SELF-EMPOWERMENT WITHIN A GIFTING ECONOMY

Do I need to explain where I started to get to this realisation? As much as the story can matter, I find that it can pull you out of the present, as you are your story at this very moment, and I will see it just by looking at you, if you feel the freedom to show me.

Consequently, I do not follow formulas of storytelling. I write as is, in the present, and you will see the freedom I write of today, or later, but either way, you will. Don’t trust me. Trust your heart, your sexual centre, your soul.

Very arrogant, hey? Not conventional at all. Time will tell if you think it’s worth it.

Because my story is not important. This is about you.

The journey for change has been a long one. And despite the groundswell fighting for respect, for connection, for freedom of expression, something always seems to get in the way of this taking hold and running with it. In the meantime, we turn Earth to toxic dust, and us with it. We know Earth will continue to live past us, but do we need to try to kill it, and ourselves in the process? People think this is the cycle of life. There is always a cycle, but it doesn’t have to be engineered, based on perceived perceptions, as we do it now. If you think we have not, stay tuned.

The journeys of change are so interesting to watch, especially with how we identify with them. Activists gift for causes that, without doubt, must be brought to everyone’s attention, but one has to wonder why these situations come up in the first place. The TPP v free economy, CSG v renewables and water preservation, obsolescent manufacture v sustainable production on demand, animal cruelty v veganism, pharmaceuticals v organic food and natural therapies, race distinction v all being one. It goes on; fighting for change with paradigms that make it very difficult for change to happen.

There have been many, many, champions for change. And there are still more. We all point at human nature being the culprit it is, developing, and buying, evolution of the spirit of humanity. I have met some extraordinary people with an incredible zest for life. They are wonderful. We say to change the world, we need to change ourselves, but then, even in achieving this, we need the environment to affect, and evolve, the change, no? So when do we know when we have hit the crossroad of changing self before changing the environment? Changing self in a social microcosm is great, but do we think of scaling the empowerment of this, or stay in the bubble?

Change is taking a new course lately. Crowdfunded startups. B-corps. Social enterprise. Motivational speakers advocating personal change. Systems and pattern analysts in business and education looking at their specific sector of change, illustrated in a multitude of ways. Activists competing for support of huge disempowered communities. Philanthropy. Social impact bonds? What is that? Decentralised philanthropy?

Changes are happening, but within what bubble? Everyone seems to connect money with impact. Even the currency designers that have been doing this for years think the same thing. Of course, in the short term, this is correct. Sustainable infrastructure has a long way to go, but what infrastructure are we building and how fast are we getting there? Few venture capitalists in business go for social impact ideas for long-term profits.

And then we have beautiful sustainability. Of course, it is our holy grail, bur we dismember it into sectors, like scientists that kill synergy to understand parts. An architect asked me what type of sustainability am I talking about: ecologic or economic? Others say sustainability is not enough, we need to regenerate. Why separate the meaning? Would not regenerate imply sustainability anyway? Regenerating what? We reduce our want of change to discussions over wine and jokes, in places and events that are hardly encouraging of valuing sustainable empowerment.
If we take a step back, looking at the whole picture, and look at the drivers of systems as a whole, we can simplify networks of empowerment disempowerment. Acting on fear, or joy. Trusting, or trustless mechanisms. Of ourselves. Of others. It comes down to this, no?

And so the key is what drives disempowerment. What parameters deduce us to think we are enemies but try to be friends? Let’s move past race, or governance, or scarce resources. There are two main points of view that shape everything else:
1 how we perceive human nature
2 money

Did I miss anything?

I didn’t think so. If you disagree, think back from your opinion, and you will get to these 2 paradigms.
The 7 year old son of a friend of mine told his father:
‘If we did not have money, no one would be poor.’

The discussion about the human condition is enormous. Discussing this as a foundation will waste time, but as much as we have our own instincts of being, so are they also shaped by the environment. We are instinctive survival creatures. We adapt to the environment to do this, some better than ours, and we are usually recognised for this capacity, especially by the opposite sex. Masters propogate. What we question is what type of master. One of war? One of ownership? One of science? One of love?

Who we become depends on how empowered we are. On truly understanding self, we do not exercise leveraging conflict, but collaboration. We are discovering this change in this age, but are tools, like that of the hunter, are blunt in achieving the full scope, and deployment, of this realisation. Yes, we are both competitive and collaborative, but our environment dictates which is dominate. People believe we are the source of the evil in our world. Certainly our reactions are, but this is dependent on being empowered, or not.

