guy having worked and suddenly having money in his pocket, not knowing what touse it for so buying some useless trinket....but maybe someone has a link for an online version so I could copy paste the relevant excerpts...
>if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death.
Or among the last, being used to it by now. Beggars have existed under all regimes and all kinds of economic collapse. Cushioned middle class people however, didn't do as well under the latter...
Being in Victoria certainly helps with his lifestyle too. It's probably the best city in BC you could hope to be in if you're homeless. It's a nice city, there's lots of green space, lots of facilities around for the homeless, a relatively small actual homeless population then the tourist homeless population of young people camping for fun.
I really doubt he'd be able to maintain that lifestyle anywhere else. Definitely wouldn.t be able to live like that in Vancouver.
Hi, someone from Victoria who hasn't bothered to live there for a long long time.
You used to be able to enjoy nice parks with your kids without worrying about junkies living in nearby tents taking up what used to be sports fields throwing used needles into the playground. Now they put up warning signs for parents to sweep around to make sure that this isn't a problem.
I'm never going back, it's gotten that bad. I know so many people who have died from overdoses. It would have been a nice place around 12 years ago but after around the Vancouver olympics, the region has turned into some kind of black hole of misery and misambition outside of the wealthy condo social bubble and being on the wrong end of the ensuing wealth disparity. Unchecked money laundering on the housing market was a huge problem leading to this kind of scenario as well. Almost none of my friends who stayed there are the successful and happy ones. Even if you have like two decent blue collar jobs you may still end up living on a friend's couch for long periods of time just for a lack of affordable housing where your neighbors aren't doing shit like moving a stove at 4am because they dropped their flap of fent-adulterated heroin behind it (my own experience in the last apartment I rented before it really went to shit out that way -- that still cost me like 1000/mo)
Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live in the only region where they don't get found frozen to death in bus stops. They do this in the USA, too, quite sadly.
Have to admit, it was a few years ago now I was there. I was just mostly comparing it to the situation in Vancouver. A friend of mine lived there for a while before moving back to Edmonton. He described it a lot like what you say. Overpriced, not many jobs. He ended up couch surfing for a bit after he couldn't afford his apartment any more before he ended up leaving.
>Nice weather means that the rest of frozen canada sends their local problem drunks on greyhounds to live
Sounds like what's happened in the town I live in over the last 2 years or so. The problem's gotten bad. Though it's not so much drunks but fentynyl and meth addicts.
It is incredibly ironic that the very people that claim the system is bad, effectively cannot survive on their non-conformist lifestyle without the current system. In a way though, it's no different than a religion. Priests cannot effectively survive without parishioners giving them money. Priests likewise preach things about the modern era of morality are bad and we must change them. So if you think of these vagabonds as "roving priests" then what they are doing is of the same concept. Although the difference between a local priest and some modern hippie rhetoric is a priest has relationships with his congregants. The idealist vagabond does not. So it's much harder for them to garner any support.
Traveling Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia live solely on donations. They don't necessarily have an individual relationship with "parishioners" any more than this particular hippie does (probably less). Whether it's beneficial for anyone for too much of society's resources to be allocated to the practice is a question. If you view spiritual comfort and the pursuit of karma as a kind of social glue, then some amount of tolerance for it might be positive for society.
I have to say, I agree with the traditional Christian practice that discourages this sort of monasticism, called gyrovagues[0] in the West. The more usual forms of monasticism, although they accept donations, are expected to me more or less self-sufficient on a daily basis, and thus less parasitic on society. Either a monk would live in a monastery and work to support the monastery, possibly selling some of the products to the outside world, or a monk would live on their own in the wilderness, only occasionally meeting with a priest and generally actively avoiding donors, at least for the first few years. An exception is anchorites, who generally spend all their time in prayer and do rely on donations, but they generally don't move around from place to place.
Even the large monasteries over time became less favored by the populace in Europe, since they had acquired enough land through donations over the centuries that they often began to act more like landlords.
In summary, those who wish to live outside of normal society, particularly economically, should strive to avoid being parasites, and, failing that, should not move from host to host.
The only difference is, at least in my experience, many hippies don't actually do the things necessary to create change. They are individuals touting a known consensus. It's the reason why green measures generally fail in politics but stupid things like protecting the second amendment are upheld strongly. There is no centralized institution to fight for these beliefs. This is why you see the Freedom From Religion Foundation actively fighting against many religious bills. It has a goal, the ability to garner funds, and a means to support people to achieve them. Most hippies are just getting by and eventually wake up realizing they need a job to survive once the donations wear out because they don't have a stable supply of people believing in their individual cause.
"The system" is just the full stack of human avarice. The eradication of which had proven to be nontrivial throughout recorded history. As soon as someone wants more than the next guy, you have a system.
Why is it ironic? The system may be bad, or it may not be, but the fact that it is virtually impossible to survive completely outside it is not evidence of it being bad or not.
Maybe one could see it as a form of civil disobedience ... surely it counts that the person lets another person take the job he might have taken and ultimately uses less resources than the average worker (commute, buying power, paper trails etc) ... also one might argue those opting out help push up wages... I personally am in favor of working as little as possible, outlawing"big corporations" encouraging artisans and entrepreneurs and veggie farmers...
I don't know what to say to the poster about the druggies.. except maybe have some compassion and consider maybe society should reach out and help more (maybe he lives in the US where the recent oxycodone epidemic was caused by the permissivness of said society)
Yes, he receives handouts, but you left out his values of simplicity, community, and such.
Jeff Bezos, the Walton family, and many peers also live off taxpayer money and impoverish poor communities by siphoning money from them, plenty of regulatory capture.
We could probably 10x the number of “handouts” as you call them, at least in the US, and nothing would change.
We’ve auditioned it already: $4T in stimulus, the $600/wk employment checks, etc. What negative negative impact really did that have on an average person’s day to day life? “Handouts” made pay rise for the first time in decades.
Even the landlords. I don’t know any landlords who are on the street because of the rent forbearance and eviction moratorium - and I don’t even agree with those policies.
Inflation is bad for lenders (i.e. people keeping deposits in USD). People who work get paid based on their real value which means their pay rises if inflation rises. Of course it maybe difficult to get a raise for your current job but switching jobs will get you a raise that catches up to inflation.
Note that there has been a shift in bargaining power since 1980 that is closing. That gap is not the result of inflation because inflation alone doesn't give employers bargaining power. If anything it increases bargaining power of employees vs the old job because the new job always pays more in nominal terms.
It's also incredibly bad for pensioners, and often there's a lag between cost of living increasing and wages increasing that can be quite painful until things equalize, which sometime never happen.
I think pensioners would be covered as “lenders”. I interpreted lenders to mean those who have savings or are the beneficiaries of savings, such as pensioners, in addition to the obvious meaning of entities that hold fixed-rate debt as an asset.
I don't understand if we can say this inflation isn't just the surge of people who didn't spend a lot on travel/eating out/etc. now splurging on all the things + constraints on goods like cars due to the pandemic causing supply chain issues. It seems to me to me a relatively temporary, same as how the April 2020 market dip didn't really mean anything come April 2021.
Yes, I don't really get why this often gets dropped. I would assume inflation goes down next year if the supply chains get better again.
A lot of the inflation I saw in the pandemic was perishable products where the supply was cut in some way or another. As long as people that want it badly can afford more they'll pay more for it. This is inflation, but it's not clear whether the money supply or the supply chains are the reason. The money supply was high in the preceding years as well, not leading to such high inflation.
The USA was a fine place to live, many people happily gainfully employed, many investment accounts booking gains, labor and capital coexisting in harmony, when inflation was double what it is now.
He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes?
Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses.
The alternative is for the leaders to have some type of power to compel people to do the dishes, and some type of punishment to mete out.
There are certain tasks in society that no one wants to do. In order to get them done, you have to choose the carrot or the stick. Money or punishment.
If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on. It can work in theory, but in practice, a society based on punishment tends to snowball out of control, with the people in charge of punishment going too far. The people in charge make a small mistake in the size of punishment relative to the transgression. With money, small mistakes like this happen constantly, and they are constantly being adjusted by changing prices and salaries. The garbage man makes a higher salary than other manual laborers. But without money, the process has more steps, and is harder to get right. People protest, the leaders listen to the protests, go through the rule changing process, and eventually adjust the punishment to fit the transgression. Without money, more people are involved in the process. Some are removed from the actual issue. It takes longer for the adjustment to be made. With only the tool of punishment available, it's more difficult to fine tune every mismatch. In practice, it's really, really hard to get a punishment based society just right.
I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke.
It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects.
Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?
But we are special, so naturally it'd be we who get the interesting exciting jobs in the post-money society. It'd be all the non-special people who'd be cleaning shit off the sidewalk, though of course they'd enjoy it since they would no longer be burdened by money.
Not really invisible, they're just not in your social circle. In other social circles, people (I've spoken to such people, it's not a made up example), claim that well-paying or non-horrible jobs don't exist, as they've never met anyone who has such job.
> I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them.
Motivating them is the key word. Right now we depend on people being forced into stressful, precarious or life threatening situations in order to coerce them into doing jobs those of us in more stable circumstances would never do voluntarily. As a result, desperate people are paid far less than the work is actually worth. Personally I find the approach morally repugnant, we should instead guarantee a decent standard of living and allow wages for undesirable jobs to rise to their correct price. The crowd that thinks they're above cleaning their own toilet might be a bit put out but fuck them.
You can read my past comments - I agree with you completely.
Toilet cleaners, garbage men and fruit pickers should not just be paid well for the important work they do; they should be given respect for it as well.
Taking advantage of their desperation is absolutely unjust.
> Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them
Is that a bad thing?
One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week? Instead we have saddle young adults with student loads, the cost of housing has been inflated by greedy investors, having a car is just about mandatory, a century of very materialistic consumer culture, regulatory penalties for being poor, etc. I'm shocked that people don't question more of this stuff.
(Speaking of motivating people, governors of many states recently cut unemployment benefits to get people back to those low status jobs, instead of giving them more money. Funny how many people objected to those handouts but are fine with all the tax breaks that investors get on empty properties.)
>One might wonder if our society is all about motivating people to do things they don't want. How many of our modern conveniences could theoretically be traded away in return for a 15 hour work week?
