Can you live without money?
This question seems so simple and yet it is so complex. One person would answer: of course not, it is an absolute necessity to living in modern life. How else would you get your food, shelter and entertainment. No one’s going to give it to you for free. Another person could answer: of course, money is not what keeps us alive, it is just an abstract form. Plants and animals-like us- don’t need money to live, they need the raw materials of air, water, food and shelter.
Both of these answers are correct. For the industrialized person, the modern money system is difficult to avoid. People dream of winning the lottery not because they want a lot of green pieces of paper but because of what it represents: power, security, fame. Really it is validation of your existence. When you receive money someone is saying that you are worth this or that amount. They have quantified your existence into an abstract form.
Jobs that make the most money are perceived as a higher level of worth to society where in reality this can be the complete opposite. For instance, why would a wall street broker make more money than a scientist making huge discoveries for mankind? Why are doctors held in higher esteem than school teachers? Aren’t they both trying to help the common good? The difference is the money.
So money represents an abstract form of value, or of worth. But how much are humans worth? Believe it or not, there are actuarial tables out there that can calculate that. For instance, a drug company (or car company, or cigarette company or…..) may estimate how many people could possibly die using their product, what the costs of the lawsuits would be and compare it to the profits they could make by selling it. After doing this cost/benefit analysis, if the benefit (the profits) are higher than the costs (including some deaths of their customers), they will continue to sell it (or fight for all its worth to be able to).
So back to the question. What if people just opted out of the money game (because that’s really what it is)? Could you live without money? I really don’t know. We have collectively decided that we need a certain standard of living, that we want electricity, that we wants cars, that we want everything to be exactly the same (the little boxes). Could we survive living outside of the box?
I think that’s why we have shows like “Lost” and the older version “Gilligan’s Island” maybe even “Little House on the Prairie” or movies like “Castaway”. It helps us to think in real terms if we would be able to survive without our modern industrial way of life – what our money system represents.
But could we do it? After reading the book “No Impact Man” and reading articles like The Man Who Lived Without Money and this blog post by someone trying to live sustainably in Hawaii, it makes me wonder. It seems that unless you are willing to give up a lot -and basically live like a nomad, a bum, or a hermit, it is not the easy way to live. We have made one of the most complicated, convoluted money systems (and therefore the industrial complex itself) to be the standard.
We have turned not only every item we use, but human beings ourselves into production units for money. And we only get a tiny fraction compared to the wizards of the planet who control it all. The people who try to step out of it are punished and must live as the outcasts. And people wonder why they would ever leave? Why when you can have cars, and TVs and computers and any new gadget on earth (at a huge cost TO the earth and the other peoples who live on it, I might add).
What can we do by ourselves anymore? What product do you make with your hands, that you can sell -or give, or trade- directly to someone else? What percentage of the things in your direct visual vicinity were made by a real person, animal or plant that wasn’t further processed by a machine? When I look around I see a computer (machine), a box of kleenex (machine), a stapler (machine), tape (machine), scissors (machine) and on and on. There are two things that are “real” in their whole form: a grapefruit (that was no doubt transported here by a vast series of machines), and ME (YOU)!
But I am a product of this system too. I suppose I could live with a little less, but I am already pretty frugal. I could live in a tent in the mountains (somewhere warm) like our friend who is hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. But that would only last so long. Eventually you want to come back to a dry, warm comfortable bed. And so we have become domesticated. We are products of and for the modern industrial complex. And this wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for all the bad things that it can and does cause.
Machines have made our lives easier in some ways. But they have also made us much too reliant on them so that we can’t do anything ourselves. We have become dependent on the factories to provide us with everything. 99.99% of things I own are a part of this machine-made world. And a huge majority of those items are disposable! So what happens if a cog in the system breaks? We will be in serious trouble. And we’ve had plenty of examples of these problems of centralization already (anytime you hear about a massive recall or even rush hour traffic, you are hearing the side effects of this system not to mention the larger chronic problems of pollution, global warming, obesity AND starvation).
So is there a way to opt out without losing out? I think this is the core question of Fruitfulista. How to live fruitfully with abundance and joy. I think there can be a way, but it would take a revolution. It would take people making more conscientious decisions about what they buy and why and how they want to live. It would take people rejecting the big boxes, the standards, the “fast” way, the machine-driven world, the huge corporations and huge government and moving back a little to when we could do things locally, as people and animals and plants once were. It will also take moving forward using technology to benefit people getting off the subscriptions to these huge entities.
And it probably seems pollyanna to think this way, or it may seem like I am glorifying the older, outdated ways, but I really think we could learn something from it, and we could actually move technologically ahead. As my husband pointed out in his post about the free Abuntu software, innovations can be made without profit as the single motivation.
