This is a great practical example of LIFE & LIVING in an Equal Money System.
It is also a fascinating example of approaching questions through the unfolding of practical common sense as best for all and moving beyond the boundaries of the current consciousness/ system. The questions were answered by Esteni De Wet on one of the Forums.
See how our thinking is conditioned to remain within the bounds of confinement as we've accepted it in this world system - and witness how from one singular point, Esteni opens a door to freedom and self-expansion, as she presents at the same time a new paradigm for a new world based on the value of life:
question - are you allowed to accumulate those things you have bought with the set amount of money the state allocates you ?You can accumulate things – However if your behaviour is obsessive compulsive and personal self interest trumpets what is best for all, it will be seen that you have a disorder and psychological training will be required to address the disorder.
For instance, let's imagine I own an old portable radio that I listen to all the time, but it burns through batteries pretty quickly, Having antiques, using antiques will be a personal interest / hobby that you can pursue. And when specific models / batteries are discontinued and this is an interest that you have you would be able to take responsibility for the discontinuation of that particular line, thus enabling you access to the specific interest that you have.
would I be allowed to buy batteries?In an Equal Money System – you will not be buying anything. You are assigned credits in order to gain access to the resources that you require. The easiest way of looking at this principle is using an example:
Imagine you live in a very big family – Lets say 20 people – All your food is always provided for (you or them are purchasing the required goods) – you have a place to live – your basic needs are met. Then you have a specific interest developing that you would like to pursue – You discuss this with your family and the family makes provision so that you are able to pursue this interest – The family measures your request to see whether it is what is best for all and making sure that the interest is clear as a self directive interest to pursue.
Now – using this example we can see that there is no buying and selling, lending and owing. There is a need – The need is met.
It must be clearly understood here though that personal responsibility plays a big role here. If you have an interest – You are taking responsibility for the entirety of that interest – By taking full responsibility for the entirety of an interest one will soon learn that with desire comes the responsibility of that desire – Thus – it is not just about taking (the personal self interest) – It is about taking responsibility for that self interest.
...with my money and then store them in my home in large numbers (let's imagine the reason I would want to store them is that it is an old technology and batteries of the right size are becoming increasingly rare).You will be able to store items.
So would I be allowed to have a cellar full of these hard to find batteries ?
The part that must be understood here is that if this hobby takes preference over that group, you become obsessive and your decisions are influenced by this obsession – It will be clear that it is not what is best for all.
Remember – In a world where we are giving to each other that which we require – the latest technology will be at the disposal of all – Thus holding onto old technology such as the radio is a personal preference which may or may not be supported by the group – depending on the availability and sustainability. That said – You may even as a hobby – develop your own batteries that make this older technology function.
If I am allow to keep hold of and store the things I bought, would I then be able to freely swap and trade these batteries with other radio enthusiasts, perhaps in exchange for someone's homegrown tomatoes or a nice portrait of my son or a haircut ?We do not trade in an equal money system. We give or we do not give. Giving and not giving is determined by the equality equation. Using the same example above.
All your needs are met in this family – So lets make this example a bit bigger now – The family is now the entire world’s population. You live in one particular town and you know a lady who does hair cuts. She does this because she loves cutting hair – it is what she has decided to place her focus on – this is her passion. So – you go to her and ask for a hair cut – As this is her passion – she gives this to you.
Your passion is old technology and as such you are a collector of old technology – But not just that you make it accessible to those that also have a passion for old technology. As this is your passion – you are always interested in finding ways to make old technology practical and accessible to others.
And if this free exchange is allowed - could this exchange be deferred - by that I mean let' say my radio enthusiast friend needs a couple of my hypothetically-hard-to-find-batteries for his lovely old 1962 radio and normally in exchange he cuts my hair - but at the time I give him the batteries I don't need a haircut - could the haircut be deferred in the following manner . . .No – This is called bartering. You still end up in a system where people owe things to one another – This is the system that got us into the shit in the first place. There are two essential key factors in the Equal Money System – Giving and Taking Responsibility for that which has been given to you.
1) I give him the batteries.
2) He gives me a promissory note that reads: "I owe Lee one hair cut for those batteries he gave me"
3) When I need to get my hair cut I simply phone up my friend - arrange when it's easy for him to do my hair - and hand him the note on the day.
Is there anything in that arrangement that would fall foul of the EMS ?
And one further corollary question . . . . imagine one day I notice in the mirror how handsome I look with long straggly hair (yes ladies, you know the look :D ) - and so decide I am not in need of a haircut - so have no need to trade in my promissory note for a hair cut with my friend - would I be able to trade the promissory note with someone else for something else (if my friend who does the hair cuts is cool with it being passed on)?