Easy, look at US's GDP ($68k) and compare it against a country that's proportionately lower (to 15 hours). That gets you around $25k, around the GDP of Bulgaria and Chile.
That's a neat way to compare! I've spend a couple of months in countries in that 25k GDP range. I could tell the difference in some ways, but there's so much more I don't know.
However, that gave me the idea to see what that same math was like using historical U.S. inflation adjusted per-capita GDP numbers [0].
That $25k number is what U.S. per-capita GDP was in 1991/1992.
Before money people traded favors. You help me butcher my cow, I help you rebuild your house (which was more work then the cow), so maybe later on your brother helps fix my plow knowing he'll eventually get something in return, and now I am trading favors with you and your brother, etc. This bonded people. It would have been insulting to say "here are two chickens for your lamb, we are now even, I owe you nothing evermore!"
Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.
Money has made it possible for us to build impersonal systems at gigantic scale. It seems to have paved the way for more stuff, but it does come with some downsides.
Debt, The First 5,000 Years [0] by David Graeber talks about this stuff.
“No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”
The source I quoted agrees, saying favors, not barter.
People did something before money was invented, right? Parent's raised kids, kids helped parent's when they were older, families banded together, items were traded between villages, across continents, etc.
Money in a broad sense is as old as anatomically modern humans, so, no.
80,000 year old grave goods have been discovered, consisting of shells of a consistent size, with holes drilled in them, a few hundred kilometers from the ocean. We know from ethnography of societies which existed until very recently that these collectibles served the same purpose as money.
A good complement to Graeber's book is the work of Nick Szabo, I would start here:
The book (Debt, The First 5,000 Years) goes over this (IIRC it's in the Games with Sex and Death chapter). It says that these kinds of "weird money" examples like stone wheels in Micronesia, where not really used to trade for goods, but more or less to trade in social favors / honor systems.
The early mesopotamian cilivilazations got debt and credit before there was coinage. Farmers bought goods on credit, the debt set in grain for example, to be payed on harvest season. Grain, would be as good as money since that's what you paid your taxes in. The whole region had a sophisticated credit culture and the effects of debt were pervasive. That's why the old testament has provisions against usury, the jubilee, etc.
But the first source you quoted, the Atlantic article [0], quotes Graeber describing economies which don't depend on money or barter:
> Communities of Iroquois Native Americans, for instance, stockpiled their goods in longhouses. Female councils then allocated the goods, explains Graeber. Other indigenous communities relied on “gift economies,” which went something like this: If you were a baker who needed meat, you didn’t offer your bagels for the butcher’s steaks. Instead, you got your wife to hint to the butcher’s wife that you two were low on iron, and she’d say something like “Oh really? Have a hamburger, we’ve got plenty!” Down the line, the butcher might want a birthday cake, or help moving to a new apartment, and you’d help him out.
> On paper, this sounds a bit like delayed barter, but it bears some significant differences. For one thing, it’s much more efficient than Smith’s idea of a barter system, since it doesn’t depend on each person simultaneously having what the other wants. It’s also not tit for tat: No one ever assigns a specific value to the meat or cake or house-building labor, meaning debts can’t be transferred.
> And, in a gift economy, exchange isn’t impersonal.
My original reply in this thread was to mention that there have been functioning societies that don't use money. I was replying to a post that couldn't imagine such things. Maybe I'm misunderstanding why you brought up barter economies?
I'll have to get back to your first Nick Szabo reference, it doesn't format readable in the browser I'm in front of at the moment (overlapping text). The second link, the blog post, seems to discuss the history of money as opposed to alternatives (like the Iroquois and gift economies mentioned above).
This "gift economy" sounds someone trying to put a nobel spin on a debt based economy.
I bet in many cases if someone got a reputation for not reciprocating "gifts" they'd soon find themselves not receiving anything. Hardly a gift.
And why are people "hinting" at things in this economy, and why this is presented as something different from a direct request. How often have you come across people "hinting" at what they really want, when really they are demanding. Sounds like something out of a cliche mobster scene, "lovely tanks you have there Colonel, it would be a shame for anything to happen to them".
> No one ever assigns a specific value to the meat or cake or house-building labor, meaning debts can’t be transferred.
If the bakers wife were to "hint" to the butcher that their friend could do with some extra "iron", whilst simultaneously saying "did you enjoy those scones i gave you" (wink), then the debt is transferred. We can pretend that it wouldn't have happened, but people are people the world over. Some would be nice and help others because they like to help, others would use what leverage they have to get ahead in life.
This gift based economy just sounds like a passive aggressive debt based economy, and it doesn't sound real.
> This "gift economy" sounds someone trying to put a nobel spin on a debt based economy.
I saw that same connection myself. Gifts, aka favors, aka "you owe me one", aka debts.
> This gift based economy just sounds like a passive aggressive debt based economy, and it doesn't sound real.
I brought this up initially (near the top of this thread) in response to someone who couldn't imagine an economy without without money. Such things have existed, as per anthropologists.
Weird, I thought i deleted this comment. I deleted it because I took the time to read the article mentioned above a bit closer. I believe it was arguing that gift-based economies were the origin of debt based economies (aka money) instead of money originating from bartering.
Stupidly I had misunderstood what was being written, and then I attacked that imagined position by making the same argument as they were actually making :facepalm:
Which was absolutely used as trade goods between Iroquois bands, between the Iroquois and other natives, and between the Iroquois and settler colonialists. Standardized trade goods, portable and of a broadly recognized value: in other words, money.
Money which was good enough that the English, being kept short of coin by the Crown, adopted it for their own internal trade. Leading to the expression "shelling out", and the slang term "clams" for the dollar.
Single Iroquois bands may not have done much if any internal trade, but the same is true of my nuclear family. I would expect some wampum changed hands for things like marriages, though I don't have a source on that and it might not be true in this specific case.
Like I said, the original post I replied to seemed to say they couldn't imagine the dishes getting done without money: "He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes?"
I'm fairly certain the Iroquois didn't need to trade wampum with other bands to get the dishes washed? Just like you said you don't need to pay someone in your family to do the dishes, families (and friends, and Iroquois villages, etc) help each other without needing money.
I didn't say that one can construct a modern economy without money, just that the dishes could still get washed, like a lot of other small scale transactions, in response to someone who may have thought that such things are not possible.
Are you trying to prove me wrong, that humans cannot possibly organize activities amongst themselves without wampum of some sort? You mentioned families doing things for each other, which might be a better example than I brought up.
(I do appreciate the discussion though, I've learned a couple things along the way. But I'm not sure if we disagree, or are going on tangents.)
I think scale is the key here. You can do that within a family, you might do that within a village, perhaps in some perfect circumstances you will be able to do that within a group of a few 1000's people, but never at the scale of our societies. It's not about the type of society or people, it really has to do with the number. You'll have a much harder time convincing someone to work for someone else he doesn't know at all...
Agreed. I never said that no-money would work at the scale our modern society is used to working at. I brought up the idea that smaller scale societies have functioned without money, though.
My thinking is that lack of money wouldn't stop the dishes from being washed, but would stop bigger projects.
> humans cannot possibly organize activities amongst themselves without wampum of some sort
Yes, insofar as every band of humans has edges, and on those edges money is a hard prerequisite. We've coevolved with it since the dawn of anatomical modernity, the burden of proof is very much on anyone who wishes to claim that that we can get along without it.
I guess I consider the existence of activities, even economic ones which don't involved the exchange of money, to be trivial? Like it's obvious they exist, it isn't saying very much to point them out?
I spent a lot of my youth in an ashram with up to about 10,000 people in it, and the dishes got washed. The breakdown of that kind of basic uncompensated labor in small (usually flat/anarchist) communes says more about their inability to escape atomization than about the possibility of doing so.
I don't get the sense we're disagreeing about much if anything here, though. Perhaps choosing to emphasize different pieces of the puzzle.
Has some information relating to Australian Aborigines.
13 Distribution and consumption
Fundamentals of distribution were also quite similar in the seven regions, especially in the contrast between the distribution of women’s product to their immediate camp and to certain other relatives such as sons and mothers, and of men’s product to the wider residence group and to wives’ and potential wives’ parents. Specific obligations to certain relatives, processes of ‘demand sharing’ (Peterson 1993), and generalised reciprocity combined to determine patterns of distri- bution (see Keen, in press, chapter 11).
In spite of the similarities, the study has revealed some variation in patterns of distribution. Kûnai and Ngarinyin men had specific obligations to provide meat to their parents as well as wife’s kin. Yuwaaliyaay and Pitjantjatjara men provided food to the prospective wife to ‘grow her up’. Obligations on the part of sister’s son to mother’s brother have been recorded in only in two cases (Kûnai and Yolngu); among Sandbeach people the senior of a MB-ZS pair did the giving (including senior sister’s son to junior mother’s brother). Kûnai and Pitjantjatjara husbands gave food to their wives indirectly through the wife’s parent. Consumption prohibitions according to age, gender, initiation and reproductive status were wide- spread, although the uneven data make comparisons difficult. Senior Yolngu men could impose ad hoc pro- hibitions by making production implements (such as canoes) or food itself sacred, and to make certain resources available only to them.
14 Exchange
People were able to produce various kinds of valued items which they exchanged for other valued items, according to gender, age, and structural position (such as birth order). In all regions ‘inalienable pos- sessions’ (Weiner 1992; Godelier 1999) included land, waters and related sacra. Inalienable posses- sions had a ‘sacred’ character which enhances their value, making them immune from exchange. In at least some regions inalienable possessions were related to ‘inalienable gifts’ in the forms of sacred objects and ceremonies. These are gifts that retain a
connection with the donor such that the gift creates a relationship between donor and recipient (Gregory 1982; Godelier 1999). People exchange inalienable gifts for everyday objects, and in marriage exchange. Movement through the field of exchange relations varied between kinds of society and between individ- uals. Older brothers in the highly polygynous soci- eties had greater opportunities than their younger brothers to accrue control of resources associated with marriage. (see Keen, in press, chapter 12).