To allay the discussion of human nature, and focus on the leverage point to empower it, I give you the child. Look at their first breaths of joy of discovery, wonder, vulnerability. Their love, and our connection to it, is absolute. But then things change. Schedules. Sleep. Support for everyone involved. I bet the newborn feels this, and they are already called to action to decide: am I overwhelmed with my need for support and safety and need to command it, or do I fully trust that the support is there for me with my trust? I believe that the babies who become adults that never forget their trust are the ones we hold in highest esteem. The self-realisers. Amazing people. I love them already.
Navigating one’s trust can be daunting. So many curve balls. Some incidental, some contrived by those weaker or stronger than you, either destroying, or cultivating.

So what drives the decisions that people make early, or late, in giving up and valuing war, or holding onto their integrity, trust, honesty? See? There it is. Human nature.

Please allow me to present this simply to you: scarcity. Before intelligence, we lived in scarcity. No doubt. However, are we still this inept? Many want you to think so. Time is scarce, resources are scarce, and so we work without love for the things we do. And told this is life.

Until now! Yes! We are in abundance! Scarcity is a perception! Look at all we have! Be a part of this today! Let the money come to you and love every moment of your life. Buy my book, listen to my workshop, be empowered.

Systems.
And who is empowered? Is empowerment just you? Your peers? Your community? Or Earth?
I’ve noticed how abundance is being sold: feel it in your heart, let the money come, watch the film, let me teach you abundance as I know it. Over and over. Have you noticed that?

All to have you embrace money.

Yes, we have used it for generations, civilisations, but based on what paradigm? That human nature is untrustworthy? That we need a quantified exchange model to get the based deal, as resources are scarce?

There are many ways to measure value, to measure wealth. What is important are the parameter to achieve. Throughout history, in cultures after dominion, wealth is measured by power over others. We acquiesce, trusting this is normal, hoping to find the strength and acceptance to be great. This becomes political, not creative. And as all political-centric civilisations go, they grow, and die. We blame the greed of human nature, we blame scarcity, but really, it is our trusting the perceptions of those that want to disempower us, in the guise of empowerment. Because trust is human nature.

We think that maturity is learning to be wary, of knowing the difference of those that empower and not, but we always envy those that keep the child in themselves, who invite trust and joy in their lives? This is always beautiful. Does this have to be an exception instead or normal?

Let me show you how to do this, and I gift it to you, because to achieve this is priceless.

Why do we give our lives, our creating experiences a price? If creating sustainable experiences is abundant, why do we reduce this to a scarce parameter? We can design in lots of ways, but the ultimate realisation is it will never, ever, measure out unlimited capacity to create.

There are many people who make a living in designing new currencies to empower connection, yet they limit the parameters for their designs. Like mainstream currencies, there is always a cost somewhere. There is always the need for administration. There is the perpetual need for learning, always designing currencies in a new way, exploring, continually making exchange complex between communities. All this does is perpetuate the need for icons. Fuck icons. Fuck people who think you need to be empowered because of them. They become stars in the hope of building community, but always based on derivatives of fear. We always look for icons outside of ourselves, instead of seeing we our all icons of creation. There are many names I could mention that keep our progression of freedom small, but like all leaders externalising power, they limit themselves.

People call money energy. A measure of wealth. It is neither. It is a medium to exchange energy, wealth. Money’s existence is dependent on our creativity, not dependent on it. This being the case, there should be NO cost to money. None. That people own money to distribute is a travesty to freedom. This disempowers everyone except financiers, and ultimately it disempowers them, too, as they are totally in service to sustaining money over connecting to people authentically, openly, honestly. They can own money all they want, but they build towers of fear that continually grow. Are they at peace? No. Is that life? Of course not.

What type of currency values all our lives, and all of Earth, while enriching and cultivating sustainable innovation? Reputation. This is abundant, like creativity is. It is what we do with scarce resources and time that is important, and this is limitless. People think reputation is attached to money. They are wrong. They are playing the limited game of reputation as servant to masters who mine your value, not empower it.

I could talk about currencies and credit institutions like micro banking that are designed badly, but the bottom line is that any that incur debt or depreciate value the currency itself, not what it is for: creating sustainable excellence. They are based on the weakest link in creation: the people that do nothing. Instead, currencies should be based on the strongest creators, as they are vastly more numerous, as it is the nature of humanity to collaborate, not compete, to make the experiences of life so valuable.

