Let’s Make the Psychological Collective Growth Narrative a Person-to-Person Story
Forget personal growth. No one gets there alone- believe me.
Recently I read an enticing article by Jessica Wildfire It’s Time To Ditch The Abundance Mindset — It Paves The Way to Inequality that nailed the narrative I feel growing inside my brain about inequality, finance, and global wealth distribution.
In a recent article I wrote, I brought into the discourse of my text a discussion about the value of work, the way in which governments get carried away by easy money from central banks, as well as the power that technological disruption is having in the global economy.
The world will change more in the coming decades than it has in the last century. And words like manipulation, control, and injustice will become almost daily utterances in the speech of ordinary citizens.
Yet in the next 5 years, the so-called “cynical economy” will bring different insights.
But what do I mean by “cynical economy”?
Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.- Charlie Munger
The economy is built on incentives. Even more fundamentally, the economy is made by humans. And humans love rewards. Rewards are short-game guarantees that motivate every human being to move from point A to point B.
In the near future, the new world will be redesigned by the gamification of the entire economy. New rules will prevail in a digitalized environment that is already accustomed to the gamification of things.
The transition to a sustainable economy will be painful for most industries, as Biden’s administration pressures the economy with ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) concerns and legislation. But there is also pressured from the technological disruption that is digitizing all sectors of all industries. Robots are coming to take our jobs and the unemployment phenomenon is going to be harder and harder to manage.
The world is seeing a cynical economy being built right under our noses, depleting the majority, in order to benefit the few. Central banks and governments know who they benefit from. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve printed 1.7 trillion dollars to support the economy, but only one-third of that money actually arrived in the population’s pockets. Where did the rest of the money go?
Not only is the world getting less fair, but the super rich are engineering it that way. They’re funneling all kinds of dark money into voter restriction bills, because they don’t want to give up their gigantic tax breaks and subsidies — which we pay for. After all, dudes like Elon Musk would go bankrupt without them.- Jessica WildFire in It’s Time To Ditch The Abundance Mindset — It Paves The Way to Inequality
The cynical economy is transferring most of the money into the few richest people by printing new money out of thin air and through inflation which is a form of theft. Inflation is taxation without legal representation, and so it’s theft. It’s an intelligent way governments manage their debts. It’s a wealth tax.
That’s how cynical our economy is right now, but things will change radically and sooner than you think.
Prosperity without growth?
Some recent research has been studying new ways to redefine prosperity.
Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.- Professor Tim Jackson Economics Commissioner Sustainable Development Commission
This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity was due to the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.
If we could at least say that this destructive goal was to save developed countries from extreme poverty, it might be slightly more justifiable but it wasn’t.
The richest countries flooded with luxuries and doused the market with products that caused nothing more than a population lacking happiness, vision, and reason to live.
An economy relying on growth to be stable turns into a collective political blindness that panics when another crisis arrives and homelessness is the mainstream.
Today we find ourselves faced with the imminent end of the era of cheap oil, the prospect (beyond the recent bubble) of steadily rising commodity prices, the degradation of forests, lakes and soils, conflicts over land use, water quality, fishing rights and the momentous challenge of stabilising concentrations of carbon in the global atmosphere. (…) Economic recovery is vital. Protecting people’s jobs — and creating new ones — is absolutely essential. But we also stand in urgent need of a renewed sense of shared prosperity. — Professor Tim Jackson Economics Commissioner Sustainable Development Commission
We urgently need a new normal, and that starts with the rebalance of our ecosystems. Simple things make people happy, not frenetic growth.
Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings — within the ecological limits of a finite planet.- Professor Tim Jackson
It’s not the corporations that will hold the power in the future, but communities or tokens.
How about the tokenization of economics?
Did you know that inside the blockchain ecosystem developers are building a tokenized economy, built under the premise of communities or tokens created to empower new incentives into a digitized economy?
Jessica WildFire shared her genuine pain about the circumstances the US nation is in right now.
Most of us already know it’s nearly impossible to survive in developed countries like America without a second job or a side hustle. We’ve accepted that as a given. We’ve even started calling people naive or lazy if they don’t do it.- Jessica WildFire
Like professor Tim Jackson stated, Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth.
Politicians are destroying our nations, but as history taught us, that is inevitable. History cycles happen and profound crises arise to bring new models, new ways to make things work.
This economic and monetary system is killing our social structures. And will continue to kill them until people rise and demand a shift.
In the isolation of their homes, increasingly larger groups of developers build a new economy- more transparent, less politicized, and based on communities that know how to value themselves, in which money is seen as finite, without the unbridled frenzy of constant and uncontrolled growth.
