In a sense the whole universe is an exchange medium. Observable reality can only be observed because it is information. Information is meaning and meanings define each other in context. To be observed, reality must change so it can induce changes in the observer - activate nerve cells, affect information stored in the brain. Since meanings define each other, the spacetime-meaning continuum curves around to redefine itself in indefinitely many ways without beginning or end. Just as physical substances such as alcohol or drugs can affect the mind, so creative changes in the mind can affect the whole physical universe in a process which takes place outside of spacetime. This is the essence of magic. Humankind could thus perhaps take a more important part in the process of joyful creative exchange which surrounds it.
Subparticles are not just bits of stuff, but ripples of energy which combine to form the illusion of substance, just as wind forms ripples on a lake or sunshine in raindrops reveals a rainbow. Atoms, molecules, living cells are formed out of the ever more complex interchanging energy patterns. This interchange takes on more complex and wonderful forms in the plant and animal worlds. Plants breathe in what animals breathe out, animals consume plants and each other - so species keep each other healthy; herbivores do not overbreed and overgraze, carnivores develop keen senses. The interplay of evolution, eliminating the superfluous like a sculptor, creates humans - who continue the exchange process again on more complex, subtle levels.
Initially it is barter: exogamy - women are exchanged freely or taken in battle. Cattle, whence our words 'capital' (Latin 'caput' = head) serve as unit measures of value. But cattle and chattel (also from 'caput') are cumbersome. How to transport value over space and time? Or make big investments over long periods and ensure that each contributor will be reimbursed fairly? Females may not be constant measures of desirability and cows cannot be kept long or carried far. If they are eaten they cannot be exchanged - hence the useless accumulation of half-starved herds which represent tribal riches. More forests are cut down for pasture, more pasturelands turn into deserts. As central Asia gradually turned into the Gobi desert, nomads turned into warriors - so Europe was regularly invaded out of the East - which is also where the barbarians who sacked Rome came from.
With agriculture came the need to measure value through time more accurately. How can the farm hand who clears the land, irrigates and sows it, know he will get a fair share of the harvest? It has been shown (in 'From Reckoning to Writing', Scientific American, August 1978) that our numbers and alphabets descend from such needs to keep records. The dummy clay sack represents the real sack of wheat the hand will get. In the meantime he can exchange it for clothing or a gift for his girl-friend; it is the bearer of the dummy who exchanges it for the real thing.
But clay dummies are easily copied. What is needed is a system of tokens whose supply cannot be so easily manipulated. It is necessary to invent the value of gold and silver. Initially this is not obvious. Primitive man lives in nature surrounded by beauty and danger - why should he attribute great value to a soft, heavy, rather useless yellow substance? The problem was solved in Mesopotamia: Will Durant ('Our Oriental Heritage', Simon and Schuster, 1954, p.244) quotes Heroditus on the 'whores of Babylon':
It was the most ancient practitioners of the oldest profession who, in effect, created the value of gold and silver by obliging men to associate what they really desired with something they had to be made to desire - so old is that advertising gimmick. A given weight of gold or silver was defined as having the value of one intercourse; the metal had backing and a unit of measure was established. We owe the women much - no longer was it necessary for a village to have a large herd of cattle, nor its chief to have a big harem to prove their worth. Riches could be counted in gold, cattle eaten and sexuality less monopolised.
But gold was not without problems. Trade was hampered by complex checks of weights and purity at each exchange. It was Croesus, king of Lydia, who, about 550 BC, invented coins by stamping the marks of his realm on lumps of metal and guaranteeing that all coins so produced had exactly the same weight and purity. The concept of price came into sharper focus and trade expanded enormously. Increasing volumes of trade required increasing volumes of money. This Croesus and others who copied his idea were happy to supply. But the newly created money was not, of course, given away for free. Croesus became one of the richest men of antiquity. He had discovered a trick perfected by others after him - while he mixed a little copper into his gold coins and found that they retained 'face value', we now have paper notes. His newly created money also served the needs of his state. It became possible to organise transport, communications, education on a large scale in a coordinated centralised way using the power of newly created money.
Progress was enormous - but it had its shadow side. Law-givers, tax-collectors, police and military also were organised 'to keep law and order for the benefit of the nation' and the state became a parasite of the people who had to keep on accepting debased coinage. Tensions arose between governors and governed which could be diverted outwards. This justified the acquisition of more weapons which, not incidentally, could also be used for internal repression. Since the government controlled money, organisation and weapons, whereas the rest of the population did not, it always played a winning hand.
