I am 41 and a father of two, but my personal situation and my name is irrelevant. Nameless, these words can be read on their merits, not those of the person I am as I write them. I want to set out a path to transforming the world, in as few words as possible. For the moment, I’m not talking about what is likely, but what is necessary:
MONEY
1. Money must end. It can end. If we were free to follow our destiny, and if this was understood, everything could be shared according to use value. No one would possess anything, their bodies excepted. Children would be protected. Beyond that, everything would be open to everyone who can use it; possessions would disappear and only tools would remain. Every use of a tool would be based on explaining to the present custodian the use you want to get from it. Everything you have in your immediate surroundings could loaned to others, or given, and likewise you would have the chance to loan or receive anything you needed for your journey from anyone. A global solidarity around fulfilling one’s destiny, and the destinies of others, could be created. Money would no longer have any use. The shift in consciousness would be profound, but within two or three generations globally, it could be achieved. The principles would be simple and would mark a return to community, to the value of human being, and to a primordial sense of presence in the world. The alternative, which we currently live, negates all of these things.
WAR
2. All war would be immediately illegal, cancelling the need for defensive wars or preparation for war. Military-industrial complexes would be reoriented, moving away from protecting specific communities, or amassing resources and ownership, and towards serving the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit of mankind and all beings (animate and inanimate) found in the world. Every use of technology to dominate would be abandoned. The hostility of our environment, to human beings as a species, would be understood, but our relation to danger would change as we regained balance, and developed local, communal and global solidarity among humans, and between humans and all things. One of the first things taught would be how our world as is – as we have constructed it – is killing us, and that anyway, we need to have a different relation to death. With great care, children would be taught about death as soon as it becomes graspable to them. As such, they would be taught about time, and the wider horizon of successive generations. Fear of death would be combated, while at the same time the gift of life would be affirmed. Above all, we would attempt to live in both the past and the future: learning about mistakes made, and striving towards a transformed world and way of life. Existence would be about fulfilling one’s innate sense of destiny, and how one can contribute to collective liberation and collective care. We are all present together.
STATES
3. States would be abandoned. Positive anarchism would be embraced; which is to say, the simple principle that none would exercise power over any other, ever again. This surely would entail a re-education of parents, but within foreseeable generations the example of becoming one’s destiny would take hold, and children are much more influenced by what their parents are than what they say. Free of the detailed fascism of the money economy, parents would be free to look across an open horizon and embrace their dreams, which would have a cumulative effect on generations. The transition of human life would be understood in terms of generations. It would be understood as a medium term drive, one that would entail short-term difficulties. Meanwhile, the end of the money economy would allow more free time for individuals, whether parents or not, to gather together and discuss – locally and globally – a new way forward for the human race. It is not beyond our means to organise a global discussion on human life in its essence, one that would depart from the core organising principles that have imprisoned us and breed so much violence, disease, depression and alienation: money, power and ownership. Within generations, prisons would disappear definitively. Fear would be reduced.
ALIENATION
4. Every detailed form of alienation from the world and others would be mapped and identified, and public discussion would focus on a larger horizon, which is our existence on one tiny mass amid galaxies that constitute billions in the observable universe. Nature would again be our primary field of life. Respect for nature would be paramount. Steadily, we would leave our concrete cities for other ways of living. This could be achieved over two or three generations. We would be reacquainted with the grandeur of nature. No single step would have as profound an impact as locating human life once again within the field of original nature. With money and war gone, the sources of conflict in the world would be greatly reduced. With positive anarchism established, and destiny revered, conversation would be the natural meeting point of two viewpoints. In the end, none could coerce another; contemplation would be left over when desire or needs are not met, placed within an ongoing individual task of feeling and walking the path of destiny. The condition, however, is established that communally, and individually, we all have the obligation to help others fulfil their destinies, as they would help us.
WORK
5. Everyone would share in everything, over the span of a year at first, and later longer periods. Astrophysicists would be linked again to farming, poets with administration. Work would be recast as the condition of possibility of collective survival, until the ethics of unity took hold and it became simply second nature to think of others locally and globally. In time, no one would have a single occupation. But this would not mimic the fascism of post-Fordist neoliberalism, where viciousness is bred as a virtue, with the political end of ripping all foundations from under our feet. Rather, across any given year, people would play multiple roles, in order to see so many aspects of human life, and to grow solidarity among peoples. Leaders would emerge not based on power or class, but in terms of being attuned to the possibilities of this world, in particular as relates to its beauty.
CLASS
6. The demobilisation of the money economy would occur according to a 20-30 year plan, so that the resources of the planet are evenly distributed. World hunger could be solved within a generation. Global education could be organised within a generation. Our focus would be to deal with problems of existence at a global level, and at a local level, within a self-supporting mechanism of dealing with the immediate and the distant. No one would be subject to death or ill-health by neglect. The 1% and 99% would disappear in a generation. Globally relevant projects that take great collective effort would not end, but would not be tied to the profit aspect within the money economy, but rather to global will, and hence become more immediately fulfillable. As public education on our fundamentals as beings disseminated, more and more people could be involved in vast global projects of elevation and understanding.
RELIGION, NATION, SELF
7. Every religion would be obliged to recognise commonalities with other religions, and metaphysics without proof would not be accepted. Claims to the divine, exclusive or not, would be cast aside. In time, religion would devolve down to personal ethics and disappear as a means of mass organisation or indoctrination, to be supplanted by global consciousness and the consciousness of being. Along with States, nations would be surpassed as locales of allegiance, to be replaced by simply a world of all its beings. Borders and passports would disappear. Every human being, no matter their situation, would be accepted as enjoying equal rights. In a world where none could coerce another, and where none would be coerced, everything would come down to understanding the path and desires and hopes of the other. The absolute line of non-coercion would be protected by all, while all would be open to myriad proposals on behalf of their fellow human beings. As individual desires would be expressed and fulfilled, so would be the desires of others. Global solidarity would exist at the level of individual and shared destiny.
SEXUALITY
8. All prejudice and discrimination based on sexuality would be abandoned forever. Everyone would be free to love whoever they wish to love, while in tune with the principle of non-coercion. The nuclear family would be abandoned as a dominant model, replaced by care for all human beings on a multi-generational horizon. The love of parents for their children would be celebrated, but parents also integrated into the global reality of generations, and generations within the planetary reality of myriad species. Some may choose to remain together, as couples, as parents, as companions, but obligations would disappear as humanity as a whole becomes one’s first family. Absence of coercion would lead to a liberation of all human beings, individually and collectively. Sexuality would be stripped of its moral prohibitions, while retaining its absolute beauty. People would be free to negotiate this question themselves, based on the affirmation of non-coercion and a new community of all human beings in togetherness. Listening would surpass judgement.
UNIVERSE
9. Consciousness of what exists above our heads — the universe in all its mystery and wonder — would be taught the world over. The aim would be to understand our situation as cosmic beings, not simply or only as beings on a specific planet. This elevation of consciousness could have a reinforcing effect on all the specific changes we have to make to reorientate our relation to the world, to others, and in abandoning the dominant systems that have narrowed our horizons until now. Who could imagine a prison world when they look into the night sky and see our tiny place within the vast unfolding landscape of cosmic time?
PARADISE
10. We would review the entire history of humanity with a view to changing direction, and establishing a real paradise on earth, for ourselves, our families and all future generations. The absence of a money economy following a global redistribution of resources would all but eliminate crime. The drug war would end. Children would be taught to meditate from an early age, and our relation to time would completely transform. There would be no consumer society in a world of free access to everything. There would be no more celebration of killing. Killing of other human beings would be universally banned, and likewise all the supporting mechanisms for killing. Everyone would be understood as a brother or sister, no matter what age, or from where. Everyone would care for everyone else. The absence of the money economy, and the complete redistribution of resources, and global affirmation of equal access to whatever exists on earth, within the bounds of deep friendship across gender, generations and location, would eliminate the drive to think of oneself only. The world would be an open space of possibility, with all opinions respected and heard.
With the base of consciousness that the above points constitute, and with our current means of global communication, we can transcend the limits we suffer, and in time work together as one single, massively variated, massively supportive phenomenon. We will have earned the label, “humanity”.
This could be paradise. We need not be hostage to the history of everything we did wrong until now. We can start again, in sisterhood and brotherhood, and in solidarity across generations, ending all the artificial divisions from which humankind suffers.
Let’s make this paradise.
4 June 2013