Marriage exchange articulated both with produc- tion and distribution through marriage gifts and the reproduction of kin networks, and highlights the most obvious contrasts in exchange networks among the seven regions. In contrast to the shifting webs of Kûnai, Pitjantjatjara, and Sandbeach people, and reciprocal exchange among Yuwaaliyaay and Wiil/Minong people, the asymmetrical forms of mar- riage among Ngarinyin and their neighbours, and to an extent Yolngu people, reproduced very structured regional systems of exchange. In the wurnan exchange system of Ngarinyin people and their neighbours, marriage exchanges joined the exchange of foods, raw materials and sacred objects along ‘paths’ linking patri-groups in established sequences. Yolngu probably did not have quite such a neat and tidy system, but they did think in terms of paths of exchange, and items moved in customary directions.
The high and very high levels of polygyny among Ngarinyin people and their neighbours and Yolngu people placed certain men at the nodes of exchange networks where they received gifts from intending and actual daughters’ and sisters’ husbands, and made gifts to intended and actual wives’ relatives. These same men (or some of them) led powerful and growing patri-groups, and controlled patri-group sacra.
> Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.
That’s one theory, and it’s not even the one Graeber preferred. According to him (and supporting evidence) money originated as a way to “keep score” of debts.
The question of the origin of money is an interesting one, but that will be probably be unsolvable, since some of the alternative theories (like barter) would leave little to no evidence.
It's been a while since I read that book but I believe the message was also that money allowed groups to grow larger than the Dunbar number. In a small community, you can keep track of the favours with everyone. It's also highly likely that you'll see someone you help out with again so there is a good chance you'll get paid back.
Not exactly the same. Money changed a lot of things, much more than just an accounting tool.
The use of money drastically changed the scale in which goods and services could be traded.
Before money people kept track of who owed who a favor amongst the people they dealt with. Family, friends, and others learned who they could trust not to be a mooch.
Money made possible much larger scale projects, enabling the industrial revolution to proceed at breakneck speed, the ability to wage world wars, and a modern global finance system treating everyone and everything as fungible, with credit scores replacing personal bonds of trust, billionaire leveraged buyouts and market manipulations, consumer/debt culture, sanctions, etc.
I think we agree that the accounting tool changed the possible scale, but we are still trading the same thing. For example, I use currency to track and buy favors from some laborer in China I have never met.
I don't think it's the scale, but the specialization. When what you need is unspecialized manual labor, favors work great because those kinds of favors are fungible. It starts to fall apart when you need specialized work. I.e. I'm a farmer and I need to see a doctor. The doctor doesn't want to see me, though, because 134 other farmers already owe him/her favors and he/she doesn't know what to do with the favors he/she already has.
The doctor needs a way to convert all those favors they don't need into favors they do need. You could trade them, but then you need an exchange rate. There's 400 farmers in the town and only one electrician; is a favor from the electrician worth the same as a favor from a farmer? At a certain point, it makes sense to just exchange stores of value rather than try to manage favors like assets.
> but we are still trading the same thing
I don't really think they are. Favors are closer to an asset. $5 is $5, regardless of the holder. Favors have bearer-specific value, such that one might be near-worthless to me but priceless to you.
> For example, I use currency to track and buy favors from some laborer in China I have never met.
To me, this demonstrates the above premise. That laborer in China would rightly value your favor at near-zero. You're too far away for them to meaningfully cash in on that favor. Your favor behaves like an asset that they have no use for. Money is distinct in that it allows you to crystalize the labor that would have been done into a physical form, and allows you to do it ahead of time. No more worrying about fungibility, and no more worrying about whether the other party will actually honor the favor.
Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off.
The jobs "no one wants to do" is usually work people are happy to do for themselves or occasionally their friends and family. The idea that "no one wants to do them" embeds the presumption that you spend eight hours a day doing just that. Of course no one wants to do that!
> Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off.
Dishes is just one example. You may wash your own dishes, but did you buy those dishes from someone who was selling them as their job?
Do you grow all of your own food? Do you also sew your own clothes? Build your own shelter? Engineer your own transportation and manufacture your own iPhone?
The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society. Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange and people working in specialized roles in focused industries.
And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.
Exactly. And because we don't usually see all this work happening firsthand, we tend to severely underestimate the difficulty involved in meeting our many needs and desires.
Modern society makes it look easy, but it's extremely challenging for a 'Dunbar's number' sized tribe to meet all its members' needs at anything resembling the quality of life we're all used to. The healthcare/pharmaceutical needs alone would be borderline impossible. You'd have to be willing to tolerate much lower life expectancy, much higher mortality for infants and mothers, etc. etc.
We're veering from the topic of jobs no one wants to do. No, I didn't make any of my dishes (actually, maybe a butter knife) or make my own clothes, but I don't think these obviously qualify as jobs no one wants to do. I'd love to build my own home. There are people that enjoy woodworking, pottery, metal working, engineering...
> The truth is that a society in which everyone is self-sufficient can’t look anything like modern society.
That much I agree with. I don't propose total self sufficiency. I just think that dishes is a very bad example of a job that wouldn't get done if we didn't pay someone to do it and, more constructively, that a lot of jobs fall into this category. There is an obvious incentive for me to wash my dishes: I want my dishes to be clean before I use them. No one has ever paid me to wash dishes. I've washed dishes for myself, for friends and for family.
Dishwashing is a good example of an ubiquitous chore that almost everyone does without any market incentive, which strikes me as the exact opposite of a job no one wants to do and which therefore has to be paid for.
Work that most people actually really don't want to do is usually well paid for this reason. If you'd said hyperbaric welding instead of dishwashing I might be more inclined to agree that it needs more of an incentive than the mere satisfaction of meaningful work.
> Most of the advancements we take for granted are made possible by monetary exchange
It should not be a surprise that money plays an important part in a society where the allocation of labor is governed by money and those that have it. It does not follow from this observation that there can't be other sources of incentives to innovate and produce.
It should also be mentioned in any discussion where the current state of production is touted as something we should aspire to that there are indications that the current mode and level of production is undustainable and harmful to the environment. It's perhaps something we should change, but the market evidently isn't creating effective incentives to do so.
> And for what it’s worth, back in college I had several roommates who clearly demonstrated that not everyone is willing to do their own dishes.
There's an important difference between jobs no one wants to do and jobs not everyone wants to do.
In the case of a small community, it can be left to volunteers (optionally offer them a meal/beer) or simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it.
On the other hand I think being bunced up with people I don't know, don't really care about or outright dislike is, at least to some extent, a side effect of the extreme centralization of work opportunities since the industrial revolution. Functionally, in terms of production, apartment complexes and offices are to people what coops are to chickens.
Practically, that doesn't work. Some people will do a half-arsed, terrible job and it's better for the community that they stay out of the way and contribute otherwise.
> simply rotation so everyone does the unwanted jobs. It's a fair system and people will do it.
I think that what would end up happening is that in even in a small group of people, it would naturally emerge that there are variations in quality, efficient, economies of scale, etc. Even in my immediate family, there are some menial jobs that my wife does 90-100% of and some menial jobs that I do 90-100% of. If we tried to make if 50-50 or have some type of rotation, we would both lose.
> If we tried to make if 50-50 or have some type of rotation, we would both lose.
Because you recognize this and aren't completely inflexible, you don't. Some degree of self-organization for mutual convenience can be relied on in much larger groups of people than two. For example, I often hear of shift workers trading shifts.
> They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done.
While I agree with most of what's said above, the proposition about "usually women, making the sacrifice" is dubious at best, if not untrue.
In any society or commune few will lead - the rest will be workers or followers. These will be both men and women, and they will both suffer from necessary sacrifices. Women are not a special class of people in those societies, and to claim that they suffer more prejudice is the usual sort of feminist-speak that has nothing to do with the reality of such communes.
I'm the last person to be charged with "feminist-speak" and I actually agree that it's usually women who end up in these undesired jobs.
Most communes and cults that give up money end up using some other form of control. NXIVM is a recent example, but most of these fringe movements discover women are more useful and less trouble than men.
This is kind of complicated, because men die sooner even if they don't do dangerous tasks. And in contemporary communes, there pretty often are not all that many super dangerous tasks to do. These communes dont have soldiers going into wars nor miners spending days in dust and dark.
There used to be difference in terms of men drinking and smoking much more then women, but that is equalizing too.
Basically, even if men dont do anything dangerous, dont drink nor smoke more, they still tend to die sooner.
And if we are talking about past, it gets complicated too due to huge amount of childbirth deaths and poverty affecting women and men differently (in some periods, prostitution being only realistic employment for single women basically which comes with its own risks). Meaning, it was not always the idylic family situation people tend to imagine when making these comparisons.
The article you sent literally confirms what I said. It lists multiple reasons, more dangerous jobs being only one. The rest are mix of lifestyle and genetics.
As for smoking and alcohol, those statistics are easy to find too. Both contemporary and past ones.
Also, article starts with premise that author expects to live shorter then his wife - but he has extraordinary safe job.
And the same is still true. Something that I hear no feminist talking about is the gap in occupational injury deaths, which is massive. We should really start working on it for more equal society.
I have seen feminists to push for women to be allowed in combat roles. I have seen them also promoting less gendered toys and occupations in child stories. Meaning also more cars for girls. Meaning driving, being cop as occupation for women too.
More equality here would mean exactly that - women driving and being on the streets more, women working in late money handling shifts, women in combat positions.
Then there are hazards in occupations where physical force is an actual factor - construction and some farming jobs. Hazard here is mostly from overextending people. There, I dont see employers running for someone physically weaker. But then again, there is feminist push to promote technological/construction interests to girls.
Tho in the latter category of jobs, unionization and regulation would do a lot for safety on itself. Then again, same can be said about driving. Driving jobs often push people toward a lot of hours and risk, whether you are tired or not. More regulation about how much you can drive would do a lot.
> More regulation about how much you can drive would do a lot.
Isn’t there already a ton of quite stringent regulation around how long you can drive? Or do you mean outside of the context of activities regulated by the FMCSA in the US?
Encouraging women to become, say, crab fisherwomen, would just result in more humans being maimed and killed. For the same reason that female soccer players tear their ACL at shockingly higher rates than male ones.
I’ve never lived in or studied commune living but do you or the GP have nonfiction sources? I’m hesitant to take either of your claims as truth without them given my own lack of knowledge. Thank you!
I wondered about that, also. I'm pretty sure that some societies and communes are democratic, where the people make choices as a group, not having specific leaders that they are obligated to follow. I think that Quakers would be an example of one such society, they govern by what some call consensus based decision making.
I know it's anecdata, but from my experience cooking at a local church it was almost always the women who would come and help clean up after service. Not just women, of course, but they were definitely over-represented on that front.