There are only 2 currencies that show the true nature of money: Sardex and Bitcoin. Both are fascinating for how one overtly, and the other covertly, realise that pricing quality is meaningless.

Sardex is the closest transition exchange that values creativity. It is based on all wealth created by real work, cannot be bought by any other currencies, is loaned freely, and all exchanges balance to zero. There are fees to run the exchange, based on the national currency, as it is intended to work complementary to that. It requires a huge amount of time to administer, and while it is based on trust, not the trustless nature that people implementing blockchains as the new derivative of currency exchange, there are those that do take advantage of the credit line which they must take legal action to claim back. it is the nature of quantifying the creation of wealth that makes this happen, which also leads to the danger of it being controlled. As an example, the Italian government loved the currency and asked for a line of credit. It was refused. Of course the government missed the point of Sardex. If the government creates nothing in the Sardex world, it earns nothing. A true wake up call for a government.

But far more interesting is Bitcoin. Not as a solution, but illustrating that no scarce quantitative currency is a solution for any exchange, only abundant qualitative ones. Bitcoin is astonishing because it leverages the profit-centric motivation of people to build its infrastructure, surreptitiously building it’s foundation as it becomes harder to make profit, disempowering owners of the infrastructure to charge fees in an effort to keep BTC circulating as prices deflate, breaking the price mechanism, inevitably losing the option of profit in charging fees/mining coin. There is a choice to let it go and move to inflationary currencies, or realise the obvious: that price is meaningless as a measure of quality, let alone sustainable quality.

Analysing the endgame of a currencies is easy: if everyone is their own currency, or everyone uses one currency. Everything else is a game between currencies, which achieves nothing. With inflationary currencies, distributed scarcely but with volume increasing, it’s a slow race to get more before it breaks. This is the nature of economic cycles, and they are designed that way, increasing inequality, promoting what is ultimately slavery. With bells on. When currencies are held back from being distributed, they become deflationary, and as prices do not change, who gets what currency is left are momentary winners, but have less to buy.

Either way, the bank wins.

Bitcoin handles this quite differently. Whoever ultimately owns the BTC mining infrastructure is buying a currency that is totally decreasing in volume. The algorithm cannot make more than it’s limited 21 million coins. People play with derivatives, but this is fractional lending, which, if everyone used Bitcoin, can’t be supported. To keep the currency floating, its better not to change fees on mining coin, but it will eventually crash at the point of inflexion when there it becomes uneconomical to mine the coin for the energy needed to do it.

Now most people would pick different currencies, with different parameters, to sustain the idea of profit through money. The games we play to do this are incredible. But what does it change? We build further inequality, even for ourselves, making everything a commodity that has a price. It is the most warped sense of wealth I have ever seen perpetuating itself. Totally disconnected, trustless, inhuman. And unsustainable.

Did it empower those that live in horror of war, of waste, of loss? No. We play games with ourselves while the people that really support us: farmers and sustainable innovators, live at the bottom of the supply chain, blinded into thinking wealth is becoming a quantifiable bank.

When a currency becomes stable and free, it has a balance, but it doesn’t drive sustainable creation. Reputation, status, has no price. Everything becomes about how sustainably an experience is created, and we are invited to realise this, and ourselves, in the most trusting, supported way possible. This is priceless. No exchange model can value that, except gifting.

On understanding we are all priceless vessels of creating new experiences to share, we exchange the same way. We all become, by default, collaborative, supportive, sustainable creators. Our reputation demands that we support others, that competitors collaborate sharing resources, creating the same thing, but differently. We build diversity together. Our creative profiles become transparent, and we want this to be so. Resources of war become resources for sustainable value. All on demand. It is not about having, but what we do with what we feel we need for us to create with.

And who decides what is created? We all do. We are all different. And so we design systems that manufacture experiences differently, to be recycled into a new way as innovation evolves. Only the best ideas that present highest quality with minimal resources in the shortest time are made. Quality is not just about the product, but how the product is made, that everything is in synergy creating value that means something, be it material or a word of inspiration. We serve ourselves and others, together. There is no higher entity than ourselves, and so we all become peers. Connecting, understanding, discovering.

Dichotomies of self or other are over. These arguments are based on fear. Being empowered together is a beginning, not the end. It’s time to evolve from this point, from joy. People who think that fear is always dominant want to own you forever. They are wrong.

Understand fully: no one is greater than you, than me, than Earth. Get used to it.
:)