And above all, without the centralization of power in individuals that no one knows or relates to, people for whom we have not voted these will become the central bankers.
Mallers is creating a financial system built under the Bitcoin network, that gives El Salvadorian citizens the possibility, under the lightning network, to exchange dollars between their citizens and across the country for minimum fee at the speed of light.
In the Blockchain ecosystem, any asset that is digitally transferable between two people is called a token.- coinhouse.com
This new technology in money gives developed countries the power to send dollars to any part of the world, but also to exchange between themselves to create a more transparent economy with a finite currency. The Bitcoin protocol is a $21 million finite protocol. Meaning, only $21 million Bitcoin will be produced. Each Bitcoin has 100 million satoshis. It’s a $2.1 quadrillion satoshis economy to be built in a transparent system called the blockchain, where you can see all the transactions.
Protocols between two parties in a peer-to-peer system will make a more egalitarian ecosystem. We don’t know where it will lead us yet as it is a very young technology.
However, the present system is broken it doesn’t help the poorest among us, and it’s creating power for increasingly radical politicians to rise up as leaders. And that’s the ultimate disaster a democracy could create.
The tokenization of economics is here, and it’s changing people’s lives.
There are no perfect systems, but people like me believe in change, and most of all, in the power of communities.
The language of self-improvement and mindfulness has been hijacked and corrupted by greedy, and power-hungry individuals.
Bring the power back to our communities. This should be a new slogan for the next generation of politicians. They have the power to change, but they need the courage to stop central bankers from dominating the world.
Commercial banks will no longer be needed when central banks create their new digital currencies.
With CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currency), the central bankers will pump new money directly into the hands of the people. While that may seem like a good thing, the future Fedcoin will end our freedom for good.
First, the future Fedcoin is predicted to be built under the same system as it is today. It’s the same monetary policy, just in a new technological format. And that means they will have more control than they had previously.
Second, to receive Fedcoins we will need to have a wallet on our phones, and we’ll receive digital money directly from the central banks. The thing is, you’ll get the money, but you’ll have to spend it by Friday, or you’ll receive money to spend on certain items like retail, gas, furniture, holidays, and so on.
You’ll be 100% monetized and controlled by an authority system. You’ll look more like you live in North Korea than South Korea. Central banks will personalize your monetary behavior like a music playlist.
That’s not democracy, that’s communism.
We live in dangerous times. The monetary system is being put to the test by a completely decentralized system called The Bitcoin Network.
That is, new blockchains and tokens, new platforms and communities are being created and collateralized by Bitcoin, digital gold, in a system controlled by direct protocols between two parties, not by a central bank with dubious agendas.
In the decentralized system, you only enter a protocol, a community, if you accept what they propose. You are free to choose and you will be paid for your services in digital currencies that you accept yourself, whether they are Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other digital currency that you believe in.
I know this new world is extremely difficult to accept and understand.
But more important than this whole new world of blockchains, you first have to acknowledge what’s wrong with the current monetary system. Only then will you be able to look at the Bitcoin network with a more critical, knowledgeable, and demanding eye.
Final Thoughts
When you read people like Jessica WildFire sharing a painful and frustrating article with total disbelief in the system, you know something’s wrong.
Until recently, teachers like me still clung to the hope that our students could succeed out there in the big bad world, even if it was riddled with unfairness, if they could cultivate the right mindset.- Jessica WildFire
I still have hope in politicians, but not in central bankers.
Politicians are the magic key to unlock a new world. They have to get rid of central bankers. They have to find a new system where we can all operate without the secret societies working behind our back.
The Biden administration has both the good and the bad inside their team. They have the addiction to easy money, offered by the Federal Reserve to push quick growth through the roof. While it seems to come out of thin air, that’s, at the cost of a deadly belief that the system and the foreign mainstream will keep believing in this dollar crazy madness.
However, there is some hope for this administration through the people that work with president Biden who came from the crypto world. Through them, we have the possibility to find a better solution in governance inspired by some of the good things that are being built in the decentralized world.
We need collective growth, not just personal.- Jessica WildFire
Social media made us think in a very individualized way. These last two decades’ problems were instigated by this individualism. And individualism is making the global society more fragile.
We need the intrinsic power of communities and tokens to make the change.
We need politicians to embrace a new system, one that can reach every human being, not just the wealthy western world.
We have a unique opportunity, with the help of a technological innovative era coming, to build a new world order based on decentralization, community power, abundance, and respect for nature.
Sign up for my email list and join the happiest readers on Medium. (This is where you get exclusive access to my daily activities, experiences, and daily thoughts)