PSYCHICBABBLEsm
by Marcy J. Gordon
New Moon in Aries 1997 Issue
Restructuring Our Economy
Introduction
Greetings USED KARMA readers! This has been an exciting cycle. I attended two conferences involving community empowerment through networked computing. The first conference, called TEACH (Technology Education Awareness Conference for Harlem) brought together educators, community activists, and commercial and non-profit agencies currently working on such issues as literacy for the homeless, computer education for the poor, homeless and disadvantaged and community networks in the federally-designated Harlem Empowerment Zone. The second conference, entitled “Community Space and Cyberspace - What's the Connection?” took place in Seattle, so I got to spend some time visiting Deek, USED KARMA's publisher, USED KARMA business manager Kathryn Lewis and USED KARMA's godlike webmaster Willie Vaughn. (To learn more about the Seattle conference, which was sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, take a look at: http://www2.scn.org/tech/diac-97/. To learn more about CPSR, go to the CPSR website at http://www.cpsr.org and click on “Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.”)
Both conferences brought together people of vision and dedication who are working to increase ordinary peoples' access to cyberspace and computer technology. Both conferences were designed not only for education, but to create expanded networks of people working with community networks for citizen and community empowerment. These goals are greatly aided by the new moon in Aries, which this year occurs just a few weeks after the vernal equinox, the beginning of the new solar year. As regular readers of this webzine know, the new moon is when celestial energies are calmest, making this an excellent time to begin new projects. Aries, the cardinal fire sign, is about pioneering, leadership and adventure. Aries loves to try new things. The vernal equinox is another time of new beginnings, as the seeds that have been growing beneath the ground since Candlemas, the First Light of Spring (February 2 - which has become Groundhog Day in American culture) are now blooming in all their glory. This energy of new growth and nurturing is an excellent time for citizens around the world to use this wonderful medium of cyberspace to organize and empower themselves and their communities.
Valuing People as Assets
At the TEACH conference I had the supreme good fortune to meet a very great man named Edgar Cahn. Edgar, an attorney and economist, is co-author (with Jonathan Rowe) of Time Dollars: The New Currency That Enables Americans to Turn Their Hidden Resource - Time - into Personal Security & Community Renewal (Rodale Press, Inc. 1992). The idea behind time dollars is to create an alternative economy based on service to others. Edgar says our economy is dysfunctional because it is based on an abstraction - money. Money is not only abstract, it is anonymous and impersonal. There is no meaningful human interaction involved in the exchange of money.
People can make money simply through having money to begin with. People who make money through speculation do not create any tangible goods or services. In short, they do not contribute to society in any meaningful way - they deal only in abstractions. Thus an economic system based on money is devoid of trust. There are no face-to-face human relationships involved in these green slips of paper that form the backbone of our nation's economy. The money you receive may have been any number of places in the hands of any number of people, but you never met any of those people. There is no connection between you and the item of valuation with which you obtain your survival in a moneyed economy.
Time dollars afford a paradigm shift from an economy based on money as assets to an economy based on people as assets. Those human assets are valued in terms of the time spent in community service. The beauty of time dollars as an alternative currency is that everyone earns one time dollar for one hour of community service no matter what they do. Time dollars are completely egalitarian - no distinctions are made on the basis of education, experience or any other arbitrary criterion. Secretaries are paid the same amount of time dollars as doctors and CEOs. In addition, time dollars provide karmic rewards in the form of good feelings people get from volunteering to help those less fortunate.
One of the reasons dogs are such popular pets is because they are pack animals, just like human beings. The nuclear family is a social structure that goes completely against the grain of human design. Remember, thought is energy, and energy is magnetic. All humans are naturally telepathic. Most people in Western society have been socialized to block out their natural telepathic abilities. Yet these gifts continue to exist, whether we use them consciously or not. All of us as humans are always communicating on a conscious basis and on a subconscious basis, whether we realize it or not. That is why it is so important for humans to have contact with each other, so they can be in each other's auras and connect in the subtle energy planes of mind, heart and spirit.
