Money and social power gradients are abstract cultural artefacts designed to defy compostability – social conventions that we can accept or reject, which are perpetuated by careless and learning disabled societies – creating conditions that are literally hostile to all life.

The main purpose of the traumatising indoctrination system of the mono-cult is to override the above fact with the myth that social power gradients are a law of nature and the myth that money is essential for coordinating human affairs in so-called “advanced” societies.

The best way to expose these two misguided myths is by providing counter-examples. There is no shortage of indigenous societies that had no need for money. If we look carefully, we can even find small scale examples that persist to this day. Similarly, if we care to look closely enough, we can find small scale examples of radically egalitarian societies that persist to this day.

Autists easily get into trouble by speaking truth to the illusion of power, and by refusing to contribute to ethically questionable ventures in exchange for money. Many of us are considered uncontrollable, i.e. unemployable by organisations that operate as a pyramidal social power structure.

Life creates conditions conducive to life. – Janine Benyus

This simple ecological truth tells us so much about life and about healthy life giving cultures. It encapsulates the observation that all living beings are compostable, integrated into the sacred cycle of life by decomposing into the building blocks of life.

Money as a social carcinogen

The global fungibility of money results in carelessness.

The notion that everything has a price and that everything can be substituted by an “equivalent” service is misguided.

• We can’t survive without oxygen – oxygen and clean air are non-fungible. Polluted air makes us sick.
• We can’t survive without nutritious food – nutrients are non-fungible. Junk food makes us sick.
• We can’t survive without love and care – trustworthy long-term relationships are non-fungible. Social isolation and social power gradients make us sick.
• etc.

Communal wellbeing is incompatible with the tradeoffs and social norms that emerge from engaging in competitive markets – especially in “free” global markets that prioritise the free flow of capital over all ecological concerns of the living world.

When the tradeoffs become invisible externalities, out of sight & out of mind thanks to global supply chains and 1-click® consumer culture, it is easy to become addicted to the convenience of money – to the delusion of fungibility.

Money is a non-compostable abstraction that violates the sacred cycle of life.

The abstraction of money creates an illusion of permanence that distracts from our impermanence, and from the wonder of being alive, the wonder of being part of the sacred cycle of life. The concept of money is entangled with:

• An anthropocentric sense of superiority.
• The denial of death.
• The perpetuation of social power gradients across generations.

The construction of money as interest bearing debt turns it into a highly addictive drug.

The notion of interest bearing debt amplifies the non-compostable quality of money – it literally defies death – it grows automagically by design, and its growth is not constrained by any biophysical limits. Interest bearing debt:

• Is at the heart of capitalism and the so-called economic system, which is anything but economising – by design it optimises for maximum busyness, for maximum consumption of energy and resources; it is addictive for culturally “well adjusted” social status conscious human primates.
• Ensures that not only everything has a price, but that everything is available as a potential object for financial speculation – applying this idea recursively has led to multi-level financial derivatives, turning money into the most dangerous and addictive drug for human primates.

Given the ecological destruction we have unleashed, it is time to grieve and mourn, time to learn, and time to resist.

We have created a dystopian social world that is obsessed with “winning”, in which nothing is ever enough. The desire to win is not healthy, it is a deadly, addictive, and dehumanising collective learning disability.

The actual effect of the myth of meritocracy, which is used to normalise and rationalise head to head competition, is a consistent bias to over-represent capabilities, and to actively avoid thinking about externalities.

I recently read ‘The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations’ (Christopher Lasch, first published in 1979), written in the year when neoliberalism got “installed” by Margaret Thatcher in the UK, apparently a very popular book at the time. Our institutional landscape has learned nothing over the last 45 years. Below are a few quotes from the book. Nothing has changed: 

Michael Maccoby describes the new corporate leader, not altogether unsympathetically, as a person who works with people rather than with materials and who seeks not to build an empire or accumulate wealth but to experience “the exhilaration of running his team and of gaining victories.” He wants to “be known as a winner, and his deepest fear is to be labeled a loser.” Instead of pitting himself against a material task or a problem demanding solution, he pits himself against others, out of a “need to be in control.” As a recent textbook for managers puts it, success today means “not simply getting ahead” but “getting ahead of others.” 