> If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on
The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat.
There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. If you don't go out and get food, you don't eat, unless you are gifted food as the young, old and infirm are. There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach.
Of course in civilized society, there are a class of rentier heirs who do not work, who have a relationship with those who do work, of expropriating their surplus labor time. Obviously this is done with coercion and punishment.
>There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt.
Are you sure about this, or are you treating a "noble savage" fantasy as if it were fact?
I've read some early settler accounts of Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society (especially women) on a regular basis.
Sometimes the beatings would be followed up with rape, and the perpetrators would get away with it Scot free because they were high-status.
The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker makes a compelling case that violence (including rape) are dramatically lower in modern societies all around the world.
I'd buy that. I just didn't know that it was relevant or comparable to modern state backing of the rentier rich. wasn't sure how to judge such a comparison. I know that modern governemnts will send uniformed guys with guns if you mess with a rich persons property. But I wondered if aborigines beat low status members and women for economic reasons, or for mating reasons, or for something else?
>But I wondered if aborigines beat low status members and women for economic reasons, or for mating reasons, or for something else?
I'm not sure if you're Aussie, but please understand that problems like domestic violence and incest/rape still exist in Aboriginal communities to a large extent.
There are also an army of "nice" middle class, urban white people performing the most mind-bending mental gymnastics possible to shift the blame away from the perpetrators and onto white society in general (who, to be fair, brutally mistreated the Aboriginal population for the better part of two centuries during a colonial campaign of conquest).
To me, within that context, the more interesting question is not whether or not there were economic/mating pressures on aboriginal populations that lead to the brutal behviour, but why a middle-class 21st century professional is looking to excuse it.
Ah, I wasn't thinking about any of that stuff. I was thinking of whether small economies could exist without economic coercion backed by violence, where this thread started. The Yanamamo were mentioned as a group that doesn't do that, the men and women carry about their work without the need for coercion. You replied that there's violence against low-status members in Aborigines communities, and wondered if the Yanamamo really were non-violent.
I don't know that it's relevant that the Aborigines are violent. Nor, I admit in hindsight, was my reply about modern people also being violent. I intuited that your comment was irrelevant, but didn't do a good job of putting that into words.
The question was whether the proverbial dishes could get done without violence, and if the Yanamamo do it then the answer is "yes", it is possible, regardless of whatever Aborigines or modern people do. I don't think that white guilt over the treatment of Aborigines is relevant to that question, either.
I'm a bit familiar with the Yanamamo. I had a class that focused on them specifically. I know that they have graduations of violence, mostly to do with mating, which can boil over between villages, but I don't remember there being any economic coercion, men and women do their different jobs without any punishment/violence that I can recall.
(A discussion like this could morph into the idea of "women's work", asking why do the Yanamamo men hunt and the women work. But societies using money have the same concept of women's work, so that would be a separate conversation form money vs no-money societies.)
Until someone shows me different, I think the the Yanamamo comment is right, based on my knowledge of them they don't use economic coercion that I know of to proverbially get the dishes washed.
Apologies for bringing white guilt into it. I misread your comment and reacted.
Regarding the aborigines, the impression I got from the accounts was that these acts of violence were more about dominance than strict economic coercion. I get where you're coming from in that regard.
I would be interested to hear what an anthropologist has to say, but until then it seems like your evidence is stronger.
> Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society
As I said, there are societies where women gather berries and men hunt. There aren't really "lower status members" of those societies. Including the Aboriginal Australians who lived this way. As the book Dark Emu shows, some Aboriginals lived as hunter-gatherers, some as farmers. The aboriginal farmers did not live this way, and certainly may have had lower status members who were mistreated.
I should point out some people have qualms over portions of Dark Emu, but generally not over this. Even a critic of this point like Ian Keen admits there was some form of farming by some Aboriginals.
"There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach."
This sounds like the classic punishment of being sent to your room without dinner, right? Removing the basic necessity of food is about as coercive as it gets. Even in civilized society we feed prisoners, give food to the hungry, etc.
During the depression, some governments actually had areas in the government land, like parks, that people could sign up for a garden plot. You could grow your own food. This allowed people in the towns and city land to grow on.
That's interesting to hear! I guess it matters how many people are struggling whether they might allow such things. (The group protects itself more than it protects low-status individuals in the group?)
> Uncontacted tribes in other parts of the world (e.g. the Sentinelese) are famously violent.
In the Amazon loggers and miners, often illegally, encroach on indigenous areas and kill members of the hunter-gatherer bands. Yes, the bands sometimes react in a "famously violent" response to these massacres.
I don't really see the connection in how these 50 person bands act together with their "famously violent" response to outsiders who are killing them.
Also the people I am speaking if are living in bands, not tribes.
This is an excellent point. The scaling of social accountability is a difficult problem. In my opinion it is a root problem of humanity and our current solutions are due for disruption.
It depends how groups are defined.
Agriculture is a precondition for a society divided into classes (for social, not practical reasons). Groups from the beginning of human behavioral modernity to the rise of agricultural slave empires in Sumeria etc. 10,000 years back worked this way.
So from the drawing of cave paintings in El Castillo onward through the next 30,000 years, all humans lived like this. You could say it is human nature. Then class-divided society spread - 2000 years ago the modern Stockholm area was a classed society, whereas 200km north were hunter-gather bands. By modern day, hunter-gatherer areas have dwindled to remote areas.
The urge to have large numbers of people all under one grouping seems to be the impetus of a ruling class or ruler, from Alexander the Great to modern times. There are signs of hunter-gatherer bands in relations of mutual aid with other bands, for marriage and other things. One of the earliest pieces of literature, instructions of shuruppak, instructs rulers to get new slaves from far away lands.
(To reiterate a point from before - there is no evidence of class societies before 10,000 years ago. It is possible some tried to be a non-working ruling class, but the methods of production of migratory hunter gather bands made this difficult, and over a span of time impossible. Whereas with the rise of agriculture 10000 years ago, we have a mass of evidence of class societies.)
> Agriculture is a precondition for a society divided into classes (for social, not practical reasons).
I would completely reverse this... a society divided into classes is a precondition for agricultural society (for practical, not social reasons).
In the period of early civilization, convincing people to work 16 hours in the fields or in the mines is very difficult if they have any other viable option, including migrant hunter/gathering. Therefore, it is necessary to create a class of people that have no other viable options, either by slavery or other forms of inequality. The social structures surrounding inequality evolved as a method of maintaining this practical class stratification.
This might had been the case in only low density areas (same as in all other continents), the majority of indigenous Americans did not live in classless societies.
Nobody said no classes. There wasn’t money like there was in Europe. There were by some intellectually honest estimates 50m people living in N and S America at the time of arrival, a huge number of people were living day to day without money.
I don't understand why the dishwashers leaving needs to cause societal breakdown, though. After they leave, surely someone thinks "Hm, we have no clean dishes any more and nobody's volunteering, so I guess I'll need to clean some dishes, if only for myself, but then once I'm in dishwashing mode it's efficient to clean more dishes than I personally need, and even better if someone decides to reward me for cleaning their dishes by doing my laundry since they realized someone needs to do that".
I mean, isn't this "the invisible hand of the market" at play, just without the intermediate medium of exchange?
It is true, though, as the end of the article points out, living this way defies pretty much any kind of planning, and that can be scary for people.
You'd be fine with doing a number of people's dishes every single day, dishes that are never cleaned by their user, for multiple hours with no pay because you're in dishwashing mode?
Is it "usually women" who do the unglamorous jobs that no one else wants to do? This doesn't really seem true, but maybe you have a source that shows it?
> From cooking and cleaning, to fetching water and firewood or taking care of children and the elderly, women carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men.
Unpaid doesn't always mean that it's the least glamorous (in the absence of compensation for anyone). Take anything on Dirty Jobs, for example. If you're talking the difference between washing laundry and cleaning out septic tanks most people would prefer one over the other in the absence of other pay.
> If referencing modern society in the west, who is fetching wood and water?!
There's more to unpaid labour than fetching wood and water. Women still do significantly more housework than men, even if both hold full time employment.
From what I’ve seen, men get stuck with the jobs women don’t want to do. Just look at our current society. Who are the miners, the garbage workers, the delivery people?
You’ll notice there’s a push to get women into comfy office jobs like programmer and not strenuous jobs like oil rig worker.
Someone can reply to me and cherry pick to show counter examples but for the most part it’s men doing these jobs.
Maybe if it was only the people who did the jobs that no one wants to do who get paid then people wouldn’t be trying to get rid of the money system. How many thousands of years would a dishwasher need to work in order to earn what someone does in one year from making 100 million in a year as a corporate fat cat, a sports player, movie star or a business owner
How much money should the modern inventor of the electric dishwasher receive, given the labour saved by the invention?
And as much as I utterly fail to get spectator sports in general, footballers get their money specifically because people pay to watch their teams and the teams are more popular when they win and therefore the teams directly bid against each other for the best players. Similar logic for movies and their stars, and in both cases there are a lot of people at the bottom who do similar things for approximately nothing as it’s fun — but they’re not the best in the world at what they do, and only the best can compete with the best.
The connection in sports and media is a lot more direct than asking if (and how much) a corporation’s overall performance can be attributed to the skills of given fat cat acting as a multiplier on the work done by those under them.
And then you have the last question: what is the stuff which must be done? Most individuals could live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, yet no city (UK definition rather than USA) can survive everyone trying that at the same time, let alone the whole world. Is shipping in the “must have” list? If just shipping stopped, much of the UK would starve even if everyone turned their gardens into personal farms like in WW2. Who makes the ships? Who digs up the raw materials for the ship?
You seem to think I don’t understand why these people get paid large sums. That is not so. I merely said these people/“jobs” are the reason many are for doing away with the current money system as a means for ensuring essential work that no one wants to do is done. Personally I am for federal laws that impose a logarithmic tax scaling system where anything over $2 million personal income in owned assets is taxed at an 75% rate and an emigration tax of 95%. The only rights are what the people decide is right. I’m so tired of hearing about how people are entitled to this and that unquestionably. No one is entitled to anything but what everyone else is willing to let them have and what they are able to keep everyone else from taking. Right and wrong are about as real as the shapes and animals we are in clouds and smoke.