Already answered.
In this context, here follows a further perspective by Marlen Vargas Del Razo:
It’s similar to a point wherein someone asked me (through a YouTube comment in one of the Equal Money System videos) about being able to get/ own/ have 5 cars wherein I pointed out that we can only drive one car at a time therefore creating an evidence on how the accumulation of cars have become a ‘symbol of power’ in society – this single idea of ‘having up to 5 cars’ comes from the capitalist brainwashing that is extensively promoted and nowadays propagated through the ‘rich and famous’ that accumulate all types of rarities and cars and houses that can only exist if there is enough slaves they can pay for to keep everything in place and functioning.
So, it will be interesting to see how the usual consumerist quirks that have been adopted as part of ‘our preferences’ are debunked once we realize that we didn’t actually NEED the item, but indulged into the accumulation, variety or worth-placed on such item/product/object as a mental value system which we’ve embedded to virtually everything – even sometimes to people – in separation of ourselves. That’s the infamous monetizing of reality wherein if we look in common sense, having 5 cars for a single person is a plain act of excess – yet I know people that do own such amount of cars and have made of cars ‘their passion’ but such ‘passion’ can only exist as long as they are able to profit such amounts of money to keep their hobby in place. Someone that is barely making money for a living won’t think of getting more than 1 car and only if that’s utterly necessary and doesn’t affect the rest of their most immediate needs to cover.
The point of ‘meeting your needs’ is actually very cool to emphasize because within that, we’ll be able to draw the line to see how much do we buy out of sheer ‘compulsion’ or actual necessity. This is one of the points that I’ve placed in action within walking this process wherein I’ve simplified my expenses as I have simplified my ‘lifestyle’ to begin with. All forms of personality build-ups require money, all addictions and any other ‘entertainment’ that I might seldom indulge in whereas others ‘need to have it’ every single weekend or so – all eventually money related just as anything else in this reality. And the point to look at is what’s behind it all. I went to buy fruit, people were watching a soccer match in the store, people go to the store to buy beer because ‘there is a soccer match’. So even if it seems as some type of ‘healthy entertainment’, the single ‘enjoyment’ of such match is mostly inherently related to alcohol consumption, buying of food or certain junk food I mean, there are many products associated with one single point of entertainment such as watching a soccer game on a saturday night, probably more than what we can even consider. That is not an actual ‘need’ but part of the accepted entertainment that is just as anything currently profit driven and sold well as people ‘need to get distracted’ after spending an entire week ‘making a living’. So it all compensates itself when the money they earn is spent on such pleasures wherein it all goes back to the same ‘masters’ that plan this entire system to work to the T for their own benefit. This is HOW we are responsible for ‘corporate greed’ as well.
What we will face eventually as we go into a transitional phase is the re-assessment of ‘what we are built of’ – what do we buy, why do we buy it, what value/worth is such product adding up to ‘who I am’ – does buying/owning such thing define me in any way? Can I live without it? These are literal questions that I’ve asked myself whenever finding something and going into the compulsory state of ‘wanting to buy it’ – I tend to accumulate stuff and I realize this is out of fear – or creating a ‘stock’ which I call ‘being prepared/cautious’ – sometimes it is so I don’t have to go buying milk all the time and sometimes it’s out of creating a sense of security around having more than 2 items of the basic meals I usually eat. Now this is only talking about basic-needs like food. If we go into all the items we buy for our pleasure/entertainment or sheer compulsive shopping-treats we’ll get to face the reality of the worth/value as the why we buy what we buy and how we’ve defined ourselves accordingly.
Possessing creates a form of security in our current system. We can hear how people are gleeful whenever they manage to ‘finally own their house’ – if they ever get to do so. So far it’s been quite a long time since I’ve heard people getting to own their house nowadays unless it was inherited or bought in the ‘old bonanza days’ in this world. I also got to know brutal stories of people losing their homes to banks after great devaluations took place in this country in 1994 after having their mortgage doubled up from overnight. Insane, and such person that was my mother’s best friend eventually got cancer and died, consumed by the constant worry about their elusive debt that grew exponentially fast.
So, possessing a house, a car or anything won’t mean ‘securing your life’ as your life will simply be able to be granted with a house to live in, a car if you need it and virtually ending this constant worry about ‘finally owning something’ for the sake of being able to sleep at ease at night.