He has little capacity for “personal intimacy and social commitment.” He feels little loyalty even to the company for which he works. One executive says he experiences power “as not being pushed around by the company.” In his upward climb, this man cultivates powerful customers and attempts to use them against his own company. “You need a very big customer,” according to his calculations, “who is always in trouble and demands changes from the company. That way you automatically have power in the company, and with the customer too. I like to keep my options open.” A professor of management endorses this strategy. “Overidentification” with the company, in his view, “produces a corporation with enormous power over the careers and destinies of its true believers.” The bigger the company, the more important he thinks it is for executives “to manage their careers in terms of their own . . . free choices” and to “maintain the widest set of options possible.”‡

According to Maccoby, the gamesman “is open to new ideas, but he lacks convictions.” He will do business with any régime, even if he disapproves of its principles. More independent and resourceful than the company man, he tries to use the company for his own ends, fearing that otherwise he will be “totally emasculated by the corporation.” 

In all his personal relations, the gamesman depends on the admiration or fear he inspires in others to certify his credentials as a “winner.”

bureaucracy has made life predictable and even boring while reviving, in a new form, the war of all against all. Our overorganized society, in which large-scale organizations predominate but have lost the capacity to command allegiance, in some respects more nearly approximates a condition of universal animosity than did the primitive capitalism on which Hobbes modeled his state of nature. Social conditions today encourage a survival mentality, expressed in its crudest form in disaster movies or in fantasies of space travel, which allow vicarious escape from a doomed planet. People no longer dream of overcoming difficulties but merely of surviving them. In business, according to Jennings, “The struggle is to survive emotionally”—to “preserve or enhance one’s identity or ego.” The normative concept of developmental stages promotes a view of life as an obstacle course: the aim is simply to get through the course with a minimum of trouble and pain.

A warlike society tends to produce men and women who are at heart antisocial. It should therefore not surprise us to find that although the narcissist conforms to social norms for fear of external retribution, he often thinks of himself as an outlaw and sees others in the same way, “as basically dishonest and unreliable, or only reliable because of external pressures.” “The value systems of narcissistic personalities are generally corruptible,” writes Kernberg,

The cult of personal relations, which becomes increasingly intense as the hope of political solutions recedes, conceals a thoroughgoing disenchantment with personal relations, just as the cult of sensuality implies a repudiation of sensuality in all but its most primitive forms. The ideology of personal growth, superficially optimistic, radiates a profound despair and resignation. It is the faith of those without faith.

The upwardly mobile corporate executive “does not view himself as an organization man.” His “anti-organizational posture,” in fact, has emerged as his “chief characteristic.” He advances through the corporate ranks not by serving the organization but by convincing his associates that he possesses the attributes of a “winner.”

As the object of the corporate career shifts “from task-orientation and task-mastery to the control of the other player’s moves,” in the words of Thomas Szasz, success depends on “information about the personality of the other players.” The better the corporate executive or bureaucrat understands the personal characteristics of his subordinates, the better he can exploit their mistakes in order to control them and to reassert his own supremacy.

the successful bureaucrat survives not by appealing to the authority of his office but by establishing a pattern of upward movement, cultivating upwardly mobile superiors, and administering “homeopathic doses of humiliation” to those he leaves behind in his ascent to the top.

More than twenty-five years have passed since David Riesman argued that the transition from the “invisible hand” to the “glad hand” marked a fundamental change in the organization of personality, from the inner-directed type dominant in the nineteenth century to the other-directed type of today.

essential aspects of the new man: his eagerness to get along well with others; his need to organize even his private life in accordance with the requirements of large organizations; his attempt to sell himself as if his own personality were a commodity with an assignable market value; his neurotic need for affection, reassurance, and oral gratification; the corruptibility of his values.