If you can wash dishes for a billion people in the world, freeing everyone from the burden of taking, sorting, drying, washing dishes, putting all dish washers out of work, i guess, you can become pretty rich too. People will have time to do something else.
Societies can work without money, or without using them that often, there used to be many self-sufficient peasant communities (villages and even entire mountain valleys) that used to manage just fine without actually using (much) money. Of course that modernity and the industrial revolution put a stop to that but it can be done.
Yeah. With money, there are lots of problems such as this too. I agree that money is evil. But I think a system with money is slightly less evil than a system with no money.
I do my own dishes now, I'll do my own dishes then.
Your thesis is non-sequitur, and speaking frankly, degenerate and extraordinarily cynical. Communes are experimental, experiments often fail, that's just the way shit works. Out of those failures, there are communes that have succeeded - you fail to mention them. You don't need gods, or leaders, or governance just the instinctual wanting for both community and self-preservation. Government is reactionary, not preventative,[1] and coercion is endemic to the human population it's tit-for-tat, and even more so in the modern era the great equalizer is among us and widely proliferated. It's not a question of genetic lottery anymore.
Money isn't actually the problem, it is disproportion and, duly, the concentration. That concentration equates to leverage, which is influence. Influence has been used to commit atrocities from times immemorial, it is, if not the foremost then among the foremost elements of human oppression. Historically this has been aceded to by the mass population through various modes of manipulation. It is actually exploitative predation which is founded on artifice, suppression and innate blind spots in social and economic cognition.[2] Worker owned cooperatives, at least superficially, seem to be the only structure that isn't human-perverse which promote both autonomy and community without being disruptively disproportionate in their allotment of power - Mondragon Corporation for example.
[1] Think of how often laws are violated despite the possible consequences: murder, neglect, speeding, embezzlement, bribery...
[2] Artifice being the hard work fallacy, which is actually predominately luck with lottery ticket odds and personal delusions of exceptionalism. Suppression being the ceaseless toil the masses necessarily endeavor in to support their livelihood. Blind spots in being inherently biased towards trust, economic blind spots emerging out of ignorance promulgated by that status quo and the nigh-complete opacity presented to workers.
Devil's advocate here. Failing sufficient encouragement to do tasks (psychological/sociological rewards as got through volunteering), most of those tasks can be automated or replaced by an alternative.
Plausible it could be automated. No idea how much it would cost, and while electric dishwashers have been a thing for longer than I’ve been alive, there’s not enough room in my current place to install one, and a humanoid cleaning robot would also have nowhere to stow itself.
Didn’t groups of people live without money just fine for most of human existence? We worked together. Money only entered the equation when the groups we lived and interacted with started getting too big and impersonal. Generosity is easier when you know the people benefiting from your work. Greed and freeloading are easier when you don’t.
I would argue that we are living in a all time high of human generosity, on a scale previously unimaginable. It just isn't carried out on a personal and emotional level.
Does human generosity scale though? I’m not so sure. Because we’re also living in a time of human hunger, human thirst, and human displacement previously unimaginable. The generosity doesn’t seem able to keep pace.
I feel you are presenting a false dichotomy. If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best? It seems that capitalist money is just hidden punishment: do something you don't want to do for a pittance, because you have no leverage. In a family, in a community there are also ways to incentivise prosocial behaviour just by culture, which is why e.g. most of German emergency operations are volunteer based. And in most associations, people are if not happy then perfectly willing to do the boring job if that's the way they become a part of the association. Social norms and customs and their establishment are a whole lot more complicated than "punishment from leaders"
> If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best?
Likely because many of those boring jobs have many more people qualified/capable to do them than there are spots to be filled. Even though we seem to need a lot of people to take goods out of totes and put them into cardboard boxes, there are a lot more people who are able to do that work than spots needed.
Maybe a sense of accomplishment, a feeling that they've done something with their day, some structure, a place to be that isn't their house, something to do besides watch TV all day, some interaction with their co-workers, a bit of exercise?
Do you not feel any sense of accomplishment from mundane things that you do well once they're done? It doesn't have to solely be that they prefer food with their meals.
Because most boring jobs require skills that everyone has. Specialization makes the other jobs have higher salaries, not because they are less boring, but because they can only be done by a smaller amount of people.
I agree that in small situations you can bring social pressure to solve this problem. Sometimes. Some families break up over issues like this.
As you scale up, it gets harder and harder. You get a few people who are intentional free riders. The hard workers see the free riders sitting right next to them stop. Then more and more hard workers defect.
That system of emergency operations is a great counter example. You correctly point out that it's good to have a system with more than just monetary incentives. You have to have a mix of monetary incentives, punishments and other incentives such as just the feeling that you're helping out, or perhaps prestige.
I'm not arguing to get rid of all incentives except money. Those other levers are vital. I'm arguing against a system with no money.
The Victoria man is a radical, he's there to start an interesting conversation, he's succeeding.
> power to compel people to do the dishes... and some type of punishment to mete out.
Moneyed, Adam Smith style capitalist economies still had slaves, colonies, wars of plunder.
It's tough. I see from your other commenters you're rooting for the guy. The mainstream opinion that executives should be paid less, that the lowest wages should rise, these are freebies and could be implemented in an afternoon, with no consequences. All the changes in a person's day to day life would be for the better. Mainstream people advocate against inequality not the elimination of money, but yes, there is a transfer, a "handout," as part of those goals.
I hate arguments like this. People who want clean dishes will do dishes. And no there's no free-rider problem because they don't have to do dishes for anyone else.
And people who want to eat will farm their own food? And people who want medicine will craft their own medications?
Self-sufficiency and moneyless societies are pure fantasy, unless they include giving up all modern amenities. I don’t think these people really want to return to the days of hunter gatherer lifestyles or even the days of homesteading.
It’s an extreme amount of work to be self-sufficient.
To add to that it isn't even legal to be self sufficient. I know how to make several prescription drugs but the moment I provide them to anyone else or anyone finds out I make them I will be put in a cage.
I don't see how taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral. If everyone did this we'd all live in a far worse world.
This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive. I relate to him in that I value money very little as a medium to facilitate my own happiness, but I still want to make a lot of it so I can give more.
He seems sweet though. I think I would get on with him were we to ever meet.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's a leech on society. He has two children he could not support (and has no contact with), he's constantly mooching off others for his basic needs, and there's not a word in the article about him ever doing a single thing productive for society. And unlike many other homeless people who legitimately are unable to contribute productively, this is all his choice.
He's lucky he's in modern society where we at least take some care of people like him. Go back further in time and he'd have been ostracized from his hunter-gatherer community for not contributing, and would've lived a short life as a hermit.
Really? Why do you assume any society is free of leeches? Heck, even Torrent has them. I think he probably would be a shaman or something like that and he would still live a similar life.
Funny, he'd fit more in a hunter-gatherer society because guess what they also don't have... (to spell it out: money).
I mostly agree with what you write, but "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset that it draws for me the picture of you being a Gordon Gekko type.
I wonder if he'd agree to do some work like cleaning the city parks in exchange for some "gifted" groceries and a room. Obviously the city doesn't want to enter into customized barters with all its employees.
Money exists in other forms other names money is effort and effort is time, your time.
Hunter-gatherer societies would have an equivalent of money not literally notes and coins but trading their effort and time. It is literally a society, people gather in a group for mutual advantage. The advantage being I don't want to personally make, build, do everything to survive so you trade skills which is effort and time which is essentially money.
> Funny, he'd fit more in a hunter-gatherer society because guess what they also don't have... (to spell it out: money).
His refusal to use money is really a lampshade on a refusal to do anything useful period. Plenty of people don't interact with money yet still manage to provide useful goods and services in exchange for necessities. He's not doing any of that either.
> "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset that it draws for me the picture of you being a Gordon Gekko type.
You've got me pegged all wrong. This transcends affront to capitalism to affront to all forms of societal organization; guy is a mooch, pure and simple, unwilling to do anything to help others but perfectly willing to accept all help from others for his own benefit. No society would put up with him, capitalistic or otherwise. He's a deadbeat father who wouldn't even do anything to support his own kids.
> I wonder if he'd agree to do some work like cleaning the city parks in exchange [...]
Based on what I read in the article it doesn't seem like he's willing to do any work at all. No mentions of performing any work or services in exchange for essentials; it's all freely given to him by charitable people and organizations.
I agree with you. there is nothing to be proud of in his case except that his life doesn't seem to be affected directly by inflation so long as the rest of society keeps its status quo.
I like you recognize that capitalism and money are not the same as productivity and value add....he doesn't seem to do the latter but he benefits still from the former because as you said he is a mooch.
> "You have to contribute productively" is such a capitalist mindset
No it’s not. All socialist/communist societies required all able-bodied people to work, described themselves as worker-led, and idolized work in their propaganda.
Good point. The hammer and sickle aren't implements of leisure, after all.
It's really all societies that require capable people to pull their own weight, not just capitalism. Even money-free communes/kibbutzes have chore rotations and expect everyone to pull their own weight regarding necessary tasks like farming, cooking, cleaning, maintenance, child-raising, etc.
I agree. His heart is in the right place. And he's fighting the good fight. There is something wrong with a system which won't allow a spot somewhere in the city to put up tents. He's right about that.
But I don't think everyone has to go as far as you, and give more than they take. I think we can find win-win situations where we both benefit. I cut your your hair and you paint me a picture. We both win. But it's hard to find good one to one barter like this. Money is the way to find more win-win situations. In a system with no money, you're back to only one to one, so there are less win-win exchanges, and everyone is poorer.
> I don't see how taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral.
Taking? It seemed pretty clear that he doesn't ask anyone for anything. People give him things of their own free will.
> This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive.
Give more money than you receive? There are other things that can be given, like time, companionship, love, etc.
The guy from the article is striving to make the world better for those who can't afford a home in Canada (Vancouver being ridiculously expensive, a separate conversation), and prompting an interesting conversation about how focused we are on money. I think those are valuable contributions to society.
Or should society force everyone onto the same page, and moralize against those who can't or don't want to keep up?
(These are questions that I think of, just throwing them out there...)
The Sun provides the Earth with enormous amounts of syntropy (this is the inverse of entropy), and we can capture this through productive labor before it inevitably dissipates off into space.