We need to think about where all this “stuff” comes from and think about where you could get it so that we could help a local friend or neighbor instead of all the money going to the 1% elite that rules the world. Small businesses need much more support than the huge ones. And small businesses that utilize closer-to-raw materials rather than machine-fabricated are even better.
And do what you can do in your own home. How can you become more self-reliant and off-grid? Even the small things count. I think a garden is the best place to start. Where else can you see something so small (a seed) lead to nourishment for your family? You are controlling your life in a real sense. From there you can move onto larger projects of self reliance and community development.
It will take a lot to change the norms that have become implanted these last 60 years or so and it will take more than just a few individuals to move this (it will probably also take sweeping policy changes), but I think we can move to a more sustainable way of life where money is not just an abstract form of random “worth” but will be utilized as the tool it should be: to measure value of goods and services provided by people (more than machines), but not people themselves. When we can get there we will be richer than we could have ever imagined.
I wrote a blog called “How expensive is it to live as you do, once you are set up?”
http://eveningrainfarm.com/2009/12/how-expensive-to-live/
This touches on some of your points.
I would add that this question can be answered from the supply side of things. I mean, what do I really need? And, where does it come from? Wendell Berry is one of my heroes, and he often refers to how we interact with the land we live upon. The land is the basis of all our survival needs. Everything we use is either mined or grown. So, let’s say the money question has two parts: permission to occupy a piece of land on one hand, and all other needs on the other. Once you have some productive land, you can be as self sufficient as you’d like, and you can separate yourself from the industrial system. The gangs (powers that be) know this, and make sure that there are plenty of folks who are landless and need to work for money. If ‘they’(owners of factories, etc) can keep the land out of the hands of the ‘peasants’ then there will always be a supply of cheap (desperate) labor and loads of folks who gotta have money to meet their survival needs. Once you have land, the whole equation has to do with how essential industrial products are to you. If I live my whole life with stone tools, and someone hands me a pocket knife, I would go nuts! “For one hour of work I can have one of these?” The same goes for bicycles, computers, and so on. My wife and I sometimes play this game where we compare which industrial product would we give up first, second, and which we would hold on ’till last: lighting, refrigeration, internet, automobile, phone, hot shower. Today, I’d lose the shower first, and hold on to the internet ’till last. (If you choose to give up the automobile, you have to decide whether hitch hiking is cheating.) So, the need for money depends on whether you consider certain industrial products and services to be luxuries, or necessities. If we suddenly had zero access to industrial products, one thing that would freak me out is not having shoes. Losing basic human mobility is scary. I have heard of a nomadic tribe in Malaysia who had one industrial item: a cooking pot. So when you talk about living without money, the issue could be framed in terms of: where does our important stuff come from? Can I weave it? Can I grow it? In the book “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, a New Guinea farmer asks a westerner “How come you people have so much cargo?” That book, and Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael” are two attempts to answer that question.
Don’t forget most of us would die before the age of 30 and live in awful conditions. When Katrina talks this way I always remind her that she would have been dead long ago if it wasnt for surgery.
Scott,
I think you’ve really hit on something. When people moved en masse to the cities, they left behind the country -the land, and therefore their ability to be self-sufficient. It’s amazing really how fast that changed in a period of only a hundred years or so!
Jeff, my point isn’t that we should leave all that we’ve learned throughout these years behind, it’s that we need a serious adjustment. We’ve come so far that people can’t even bathe themselves, feed themselves, take care of basic medical needs or entertain themselves without some form of the system being in the middle of it making money.
It’s not that Katrina shouldn’t get any kind of surgery, it’s that it shouldn’t have to be through a huge medical industry with HMOs, PPOs, AMA, BC/BS, and all the other alphabet soup that make even the necessities into life about money rather than the intrinsic worth of the life of person.
Wasn’t there a time when a doctor was a part of the community like the miller, the blacksmith, the horseshoer, the farmer, the logger? The doctor helped in exchange for money, but maybe in exchange for some barter or skill that someone else had. Now what if we could take that same sense of community and invigorate it with the innovations of today in terms of technology that we never would have seen years before.
And, we also had much worse sanitation back in those days. People died much earlier because of acute conditions, not the chronic ones caused by today’s lifestyle (smoking, eating, drinking too much and not moving). People developed vaccines and water treatments for these acute infections and diseases, not to just to make money but because it would help mankind!
These ideals of technology and innovation and the wisdom of our elders are not mutually exclusive. We live in a great time, but we had better figure out what we want our world to look like or we will just be stuck with whatever we are given from the powers that be (that took the power long ago).
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