getting back to an old subject...

[Peter Korsten]

Op 14-4-2012 14:29, Tony Scharf schreef:

> Money is not the problem. The problem is greed and our base animal
> instinct to accumulate.

Exactly. Without money, we'd all be hunter/gatherers, or sustenance 
farmers (and priests, of course).

I think what people have against money is when it becomes a goal in 
itself. For example, the dealings that led to the financial crisis of 2008.

Iain M.Banks describes Gert's vision of an ideal society in the Culture 
novels. It's a society based on abundance, and hyper-intelligent 
machines. It relies on several premises:
* those hyper-intelligent machines are benign
* people find nothing more important than to belong to society; 
ostracism is the worst possible punishment
* there's an infinite amount of energy and materials

There are a couple of problems with this scenario:
* there are no such hyper-intelligent machines, and there's no saying 
that if they existed, that they would be benign
* the majority of people find nothing more important than their own 
survival and that of their genes
* the amount of energy and materials is most definitely finite

Actually, I find Banks' socialist Utopia rather objectionable. The 
people are without exception hedonistic, narcissistic and egotistical. 
The natural world is there to be exploited.

In contrast, my niece is currently taking a university course in 
sustainable development in South Africa. And whilst I get the impression 
that part of the ideas sustainable development is rather idealistic and 
political in nature, and would perhaps not stand up to scientific 
scrutiny, it is a very different way of looking at things.

And in my opinion, it's also a much fairer one. Not just to the people 
around us, but also the entire world.

- Peter