As a toy example, it is certainly mathematically possible for everyone to grow more calories than they consume. We wouldn't want this, for the obvious reason that we don't need more calories than we consume, and this would be labor-intensive enough to leave many useful tasks unfilled.
But it proves you wrong: there's nothing preventing "give more than you receive" from being a categorical imperative. Certainly nothing "mathematical".
It's not about production though. Give/receive is interpersonal, one has to receive whatever you give, which makes that person have to give more than they got from you, to whom?
It's a fruitful way to live but not something you must expect of others because it's an unattainable goal.
>This is mathematically impossible to apply universally. Can it be a moral code if it can't be universal?
It's obviously impossible but it is better than the inverse which is also impossible. The difference is that if you are below the potential that is actually possible you will approach the maximum potential of your society. You're failing, but you are failing upwards.
"taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral." is effectively trying to approach the minimum potential of your society i.e. zero.
> I don't see how taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral. If everyone did this we'd all live in a far worse world.
We have a large upper class that does exactly this and not only do many people seem not to mind, they find membership of this class aspirational. It’s how capital income works and what capitalism is built on.
> Epiphany Two happened a few months after they met, on June 27, 2003, almost six years to the day after Epiphany One. Johnston’s father had sent him $50 for his birthday. With it, he bought beer, pot, and cigarettes, and then threw himself a small party at Beacon Hill Park. He overdid it and found himself lying on his side behind a bush. “I was just pukey drunk,” he says. “It was embarrassing. And then it just hit me. Like, I've had enough of this. I'm not playing this game anymore. And I was done. I had no use for money.”
Uh, I'm not sure that's what I would have taken away from this.
Alternative title: a bum glamorizes his parasitic lifestyle.
Money is one of many solutions designed to allocate resources on a large scale. Of course, there are others, but he doesn't propose any alternative system. He's just a parasite. A pre-industrial society most likely wouldn't be able to support his existence so easily and he would either starve to death or start working.
He's less of a parasite than many rich people! I'm thinking of those who are nothing better than rentiers and/or running cartels, commandeering common resources for their own profits, accumulating money for themselves at the expense of society, who glamorize materialism and moralize hard work because that's what keeps the money rolling in from the plebes, and having the support of the government to keep them on top.
They seem to be have done, and are doing, way more harm to our society than this guy.
Money is only one kind of power as I learned from going from working stiff to millionaire (thanks software biz!) to homeless broke person (cursed alcohol.) There is the shamanic-like power of a deeply spiritual person. There is the leadership power of a good manufacturing supervisor or ship captain. There is the moral power of Martin Luther King or Solzhenitsyn. I've come to the conclusion that accumulating money is how people who otherwise wouldn't have any power to purchase it. There's a easy test I do in this industry when a rich person publishes a thought piece that doesn't move me: Would this person have any power if they weren't rich? A lot of times the answer is no.
This Victoria man has another kind of power: The power that gets other people to take care of his needs for him without objecting or rejecting him.
> Would this person have any power if they weren't rich? A lot of times the answer is no.
In my experience, the answer is no like a solid 90-99% of the time. At least in America, the wealthy buy their kids into elite high schools, which feed into elite colleges, which feed into jobs at elite, increasingly monolithic institutions/corporations.
Junior gets to fail again and again until they succeed, and then the return on capital further institutionalizes their family's power.
I feel a bit sorry for them, because with money you can build yourself a really nice gilded cage (or be born in one), which is extremely difficult to escape from because it would take giving up the money. This makes it hard to develop the other kinds of powers I mentioned. I believe these thoughts are not my own, but are the basis of ideas like "The love of money is the root of all evil" and "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." (I am not a Christian but I am familiar with it - I'm sure I could find similar thoughts in other religions)
>In my experience, the answer is no like a solid 90-99% of the time. At least in America, the wealthy buy their kids into elite high schools, which feed into elite colleges, which feed into jobs at elite, increasingly monolithic institutions/corporations.
Well, this may be bad but what is the alternative? It's not like the life of an average citizen is any different other than in degree. They also use money to go to a good school and good college to get good jobs at good companies. I don't see the injustice here as substantial. I see bigger flaws in the money system than our society maintaining itself.
Usually those "rich people's" thoughts are interesting not because they're worth millions or billions, but because they've built something impressive over their lifetime and probably have gained valuable insight as a result.
Most people wouldn't be very interested in an interview with a Walton heir for instance, but Sam Walton himself would have no problem drawing an audience.
He cultivated those other powers before he became rich, or he most likely wouldn't have been able to build what he did. I think a good example is Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Jobs went to India, practiced Zen and experimented with psychedelics before he built Apple. He found his power and used it. Bill Gates was born rich and is having a tough time inspiring people at the moment.
Exactly. If you want to live without money, that should be doable, but this isn't it. You can live on a homestead in the middle of nowhere, grow your own crops, raise your own cattle, barter with neighbours and be completely self-sufficient without money. This guy just lets other spend money for him.
Not a commune, they were a couple that lived off the land in Maine, and built everything there themselves. Nowadays their home is staffed by volunteers and open to visitors to see how they lived.
I assume so. I was curious how modern society deals with quakers and the amish in this regard, and found this:
> The Amish are subject to sales and property taxes. As they seldom own motor vehicles, they rarely have occasion to pay motor vehicle registration fees or spend money in the purchase of fuel for vehicles.[114] Under their beliefs and traditions, generally the Amish do not agree with the idea of Social Security benefits and have a religious objection to insurance.[115][116] On this basis, the United States Internal Revenue Service agreed in 1961 that they did not need to pay Social Security-related taxes. In 1965, this policy was codified into law.[117] Self-employed individuals in certain sects do not pay into or receive benefits from the United States Social Security system. This exemption applies to a religious group that is conscientiously opposed to accepting benefits of any private or public insurance, provides a reasonable level of living for its dependent members, and has existed continuously since December 31, 1950.[118] The U.S. Supreme Court clarified in 1982 that Amish employers are not exempt, but only those Amish individuals who are self-employed. [0]
>He claims he hasn’t spent any money since. It’s true, his friends have told me. No money at all.
This quote was kinda funny to me, because the online text doesn't convey any sarcasm or tone.
But considering he's actually just a mooch I sort of implied the tone of that comment to be quite snarky. "Yeah, no money at all, he won't spend a dime" - this guy's poor friend.
He's not just living off trash. People give him food too, his friend has spent money on him for things like printing his book. He's indirectly using cash.
Money is simply a storage of future labour. You're given it in return for the labour you perform today for someone else (or as a benefit from society due to not being able to perform laborious tasks.)
Money isn't evil. How you utilise it is evil.
> Epiphany Two happened a few months after they met, on June 27, 2003, almost six years to the day after Epiphany One. Johnston’s father had sent him $50 for his birthday. With it, he bought beer, pot, and cigarettes, and then threw himself a small party at Beacon Hill Park. He overdid it and found himself lying on his side behind a bush. “I was just pukey drunk,” he says. “It was embarrassing. And then it just hit me. Like, I've had enough of this. I'm not playing this game anymore. And I was done. I had no use for money.”
The lesson here hasn't been learned. Simply don't exchange money for those things. Exchange them for something else, something healthy, and you'll be fine.
I feel like this kind of protest stems from a degree of immaturity with money; not knowing how-to utilise it, what its reasons for existing are.
> As we walk through the city, Johnston offers a small disclaimer, putting out in the open what he calls his one “debatable” act of spending, post-31st birthday. If you count a gift card that someone gave him back in 2012, which he used on Big Macs and coffee, then, he says, he’s been money-free for only nine years.
This raises a point that article doesn't address: what is "money"?
If Johnson trades those cigarettes he makes from tossed butts for food, is he using money? Cigarettes have been used as currency in some special situations like war time.
Likewise, if Johnson accepts a product created through the use of money, isn't he in fact using money, if only indirectly?
Then there's the big question that never gets asked or answered: what happens if every single person on earth lived like Johnson? Money is fundamentally a way to fulfill future needs and wants. Abandoning money is really abandoning a path to build a future deliberately.
Storing grain, smoking meat, or building a shelter serve exactly the same purpose as money in this context. They are ways to make the future more predictable. They also have the interesting property that they can be traded for other ways to make the future more predictable. And that leads to the main problem that Johnson seems to be trying to solve: how to stop focusing on optimizing one's future through the accumulation of things that can make the future more certain.
What does a world of people who have abandoned the idea of making a future for themselves actually look like?
* Intentional destruction of currency tenders is a criminal offense in most countries. There is nothing worthy of hero-worship here.
* The guy leeches off the goodwill of others. He doesn't internalize that the amenities offered to him as charity, are being bought with someone's money. Food & coffee doesn't grow on trees. Heaters in winters don't work on magic spells. He doesn't spend his money. It is someone else's. Public money mostly, and the charity of sympathetic Samaritans
The glamorous-pious/moral-homeless trope is BS. If he wants to do better, then live in one of the BC forests. Into the wild, all the way in. Seriously, if you take out these nutcase views/agenda, he is no different from garden variety homeless. Most people I have seen are destitute by their bad luck or lack of opportunity & education. This guy is a wreck by his parasitic fetishes.
Are you sure he's asking for any of your tax money? I didn't notice in the article any mention of him collecting benefits. He dumpster dives for food if nothing else. People give him some things, of their own free will.
And don't forget about all the rich people that your tax monies subsidize [0]. Those are people who have money, and are being given more from your taxes.
How much different is this guy than those rich people getting tax breaks? Which begs the question why there is such a visceral reaction against this poor guy, but not all the rich who get propped up by the government. I guess we aspire to be one of those rich people who do nothing, and resent the people who choose not to play the game that most of us aren't winning.
Point taken on what-about-ism. I find that I do that perhaps too often. But these connections keep jumping into my mind. I wonder if people get mad about one thing, but not the other. I wonder what the commonalities are, what the differences are. I grant that it can lead to tangents, but I guess I find value in it. For example, in this case, does society cut the mooching rich more slack than the mooching poor? It seems that many of us aspire to be rich, and that many consider the poor to be lazy. Our system seems to have a lot of bias built into it. I wondered if I was seeing that in your comment, and threw my reply out there. Maybe I should have worded it differently?
Anyways, back to the guy in the article, lots of other taxpayers are happy to support local food kitchens, that's why we have them. He didn't "take" the coffee, they gave it to him.
I understand that you disagree. Other people feel different. That's politics.