If taking real value from a person against his will without giving anything in return is theft, then issuing intrinsically worthless tokens and using them to obtain real goods and services can enable some people to rob others on a very large scale indeed. Gold tokens, like paper money, can be attributed symbolic value because they are 'rare'. Unlike things with real intrinsic value, tokens have no value unless they can ultimately be exchanged for real value. If some people are able to issue tokens and use them to obtain a lot of real goods and services, the process is fundamentally dishonest. Over the centuries a variety of subtle swindles developed on Croesus' original trick. So tax money mixed with newly issued currency (international loan, budget deficit...) can be lent out at interest to banks ('bank rate') who lend it out at a higher rate. When borrowed money is spent, its receivers deposit it in banks where it is again lent out at interest - and so on, indefinitely. So it now seems that the entire world is in debt to its banks - and financial collapse may be imminent. In spite of official propaganda, such institutionalised injustice cannot be in the 'national interest' - it is extremely harmful to the population of the planet as a whole.
It is edifying in this context to read about the decline and fall of Rome - how tensions within society were diverted into war at its frontiers, how free men who went out as soldiers came back to find that their small farms could no longer compete with the latifundiae - great agricultural combines run with slave labour. The Romans had slaves, we have robots; they had Colosseums, we have television; they had breadlines, make-work projects, class wars between rich and poor, overstuffed bureaucracies, the stifling of initiative with taxation, inflation and interference, and so do we.
If we do not want to follow that road again, we will have to devise an exchange system which is both fair and efficient. The Community Cooperation Coordinator system (CCC) is a step in that direction (and is explained more fully in the next entry). Briefly, it can be built on to provide public services in free cooperation and competition, rather than as rackets. Fundamentally, this is a special case of ensuring fair returns on investment - again a matter of fair exchanges. There is no need to have social systems in which politicians and bankers live in outrageous luxury in the capital while peasants starve in the countryside. We do not have to kill nature to provide more taxes for nation state protection rackets - we already have more than enough weapons to kill all life on earth several times over. We do not need tin pot dictators who use Croesus' technique to accrue enormous personal wealth nor public services which are sinecures for civil servants. There is no need for money in international trade - more than half of which is done through various forms of barter anyway. In fact, we have no need for money at all, nor need trade be national or international. All we need is fair, efficient exchanges. But it is upon the ability to issue and control money that the nation state system is founded.
Every minute several thousand hectares of forest are cut down; large parts of the earth are turning into deserts and the rest filled with junk and industrial wastes. Several animal and plant species become extinct every week. Specialists have predicted unpleasant climatic changes if we continue to pollute the atmosphere at the present rate. Since the beginning of the century, war and traffic accidents have taken hundreds of millions of lives - terrorists a few thousand. But do we see any serious effort on the part of governments of nation states to do away with polluting transportation and energy generation systems? Do they not encourage the production of automobiles, nuclear power stations, strip mining, and do they not raise taxes and so increase pressure on the people and the land?
The organisation of this planet into nation states has outlived its usefulness. No state can protect its citizens militarily - the old game of 'I can hit harder than you' no longer works now that it is possible to make weapons of any desired megatonnage. As events are proving, states cannot provide economic security either - the protection, public service and credit rackets they run are, in fact, the real causes of inflation, unemployment, depressions and many other forms of waste and unfairness. The 'justice' they dispense is founded on an old trick which enables some people to get something from others for nothing - a form of robbery. If we are serious in our desire for world peace, we can do more than trust in the efficacy of prayer. We can start moneyless exchanges which make redundant the whole system of military machines which justify internal oppression through tacit collusion. We will do away with nation states or they will do away with us. Time is running out.
Exchange systems other than those based on the 'good faith in the XXX nation state government' have been proposed elsewhere. So there are a variety of schemes out for privately issued coins or commodity-backed promissory notes. These actually pose problems similar to those solved by Croesus or the Babylon women. Commodities used for backing currencies are inevitably available in different qualities or locations and they cannot be sold or consumed. How are prices to be calculated if multiple coinages of more or less dubious worth or backing are in concurrent circulation? If some board of directors is to decide how long a line of credit is to be allocated to each member of the community, will that authority not be subject to much temptation? Is its 'guarantee' that each participant will, in fact, make good on any credit accorded him not similar to the Croesus trick? If insurance is demanded, who should decide its cost? And what if the insurers themselves default? A Funded Direct Exchange (FDE), where each participant makes a deposit in case he or she dies or defects, seems simpler and more efficient.
Conrad Hopman, BP 225, Noumea, New Caledonia, South Pacific, (tel 687 26 21 26. Hopman's ideas are detailed in his 180,000 word 'Book of Future Changes, Living in Balance in the Electronic Age', (published by the Institute for Social Inventions, 1988, ISBN 0 948826 10 X, but now out of print and available only through libraries or on microfiche from the author).