The current financial system is a mess. It is built on a foundation designed for an era of physical ledgers and slow communication, but we are trying to run a high-speed, digital world on top of it.
Most people assume money is created by the government. In reality, the vast majority of our "money" is created by private banks when they issue loans (Fractional Reserve Banking). Since every dollar is born with an attached interest obligation, there is technically never enough money in existence to pay back all the debt plus the interest.
Ever notice how economics is always, "Grow or go, go, go?" It's because this booby trapped debt system forces a perpetual growth mandate. If the economy doesn't grow fast enough to cover the interest, the system collapses.
It's like hiring a bunch of people to give out parking tickets. It costs more to employ the parking patrol than the city has budget for. So in turn, they ticket any and every questionably parked vehicle. The residents basically pay for an unnecessary service they don't want.
Good thing Long Beach would never do this! .... oh wait-
In other words, the city "needs" the money brought in from parking tickets to pay the ticket writers. Just like the banks need us to go into debt to pay the interest on money they've loaned that they didn't have to begin with.
And neither service actually improves the lives of us, the common people.
This begs the question,
Why do we even perpetuate this human-made, erroneous system that isn't working for 99% of the people?And this is not an exaggeration, this system doesn't work for literally 99% of us.
We are obsessed with survival. We research wild animals in awe of their rhymes and rhythms.
We don't beat our hearts, or grow our hair, or digest our food.
We don't breathe air, air breathes us. Our CO2 is necessary for the plant's to eat, just like their oxygen is necessary for us to breathe.
Man couldn't design a more perfect system if he tried.
We were perfectly designed to inhabit a system that functions best when we stop interfering with it.
Nature is the ultimate proof of the "Do Nothing" principle. A forest doesn't have a central bank, a 401k, or a department of urban planning, yet it is the most efficient, productive, and wealthy system on the planet.
The tree follows the sun; the soil provides plants nutrients as a byproduct of its own existence.
The rain doesn't charge for delivery. And it doesn't create a poisonous chemical plastic to bottle itself up in for convenience.
Everything gets done because every element in the system is simply being what it is. In nature, survival is the default state, not the goal. It is only in our human-made financial systems that we’ve made survival a subscription service we can’t afford.
This is why I love the saying, "Do nothing and everything gets done." This is based on the principle of Wu-Wei, which is the art of non-interference.
Wu-Wei is similar to symbiosis, which is the idea of two separate parts coming together for mutual benefit, but it failed because human ego entered the equation. We treated the Earth like a business partner we could cheat, exploiting nature as if it were a resource rather than our own flesh and blood.
Wu-Wei recognizes that we and the environment are not separate. We are one thing moving together. It's an identity of being in the flow with the flow- a fractal of a macrocosm as a microcosm. There is a universal order that always works out; we just fight it inadvertently by trying to impose our own broken and selfish logic on top of it. Instead of fighting against, we should just respond to and gently correct anything that's out of harmony.
Just look at nature, it is so abundant! Not one thing screams, "Ooh there's not enough of this for you and me to both have it, so I'll buy all of it, and rent it to you for a price."