Clarifying the bartering point is also cool as we can see how it is within the ‘I.O.U’s that money came to be within generating these relationships of give/take that weren’t unconditional. Eventually in bartering someone will decide that a kilo of potatoes ‘deserves’ two kilos of bananas for whatever reasons they might give and within that, creating further inequality between products which is an equivalent of profit making in the long wrong = inequality; whereas if everything is worked for to be produced and placed as equally available, we’ll dissolve such current differences that are outflows of speculation that comes from the ‘claws’ of the system that decide on the worth of certain foods in the ‘food market’ for the sake of creating some profit for them.
A basic example here is how avocados went up in price here in a crazy manner like never before and they explained me how it was because ‘the cream of the crop’ of avocados was sent out to the US and there were barely non ‘good stuff’ left here, so due to the infamous offer-demand law, the demand was such that couldn’t be fulfilled hence prices went up to the point wherein I would pay for one single avocado what could’ve been good for 3-4 avocados before. YET common sense is that there is a monopoly behind this that has made of ‘avocados’ a product of desire to be fulfilled in a certain way that the rest of the markets are absorbed to fulfill such need. As a parallel point, someone that owns an avocado tree in their parcel won’t experience any ‘change’ in the growth of avocados and, as a result of them being out of the market-circuit, they’ll simply have no correlation to the current rising up of avocados in prices in our usual markets – the tree is the tree and it ‘knows’ no economics which is an equivalent of fancy laws that are created to benefit only a few.
As a final example someone asked the other day in one of my videos on how things would be given – meaning if there was John and Paul wanting to have a car yet John didn’t work at all and remained under an apple tree all day while Paul worked all day, how would ‘that’ be equal? Yet the basic point that I asked is why would John want a car if he was planning to remain under an apple tree all day? These type of questions mostly reveal to what extent we are not willing to give to another what we want for ourselves, and how even if John decides to stay underneath the tree, if he requires a car and has been a human being that’s worked for the system and shows no other signs of greed, then cool for him getting a car, why not?
Working won’t be ‘our key to the world’ anymore in the sense of only being able to have access to our basic requirements if we have a job and If we have enough money to meet our needs. Within this, work will also become part of our expression and process of discovery of what the human being will be able to be/become once there is no worry to have food on the table or a place to stay in the next day.
By living in a world where giving and taking in equality is available for all, the inherent greed that comes through fear of loss will cease to exist as no ‘scarcity’ will be in place – we know how scarcity is part of the tactics to promote compulsive acquisition of goods as there is an ‘impending fear’ of such item/product not being there anymore next time or ‘going extinct’ or rising up in price for whatever reason those that ‘name-the-game’ would decide for. This is hooked then with trends and any seasonal human quirks such as Christmas time when everybody is out there shopping their pockets till they’re dry.
Lol how can we take anything as ‘true value’ in this current system if we’ve monetized all, even ‘love’ or ‘happiness’ or whatever anyone would consider to be ‘out of the loop’ from such value system.
Everything has been ‘tainted’ within this current system and, because it’s our creation, we’ve got to take self responsibility for it. We cannot possibly continue wanting to ‘own the world’ for the sake of feeling superior, feeling more, feeling ‘valued’, feeling ‘loved’ even – there is a LOT that we’ve created as an idea of ourselves disregarding the very physicality that has tolerated our mental bs value systems for so long now.
We’ve got to stop within ourselves, we’ve got to realize that a simplification of our own lives is required to then be aware of what will actually entail to take self responsibility for our very basic needs and services to be met/fulfilled once that there are no more ‘slaves’ to pay for to do the work for us, once that we are not able to ‘own’ for the sake of creating a certain profile within the credit-system required to be able to obtain ‘more’ as such surplus of money was only debt anyways. Within this, all egos will eventually be deflated like balloons that lose their hot air – which is money as it currently exists. This is part of what we’ve realized and shared here as part of our process in seeing how money affects ‘who we are’ and how we experience ourselves differently when ‘we have more than enough’, when ‘we don’t have any’ or ‘when we are on the verge of losing it all’ – and many other interim states of course.
So – money as the added power on the human will cease to exist and this giving and taking will remain as the exchange that we have as our physical breathing- in-out/ giving and taking without being able to ‘accumulate breaths for the sake of living more’ or out of ‘fear of survival’ lol – if we take the basic principle of breathing as ‘Life’ as I am Here, we’ll be able to understand how any form of ‘power’ beyond each breath is a delusion that has only filled some greedy men’s pockets and how giving and taking should be as fearless and as ‘natural’ as breathing.
Lots of changes ahead for us, glad to have it this way because we cannot possibly continue as we currently are now.
Thanks.
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