Beneath the concern for performance lies a deeper determination to manipulate the feelings of others to your own advantage. The search for competitive advantage through emotional manipulation increasingly shapes not only personal relations but relations at work as well; it is for this reason that sociability can now function as an extension of work by other means. Personal life, no longer a refuge from deprivations suffered at work, has become as anarchical, as warlike, and as full of stress as the marketplace itself. The cocktail party reduces sociability to social combat. Experts write tactical manuals in the art of social survival, advising the status-seeking partygoer to take up a commanding position in the room, surround himself with a loyal band of retainers, and avoid turning his back on the field of battle.

Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It “educates” the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.

As Daniel Boorstin has pointed out, we live in a world of pseudo-events and quasi information, in which the air is saturated with statements that are neither true nor false but merely credible.

The bureaucracy not only provides supposedly reliable information to high officials; it provides misinformation to the public. The more technical and recondite this product, the more convincing it sounds. Hence the pervasiveness, in our culture, of the obfuscatory jargon of pseudo-science. This language surrounds the claims of administrators and advertisers alike with an aura of scientific detachment. More important, it is calculatedly obscure and unintelligible—qualities that commend it to a public that feels informed in proportion as it is befuddled.

The degeneration of politics into spectacle has not only transformed policy making into publicity, debased political discourse, and turned elections into sporting events in which each side claims the advantage of “momentum,” it has also made it more difficult than ever to organize a political opposition. When the images of power overshadow the reality, those without power find themselves fighting phantoms.

The book reminds me of what W Edwards Deming wrote and said about “management” a few years later, and of André Spicer’s academic article ‘Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations’ 40 years later.

On the margins of society the number of people who have serious concerns about the toxicity of money is growing.

A society that uses money never grows up, and remains forever ignorant of its limitations. Together with money, the notions of investment and philanthropy are also completely broken. By neglecting deeper analysis of the polycrisis, they contribute to the perpetuation of the problems caused by money.

In a social world in which everything has been commodified, for a number of reasons, phasing out the use money overnight is not a viable option – addicts are experts at kicking the can down the road. It is time to sober up.

Sobering up

By framing the harm and the trauma responses caused by the life destroying global mono-cult in terms of addictions, we can begin to comprehend the magnitude of the wound that modernity has inflicted on the living planet.

The delusion of technological progress is feeding the addiction to various forms of convenience and consumption – this keeps us perpetually busy and it distracts us from our human natures.

The delusion of the self is feeding the addiction to various forms of social power – this “normalises” carelessness and deceptive forms of communication, and it allows our latent capacity for establishing dominance hierarchies to override our innate human collaborative tendencies towards mutual aid.

To sober up we need to acknowledge all our fears, face the pain, and turn fears into courage:

1. Fully letting go of the delusion of the self – exiting the cult of the self. This includes letting go of all the internalised ableism that permeates modern social norms, and weaning ourselves off all of the addictions that stand in the way of committing to sacred relationships within an ecology of care beyond the human.
2. Fully letting go of the delusion of technological progress – exiting the cult of busyness. This includes incrementally weaning ourselves off all the conveniences afforded by the availability of fossil fuels.

Most importantly, we must acknowledge that we can not regain sobriety alone, in self-isolation, and we can only relearn to be fully human at a scale that is compatible with our biological cognitive and emotional limits, neither at smaller scales, nor at larger scales.

Composting money

One viable approach for gradually phasing out the use of money would be a collective social agreement to prevent central banks from “printing” further money, and to attach a negative interest rate to all money (debt) that is currently in circulation. Negative interest rates can not only catalyse urgently needed initiatives to reduce the human ecological footprint, they also significantly reduce if not eliminate the toxic addictive quality of money. The miracle of Wörgl, described in detail in Bernard Lietaer’s books, is a good example.