> does society cut the mooching rich more slack than the mooching poor
I think about this constantly. My parents and grandparents are so concerned about a situation where a single undeserving "poor" person is given support that they'd rather nobody be given that support. Drives me insane, especially considering my grandparents were all too happy to accept government support during the pandemic despite them not needing it (their words).
... I wouldn't consider it an opinion when I say that food kitchens are for the needy. This guy is not needy, he's want-y, maybe, or greedy. The needy are in situations they cannot or otherwise struggle to control. This guy is actively avoiding "fixing" his situation to a point where he is no longer in need of these services.
The situation on the West Coast here is pretty bad. The homeless population is quite large and there's very little being done to help them. I can't help but feel it's partially the result of the older population here being apathetic due to the above.
> “It would be a lot easier if everyone quit money at the same time, make a day of it, and then everyone can co-ordinate and start planting.”
> He takes a drag on his cigarette. “Yeah, it would be a shitshow. But there's certain steps that need to be taken, and I'm sort of the disposable one that can't be bought. So I can make the horrifying decisions that no one else can make."
The guy says he doesn't believe in evil. The only time in history that money has been abolished was under the Khmer Rouge. They also had no concept of evil, and made a good many horrifying decisions in service of total economic equality through forced poverty and mass enslavement. Because of course the people who don't want to quit earning, spending, owning and trading their goods and services need to be forced to do so, or else be eliminated.
Just because he doesn't touch the money, what does that have to do with anything. If someone like Queen Elizabeth never touches the money herself, mean that she does not spend money? If Jeff Bezos has a person following behind him 24/7 and never touches money, does that mean he has no money and doesn't spend? Of course not.
If someone gives the dude food for free, the homeless guy still paid money for it. Maybe not cash, but he paid some form of money. The person purchasing the sandwich loaned or gave the homeless dude money, and then paid for the sandwich on behalf of the homeless guy.
The homeless guy spends money living in the guy's house.
Not only that, the sandwich he received for free is taxable by the IRS. It's like on those game shows where you win a car for free, you still have to pay taxes on it. That is because it is legit income, as in money to you. The gameshow gave you money for the car, but the gameshow then bought it for you, hid it behind a wall, and made you work for it.
If the guy needs healthcare and goes to the hospital for free, he's not going for free. The doctors and nurses and rent and utilities and tools all cost money that someone pays. Nobody is working for free. The homeless guy is getting money from everyone, he just doesn't touch the actual cash, but it is all the same thing. He is spending $10,000 or $50,000 or $150,000 or whatever the medical care may cost, in value.
This only works if not everyone in society does it.
It’s easy for a lone person to ride on the backs of others, who are actually, you know, working for money, but if tomorrow we got rid of money society would collapse.
With the way NYC is, I could quit my job tomorrow and mooch off others (SO many do).
I’d be uncomfortable, but I’d live. If everyone did this there wouldn’t be a NYC anymore.
I agree, if your grand answer to the torments of society is to just rely on that exact society to sustain you, it's not a sustainable answer.
Even just something as simple as the cigarettes he scavenges, where does he think those are coming from?
Like I'm sure you could grow some sort of nicotiana in BC, but it's not exactly North Carolina, and he's not exactly Thoreau.
It's kind of stunning how close this guy is to Diogenes. Hates the Athens marketplace, never leaves (until captured by pirates).
Tangential, but I tend to feel this way about a segment of van life philosophy, it's sort of the next level. People want to escape the drudgery of conventional society, so try to be a van life influencer, and have your life hinge on a large (van/bus) vehicle running on refined petroleum, probably the avatar of global industrialization. It relies exclusively on people who specifically do what you won't.
> Tangential, but I tend to feel this way about a segment of van life philosophy
Ah, I know what you mean. I've thought about this myself. One of those "it wouldn't work if everyone did it" kind of things. You could do van life while working for an oil company, there's people with all kinds of van life jobs, it's a way to cut expenses and have more time outside of work. But things would need to be quite different if everyone did it.
But then again, if everyone wanted to escape the drudgery of conventional society we would end up with different conventions.
I don't think it's any wrong for this guy to do what he does, or van life people. It seems like it would be wrong to expect/force everyone to adhere to our current conventions when they don't want to. At least ideally. And he's no more of a mooch than the rentier rich and corporations who plunder the common good for profit.
I found it interesting how money and productivity are such trigger issues for many people. Perhaps because we all work a lot more than we'd like to, and aren't rich, and resent those who don't buy into the same rules.
I understand, I was careful to say a segment, I know how easy it is to come off resentful or bitter. I largely don't have much a problem with van life or any such lifestyles, like you say, there's plenty of people where the extent of van life is they just happen to live in a van.
The issue I take is admittedly more pedantic, sort of intellectual honesty. I know it's paradoxical, but a thought I have a lot is "I don't care if you lie to yourself, I just ask you don't lie to me."
Rejecting money as some moralistic endeavor while living in a city is to me, bluntly, pretty dishonest. I feel like that is what is arguably wrong with what he does, especially in the context of his own framework. It really is like Diogenes, if he hates society so much, why is he still here?
I'm not a fan of half measures, especially when one wants to be a modern day philosopher.
I guess I had a different reaction to his no-money thing, kind of putting it into the context of my own recent experiences, feeling drowned in the rat race sometimes, and seeing that happening to other people I know. Have we made things better in the last 50 years? The culture in the U.S. seems to be very focused on money, keeping the gdp growing, counting on consumers to keep consuming, etc. Isn't money supposed to be just a means to an end?
So I took this guy's stance on money as making a statement. Are we hating on the guy who doesn't want to play the game so many of us feel stuck in? Is he worse then the rich who dupe the rest of us, plundering the common good for their profits?
I think it's great that there's people out there dedicated to exploring different ideas. That seems to be inevitable, there's billions of us, and we're not evolved to be the same, for good reason. The majority shouldn't need to be scared of the minority, right? And we're all equal, aren't we?
Also, unrelated to the idea of no money, I liked his taking a stand on allowing people to sleep in parks. Many homeless people want to work and need to be near cities, where the jobs tend to be, and have nowhere secure to sleep. Maybe lockers, porta potties, showers, cheap boarding houses, camps for the better behaved, camps for the crazies, etc. What we're dong now isn't good enough. I'd like to think if we got all opinions in a room we could work something out. They're people, too.
Anyways, that's what was running through my mind when I read the article. I've also thought of stuff like this from the van life perspective, like you mentioned. In the past I've railed against welfare, but lately I wonder more about the burdens we place on the poor more than the money we give them. I don't think I've ever thought it was immoral to be poor.
The monks of old (Eastern and Western philosophies) would live off the largesse of others in terms of food, clothing and shelter. They gave back in the form of teachings and wisdom or a temporary place to stay for travelers, without judgement or payment.
This man is just taking, and not giving anything back. That makes him a mooch, and little more.
> While meditating down at the ocean—and tripping on acid courtesy of the motorbike’s new owner—he experienced what would become for him unshakable insights having to do with patience, fate, and love.
I was waiting for that part since I started reading the article. Isn’t this what the hippies in the 60’s figured out as well?
> ..Refusing to spend money is the only moral way to live.
> ..Not only did money enable what he deemed insane behaviour on a grand scale, the dependence on it, the fear of losing it, the focus on acquiring it wrecked people’s lives and drove them to be dishonest with themselves and others.
> ..People are putting themselves through hell, living in situations that are just making them nuts to avoid being homeless.
> Every taxpayer is an indentured servant until this debt is paid.
> Only one solution appears just and good, and that is a society without money.
Money is not evil, but the abstraction of “value” in modern life does cause the problems he blames money for.
Perhaps the jungle/forest tribes way of life is the best and simple way we can be happy. Yet tent communes like Johnston’s seem to be setup in the middle of a town square or within close proximity of a city, and not in nature somewhere actually sustaining themselves.
In the end if we blew it all up we would arrive back to same evolution of living we find ourselves in today.
I admire his resolve, though it's not something I'd like to take to the extreme. Spending more time with people who have less money (e.g. CouchSurfing -> BeWelcome, hitchhiking, dumpster diving) has been an immensely rewarding experience.
Last week, I heard a message about investment, which said that the 3 ways to store wealth are stocks in companies, bonds in governments, and property (owned by banks or rich people). A few days later, I read about GitLab making it their policy to help people get visas (shouldn't that be a government choice?). Privatisation is also taking over police departments, prisons, bus services, etc. I don't trust that the shareholders' best interests are the same as the needs of the people. War helps private companies, at the expense of governments & property. I'm not hopeful for peace in the next 50 years.
What about investing in people? Not saving wealth, but giving it away!
People will try hard to save their own lives in a war (and if I die, I don't need the return on investment anyway). It's a personal contact, so I think it's highly resistant to inflation. Building community is, in my opinion, more important than storing up wealth. I guess this view is similar to 關係 guanxi. It's democratic: if I do something silly and lose face, then it has consequences. I don't think it's authoritarian communism, where 單位 dictate who you can marry or what kind of job you can do, but a community-focussed lifestyle where newcomers are welcome, and share freely within the group. I'm still trying to figure this concept out though, so other suggestions of philosophical readings are welcome :)
What about the "hockey-stick" exponential growth that's needed for compounding to work?
Companies pretend that it's true for them, but actually are at the mercy of business cycles. Governments have linear growth at best. Property has had exponential growth because of increasing population, but that's plateauing.
Can social connectedness be exponential, for the benefit of society? Not just more people, but people who are more connected to each other? How can that growth be incentivised? (I'm thinking out loud)
> [Company] making it their policy to help people get visas (shouldn't that be a government choice?)
Of course it's the government choice to grant the visa or not. It's the company choice as to how much support (financial, HR/legal advice, other) to extend to their employees [and their household].
Why? Just why? Why the hell can't I be free to move freely to a place where other people accept me? Why is it that a parasitic entity (the state) has to say whether they allow me in or not? Why should I be barred to enter a continental region of the world without convincing a bunch of bureaucrats that I'll be there just for a few days?
> Privatisation is also taking over police departments, prisons, bus services, etc. I don't trust that the shareholders' best interests are the same as the needs of the people.
And you trust state actors responsible for most murders in history (example: compare how many hundreds of millions were murdered in wars vs. by private actors in the last century), how come?