Thus face-to-face human interaction is as important to the spiritual wellness of a community as it is to a community's economic and material health. Given the lack of community in American society, is it any surprise that loneliness is this country's number one mental health problem? Yet when was the last time you read a newspaper article or heard a talk show promotion touting loneliness as the lead cause of America's burgeoning mental health crisis? Yet loneliness is the pathology underlying many other forms of what gets labeled as mental illness and antisocial behavior.
Through time dollars, people develop meaningful and caring personal relationships with other members of their communities. Affluent people tend to work in time dollars programs for this reason alone, often donating their time dollars to individuals or community organizations. The types of services to be included in a time dollars program are limited only by human willingness and creativity. Ideally, a time dollars program should be designed and developed by members of the community it is designed to serve.
Here are some examples of ways a time dollars program can be implemented. For example, in Brooklyn, a major borough of New York City, senior citizens can use time dollars earned through helping other senior citizens to pay part of their HMO expenses. For example, a healthy 75-year-old with a car can drive a sick 95-year-old to the grocery store and help with the shopping. Cleaning services, cooking, child care and massage are all examples of services that can be exchanged for time dollars.
Edgar Cahn recommends that local merchants provide discounts for time dollars to support the local time dollars bank and encourage service and participation in the community. Only by knowing our neighbors can we work together to make our governments more responsive to our voices and our needs.
The Internet Fly in the Time Dollars Ointment
In the New Moon in Aquarius 1997 issue of this webzine I made some predictions regarding alternative currencies and the world's economic health (see archive below). Little did I realize when writing those words that not two months later I would be meeting Edgar Cahn, the creator of the time dollars concept. I spoke with Edgar regarding my vision, which left him somewhat dazed. However, his ultimate response to the contents of my vision was to hug me, which I interpret as encouragement.
I told Edgar that I realize a fundamental tenet of his time dollars theory is to keep goods and services produced in the community within the community. This is critical to the idea of building trust and interpersonal relationships into a community's economy. I explained to Edgar that with the Internet, time dollars are no longer limited to redemption within the community of origin. Once we have functional electronic cash (which I still maintain is coming sooner the rest of the world thinks, based on my ongoing belief as earlier expressed in this column that new communications currently being conceived and rapidly developed will dramatically and forever change the topology of the current bandwidth landscape) people are going to start hooking their time dollars banks together and exchanging time dollars for goods and services over the Internet.
When this happens, people will be expanding their networks of trust. If someone bails on a time dollars obligation, they will have a hard time avoiding the consequences from the members of their own community. If a person is incapacitated and you were supposed to take out their garbage on Tuesday but you didn't show up until Thursday, do you think you are going to get a happy reception when you show up? In addition, word of your unreliability will spread quickly around the community, making it difficult for you to accumulate future time dollars. While this may not seem like much to an employed person, it is a very big deal to someone hoping to use time dollars for experience as a springboard for employment in the mainstream economy.
Starting a time dollars bank in your community serves other important societal functions. Once people in a community get to know and trust one another, they can come together as a group to deal with larger social and political issues not only in their own communities, but on the state, federal and global levels as well. The New York Times ran an article last month stating that 50,000 people demonstrated in Bosnia in support of the right to free news media. Subcommandante Marcos, leader of the Chiapas rebels in Mexico, has a website to publicize his struggle to free the media worldwide in order the represent and protect the rights of indigenous people everywhere.
More and more of these kinds of groups and organizations are taking their place in cyberspace and linking up with like-minded beings. The explosion of mass consciousness this column has harped on in recent months is proceeding right on schedule. So keep looking for signs of spring and find out what people are doing in your community for equal access, community networking and citizen empowerment. As we used to say back in the 60s, POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
Copyright 1997 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com.
The Marcy J. Gordon corollary to the second law of thermodynamics states that in the new world, all roads lead to Brooklyn. (If the population of Brooklyn isn't evidence of increasing entropy, I don't know what is.)