Within the S23M worker co-op, we also make use of negative interest rates to address temporary differences in cashflow needs between individuals that may arise due to specific life circumstances. The mechanism allows members to grant a ‘trust extension’ to a member with a temporary need for additional money. We use the term trust extension instead of ‘loan’ or ‘debt’, as there is no predetermined repayment schedule, and as the interest rate is negative. Those granting the ‘trust extension’ have trust in the recipient, and the negative interest rate eliminates financial speculation/exploitation.

When a currency with negative interest rate is combined with a policy commitment to prevent “printing” further money, the result is (a) a strong incentive for those who own financial capital to lend it to those who are working on important transformational initiatives, and (b) an incremental reduction of the money that is in circulation, eventually converging towards zero. The overall result can be understood as “composting” the money that is in circulation into life giving initiatives, with a number of benefits along the way:

1. Elimination of the impossible, cruel, and life destroying expectation of a positive “return on investment” on a finite planet within a social context of ecological overshoot.
2. Providing a gradual path for recovering capitalists to reintegrate into the local ecological context, and to refamiliarise themselves with ecological and biophysical constraints.
3. Providing a gradual path for ethical entrepreneurship within ecological and biophysical constraints.
4. Providing time for people to (re)learn the art of de-powered dialogue, slowly reestablishing trustworthy relationships, even within societies that are currently plagued by high levels of inequality.
5. The incremental approach provides time to co-create and nurture de-commodified human scale communal social arrangements, thereby incrementally moving away from the social myopia caused by a one-dimensional anthropocentric metric.
6. The negative interest rate catalyses ‘trust extensions’ for ethical entrepreneurship.
7. (Re)localisation, as in the absence of positive abstract financial return, investors will benefit most from investing into local initiatives that tangibly improve communal wellbeing – including the wellbeing of the investor.
8. Over time, as the use of money converges towards zero, digital systems can be refocused from tracking monetary flows towards tracking the flows of physical resources, and waste, including flows of energy – measured in physical units, resulting in meaningful and actionable metrics related to ecological health.

The above proposal may seem radical, but anyone who takes more than a few minutes to reflect will have to conclude that it offers an incremental pathway towards egalitarian human scale cultural organisms that is designed to not leave anyone behind. All we can do is sow seeds. We are not in control. We have to trust the big cycle of life that is far beyond human comprehensibility and beyond human control.

We can all start locally, within our own social context.

The biggest obstacle is the widespread addiction to various forms of social power amongst those who currently own financial capital, which in most cases includes an addiction to the expectation of monetary “return on investment”. This leads us to the need for composting social power gradients, which involves systematically tackling addictions to social power.

Composting power

Reducing social power gradients is at the heart of all social movements and at the heart of revolutions. Daoist philosophy offers the best advice on this topic that I am aware of. There is no quick fix. We are dealing with the toxic paradigmatic inertia of super human scale institutions, and with inmates who are paralysed by fear, and, to varying degrees, are addicted to convenience and various forms of social status within the social pyramid scheme.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Buckminster Fuller

This is all that we can do – trusting in human scale, catalysing ecologies of care, and learning from and with each other, which is actually quite a lot!

Many of us are stuck in survival mode. We need to slow down, to the relational speed of life. By definition no one is able to do this in isolation. It also can not be achieved by training. It requires lived experience, imagining alternative de-powered social operating models, and educating ourselves in critical thinking tools and de-powered forms of transdisciplinary collaboration. 

Along the way we can offer palliative care to dying institutions, and advice on possible exit path for inmates who are ready to confront their addictions to the status quo.

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Jorn Bettin

Knowledge archaeologist by day and neurodivergent anthropologist by night at S23M

The more we help each other to question in ways we otherwise wouldn’t – and correspondingly discover new insights about the world and ourselves, the more we are able to learn from each other, and the more we start to understand each other. The gift that we all bring to the world is the (re)generative potential of all the trusted relationships that we co-create.

Latest posts by Jorn Bettin (see all)

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