> War helps private companies, at the expense of governments & property. I'm not hopeful for peace in the next 50 years.
No. It's not at the expense of governments. This is pure brainwash propaganda. Governments, or states, are responsible for most of the destructive behavior we see in human history. They're not victims but perpetrators of wars. It's silly to think otherwise.
You're not hopeful "for peace in the next 50 years" because of your prejudices and misconceptions.
Society has never been so peaceful as today. Thanks to the private sector, communication is more and more accessible to everyone. Some day (not sure if 50 years or 500), poverty will be over, except due to acts of state-sponsored terrorism, and people will be able to denounce it whenever it happens and on a global scale. This is starting to happen today already.
Most private entities (companies or the third sector) do good for the people and benefit nothing from the misery caused by state actors and their wars. Just a thin fraction, such as defense contractors, does.
I can't tell if you are trying to be sarcastic so I will respond in good faith.
> Why the hell can't I be free to move freely to a place where other people accept me? Why is it that a parasitic entity (the state) has to say whether they allow me in or not?
Because when a community decides to provides services to a people it must now have standards to decide who to provide services too. There are only 2 possible ways to solve this.
1: provide services to everyone. naturally this doesn't work.
2: provide services to nobody.
> Governments, or states, are responsible for most of the destructive behavior we see in human history.
This is a consequence of the state's monopoly on violence. By joining a society you voluntarily give up power to the government in exchange for services and protections.
Wars occur as a consequence of this exchange of power when states look out for their own interests, which include the interests of its people.
> Society has never been so peaceful as today.
Because the state has a monopoly on violence and has gotten more effective at enforcing that monopoly?
> Most private entities (companies or the third sector) do good for the people and benefit nothing from the misery caused by state actors and their wars.
I'm not sure if you are aware of the other functions that states provide but some of the functions you may find beneficial are ways to resolve conflict without violence, protections to people, and a standard of living. These are again, enforced with violence. Seeing as you moved from Brazil to the Netherlands I'm sure you are aware of the benefits you are granted.
> Because when a community decides to provides services to a people it must now have standards to decide who to provide services too. There are only 2 possible ways to solve this.
So, if you're a spoiled brat lucky to be born in a developed country with socialist tendencies, you're fine.
However, suppose you're unlucky and were born in a poor country and now want to migrate somewhere to improve your quality of life. In that case, spoiled brats will do everything they can (including kidnapping you if you try) to stop you from doing so because you're the wrong race|social group|whatever.
You hold such awful vision and wonder if I am being sarcastic? What the heck.
If you want to provide services to people, do it with proper and just means.
Not by sacking people and pretending you want to give back to them whatever you deem essential services.
> This is a consequence of the state's monopoly on violence. By joining a society you voluntarily give up power to the government in exchange for services and protections.
No. I never did so. You were brainwashed with this stupid idea.
> Wars occur as a consequence of this exchange of power when states look out for their own interests, which include the interests of its people.
No. You're being incredibly silly.
How come it was in the German people's interest to do what they did?
How come is in North Korea's people's interest to do what they do?
How come is in US citizens interest to invade other country and spend a trillion doing war overseas?
Sure, some people will benefit from such arrangements. However, most everyone loses.
Besides, you demonstrate a lack of knowledge regarding the positive aspects foreigners usually bring to a territory. For example, most of them come in peace, and the net result is positive. I'm sorry you don't get something as basic as that.
> I'm not sure if you are aware of the other functions that states provide but some of the functions you may find beneficial are ways to resolve conflict without violence, protections to people, and a standard of living. These are again, enforced with violence. Seeing as you moved from Brazil to the Netherlands I'm sure you are aware of the benefits you are granted.
I'd be a fool if I believed in your stupid idea that I benefit from having most of my paycheck extorted from me here or most of my consumer power extorted from me back when I lived in Brazil.
No, most of my money I (or anyone else for that matter) pay doesn't come back as nice services from the public sector but go to harmful programs, intrinsically evil agendas, are used without any accountability, and so on.
If I get back 5% in good services that I really need or want, I'd be surprised.
The poorest ones are even more negatively impacted than me by the state, and you probably believe that they get a lot of benefits. Your ideas about what the states do are incredibly out of sync with reality.
I really can't stand these long-form articles that just take ages to get anywhere.
For example, at some point the article notes he didn't get to the truth until two epiphanies that obliterated his self-image.
Then there's literally 9 paragraphs of other text. Then it follows with the 10th paragraph: "Then came the Epiphanies."
Long-form is great, but it feels as if each page is just loaded with stuff other than the point of the article. If it's written in poetic form, contains beautiful photography, or actually interesting anecdotes, sure. But none of it was there and the larger point never did arrive, either.
As for the Victoria man... completely misguided. Every street he walks on, every piece of cloth he wears, the coffee he drinks, the food he eats, the phone he uses, the internet he uses, was produced or maintained by someone else. Money is merely a medium of exchange to allow people to exchange their contribution to society, for other contributions, in a feasible (i.e. not barter-based) manner. There's tons of legitimate criticisms on capitalism, on our economic structures, on unequal opportunity/ability, monopolies, corruption, concentration of wealth etc etc, which makes our socioeconomic system imperfect. But the idea that money (as an invention/tool) is the root of the problem is entirely misguided and frankly, entirely unfounded. Nothing in this article really substantiates this wild claim he makes, and nowhere does the interviewer even remotely challenge him on it. Unfortunate that I had to read the whole thing to find that out.
People living their life completely without money, can teach us all a few good lessons. If some people can live completely without money, then the rest of us probably spendt too much time hoatding money. Happiness is possible without money.
The good lesson it can teach is that there are hypocrites in the world, and that at the present time there is enough excess productivity in the system that people who contribute nothing can basically ride for free, and the value they contribute is that they serve as props for a fantasy discussion that is delusional at best.
Money is the most basic social contract everyone agrees with. The problem of money today is that it overrides politics, so it shifts problems from one place to another side of the planet. Tax evasion or dodging, social darwinism and social inequality, money laundering, etc, money have always posed great problems...
People will call money a great and indispensable evolution of human civilization, while arguing that socialism leads directly to gulags and famine (which is the worst strawman argument of people who will defend market essentialism).
Money is a tool, but honestly, it's not very good at what it does. Governments and institutions already achieve most of what human needs, by allocating resources through political decisions and law. Banks are always privatized for some weird reasons and never do anything right and never improve the interest of the public.
Doomists will say "we don't want to be hunters and gatherers again", yet cannot prove that capitalism allowed the apparition of science, technology and industry.
Really interesting discussion here; it's heartening to feel the underlying desire by commentators to find effective moral principles. It strikes me that what we have now has evolved into an economic/money system that is complex, dynamic and probably the "least worst" we can achieve. We do live together in a miracle. I'm happy we still have space for monastic energies to survive.
I do fear the coming resource scarcity and slowing tech adaption rate.
Of course it would be impossible for modern society to stop using money altogether despite what this man might hope. Its easy to see this person as someone who just doesn't want to work. At the same time, I read a historical religious fiction book that describes monks going from town to town offering enlightenment in exchange for food and presumably shelter. Is this any different?
All of modern society joining a monastery or becoming enlightened is perhaps an even bigger ask.
...have you been to Victoria? In the past twenty years?
Forgive me for getting defensive, but as someone who lives here, you don't know what you're talking about. The days of the "home of the newlywed and nearly-dead" stereotype are over (maybe except for in Oak Bay). We're a solidly medium-sized city, the capital of BC, with multiple universities, significant naval presence, a booming population, and strong tourism industry. And also one of the most expensive and desirable housing markets in the country.
And FWIW, I'm not sure how going for decades without money is more feasible in a cultural hobbit village, whatever that means, than anywhere else. No, it makes sense that he can do this in Victoria because we have the best year-round weather in the country and lots of support available for the homeless.
One can find a lot of words to describe this lifestyle, but I think one that fits the most is "parasite". And as most healthy organisms, a modern city in a modern society can tolerate a number of parasites, and they may not even do any harm when they're in small quantities. But if it spreads beyond certain measure, the lives of both the host and the parasites become very miserable.
In countryside Japan, I notice that people get a lot of their vegetables and rice from family members who have a plot of something. Some have rice, some have carrots, potatoes and so on. Giving whatever excess stuff you have from your field and get reciprocated with other stuff you don't have, no money needed.
This guy is a monk.
So that's how they got invented the first time, huh.
Well, if he teaches others what he know and they emulate him, while the general populace tolerate and support them, a new ascetic movement would be made easily.
Still, my heart is with his estranged SO and their children. Ascetics can't support others that well after all.
I agree. Even though money is bad, I believe that it's excusable to help others.
(No, the ends don't always justify the means. In the case of community and the greater good, my moral expectations on others are much lower than the strictness with which I judge myself, and I will break my own rules if it means being a better guest/host).
In the anime Haibane Renmei there are angel-like characters who are allowed to barter for goods but not allowed to use money- presumably because of an association between money and sin.
This reminded me of that- though it doesn't seem that Johnston is doing any bartoring.
Enlightenment from an acid trip. This guy just reminds me of my friends who took too many psychedelics and didn’t mature out of the stage in life they were in when they took them.
"The nicer flute arrived the next day. “I'm sitting at the harbour. And some guy is sort of dressed like me, I guess casual, has this three-foot-long bamboo flute and a cup of coffee, and he is walking. And I say, ‘Can I have a sip of your coffee?’ ‘Is that a flute?’ ‘Can I try it?’” The man gave Johnston permission for both requests—and then he gave Johnston the flute.
Stuff like that “happens constantly,” he tells me."
There's a second interpretation of this interaction. I'd like to hear it from the other side.
Yeah. I’m not sure how that can’t be taken for parasitism. You can be pleasant about things as he seems to be, and still be a parasite. I’m sure he knew when he asked to try the flute he might end up with it.
Ultimately his lifestyle is supported by the community around him and the hard work of others.
>The pandemic has made the idea of economic collapse easier for the Average Joes to imagine, he says. As a result, the time could be ripe for considering alternatives to the status quo. Ideas previously believed too radical for consideration have already entered the mainstream, like a universal basic income.
I don't understand this. The idea of economic collapse? Did people miss the biggest economic collapse that just happened last year? It's already over. What could possibly be worse for an economy than a permanent lockdown? It's absurd how people are scared of full employment.
Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans