Framework dictates the rules of any game and limits the possible outcomes of the game. Despite requiring immediate and radical change in the world in order to survive as a species, we are currently held firmly in place by the enormous inertia of our existing framework. We have pushed the current Framework to its logical conclusion and the current systems are self evidently unsustainable. What is required now to safeguard the future of humanity is an immediate profound change of the Framework in which we operate. Change either with or without our consent is inevitable. If we wait for the change to occur naturally, we will have little or no control over its outcome. So what are we waiting for?

It seems that we are waiting for world leaders to realise the error of their ways and make the necessary changes to safe guard our future before it is too late. Whilst we can safely expect our leaders to make changes within the Framework, is it reasonable to expect them to be able to make changes to the Framework in which they are so well established and successful. If you had worked so hard to get where they are now could you? It is fundamentally against their short-term best interests to change the Framework in which they are proving so successful and the system in which we are currently operating does not promote or more importantly, reward long-term vision. For fear of losing ground in our competitive economy, our leaders will not be able to consider making the required changes to the Framework, until the failure of the system is too obvious to ignore anymore. The problem being that by the time the failure can no longer be plausibly denied, it will be too late to do anything about it.

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There is a positive feedback mechanism (cumulative causation) occurring between the effects of Representational Democracy and Capitalism which unless interrupted will lead to catastrophic failure of the whole system. My goals are focused on how we can relatively quickly and peacefully modify the democratic decision making process. Unless we find away to get more peoples voices heard, we will be at the mercy of the highly concentrated power held by vested interest to implement the changes that are needed to undo the system which lead to the vested interest in the first place.

Image by _moonpie via Flickr

My comments here are based on my experience of the UK property market. Since banking and markets are fairly global these days, I would be surprised if the circumstances vary greatly in the US or any other country around the world.

These days, the cost of construction represents a relatively small proportion of the cost of a property. The major component of the cost being the price of the land. For example, a four bedroom detached house in the area of the UK where I live would cost between £150K – £200K to rebuild in the event of a fire. However, the property value on the open market would be around £600K – £700K. The same house in a less desirable area only 10 miles from where I live costs in the region of £400K – £500K. The difference between the figure to rebuild and the figure to purchase the house being the value of the land on which it stands, which in turn depends on the location/desirability of the land.

It is not availability of property, but the availability of land that is affecting house prices. Because we see vast tracts of green fields covering our countryside, it may not be obvious that there is a shortage of land. However, the requirement for government permission to be granted to build on land creates an artificial shortage. To emphasize this point please check the price differential between land with permission to build already granted and agricultural land in your area. Statistically, in the UK, all but 400,000 of us live on less than 6% of the land (Source: Guardian, August 2003)

Until about 30 years ago, banks in the UK would only lend a borrower up to 2.5 times a single household salary for the purpose of mortgaging a property. When I was a boy this meant the most my family could afford to pay for a house was 2.5 times my father’s salary. The bank also insisted on a hefty deposit between 10-30% of the value of the property to ensure that the buyer had an investment in the property ,thus encouraging responsible borrowing. The requirement for a deposit in a climate of near zero consumer credit meant that the buyer was required to save the deposit money. Having the maximum borrowing limit tied to salary levels coupled with the requirement to save a deposit had the effect of setting a maximum limit on house prices based on a single person’s salary. Buyers only had so much money to spend so there was no point asking more than that when selling, resulting in relatively stable house prices.

Over the last 30 years, for reasons I will explain in my next article, banks have become ever more desperate to lend money to consumers. The first tentative steps taken by banks in this direction were to offer to lend 2.5 times the combined salaries of both husband and wife. So in families where both the husband and wife worked, the amount they could borrow almost doubled, thereby doubling the maximum amount that families with two earners could afford to pay for a house.

This new availability of credit applied a steady upward inflationary pressure on house prices. With the amount of money available to spend on property nearly doubling, so too over a period of a few years did the price of property. Initially people were still constrained by the requirement to save a deposit which acted like an anchor holding down the number of people who could afford to borrow the maximum loan amount offered by the banks. Another factor still affecting the amount that people were prepared to pay was their level of confidence that they would be able to recover their investment when the property was sold. Confidence, in turn depended on other peoples’ willingness and ability to borrow similar amounts of money from the banks. As more and more people paid more and more for property, our confidence in increasing house prices grew, and so so did our willingness to borrow more money for a good investment like property.

The next step by the banks to increase the amount we could borrow was to increase the multipliers used to calculate loan amounts available to borrowers. It became possible to borrow 3,4, even 5 times the joint annual family income. As property price increases grew ever steeper, the banks requirement for a deposit became obsolete. Since the rate of increase in value of the asset was so high, any loss incurred by the bank through the forced repossession of a property was offset by the increase in value of the property by the time the bank resold the property. Basically, all the risk was on the borrower and unless property prices crashed there was no risk to the bank.

Image by Buddhaah via Flickr

It has now reached the crazy situation in the UK where there is no longer any theoretical limit to the amount banks are willing to lend against property. People can now certify that they can afford to pay back any amount of money that they wish to borrow. As long as the bank believes the value of the property exceeds the amount borrowed and the bank’s exposure to risk can be covered by reclaiming the asset/house, the money will be lent to the buyer without too many questions being asked.

What this means is that when buying a house, we are forced into competition with other people for the same resource, that due to planning legislation, is in artificially short supply. Whilst the amount of land available for building is artificially limited, the only limit now to how much a bank will lend is the perceived value of property. In other words the more you are willing to borrow, the more the property is worth so the more the banks will lend.  So we find ourselves in an ever-increasing spiral of property inflation.

The question we really should be asking ourselves is why are the banks so desperate to lend us more and more money. Originally I believed this was just down to corporate greed. Obviously banks would make more profit from increased interest payments. Unfortunately it’s not that simple and the truth is far more ominous and frightening.

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Hands up if you think the current world financial crisis is a surprise? Hands up if you don’t believe that it was not only foreseeable over three hundred years ago but absolutely inevitable? Hands up if you think there is anything we can do to stop or change it. Hands up if you think our system isn’t actually designed to collapse.

The chances are that you will want to put your hand up to some or even all of the statements above but incredibly because you’ve never been taught and in all probability never thought to ask how the monetary system works, you won’t be able to because you just don’t know.

Despite the fact that all our daily lives depend so heavily on money, we actually know very little about it. As children, we just learn to accept that people in shops will give us what we want if we offer them a few round shiny pieces of metal. What a great deal, what use is this shiny metal disk to a kid anyway – yay give me sweets! As kids we just assume that the shop keeper magically conjurers up a shop full of goodies that he’s happy to dispense for a handful of metal or maybe a few pieces of paper. We don’t appreciate that there is a whole supply chain behind the manufacture and sale of the things we desire and to be honest, we don’t really care.

Image by Brintam via Flickr

We also learn that while we don’t have any idea where they get it from, mummy and daddy always seem to have some. Some of us might know that they have to ‘work‘ for money but that doesn’t really mean much to us either. It’s enough for us to know that to get what we want, all we have to do is ask mummy or daddy to give us some of that money stuff which they always seem to have in their purses and wallets.

This manna from heaven attitude is carried over to our adult life. Whilst we may accept as adults that we have to do some work to get our own money, we still don’t stop to think about what it represents or where it comes from. We just accept that if we have it we can buy what we want and that makes us ‘happy‘ and if we don’t have it we can’t have what we want and that makes us ‘sad‘. Where it comes from and what it is is of less significance than having lots of it. It’s one of those Lego building blocks on which our modern society is so firmly established that we just can’t imagine a world without it.

What the hell is a Global Financial crisis anyway, does anyone really know? We hear it reported daily on the news that a recession coming and just like children being told – “no sweeties today” we accept without question that there’s going to be less of everything, start to batten down the hatches and stop spending. Does anyone know where this recession is coming from or why? In global terms what’s actually changed in the last 12 months? Are there less people in the world, do they suddenly need less food, clothing and shelter than they did last year or has what they all want out of their lives suddenly and dramatically changed? The answer to all of these questions is no and we must conclude that in reality, not much has changed at all! So why the huge hiatus now when everything seemed fine last year?

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Standing outside a prestigious financial institution to add gravitas, financial news correspondents regurgitate words fed to them by government ministers, economists and bankers about how the crisis is due to bad investments and sub-prime markets. Just like vain courtiers pretending they could actually see the Emperor’s new clothes so they didn’t appear stupid, we nod sagely and pretend we understand. Whilst in our hearts we simply pray and hope that better minds than ours understand what’s happening and know how to fix it for us.

If nothing has really changed in terms of what we want and need, don’t you find it strange that the global economy is grinding to halt because there isn’t enough money? If money is just something we use to make transactions simpler and more fluid how can it be that there isn’t enough of it? How can there not be enough pieces of paper and little silver disks. After all we can make as many of those as we like – can’t we?

Well no we can’t because we all intuitively understand that the notes, coins and plastic we use to pay for things have no inherent value. We can’t actually eat money or build houses from it. We all know that money represents something. A currency only has the value we attach to it. The value of individual currencies goes up and down every day depending on our level of confidence in that currency. We all know that by simply creating as much money as we need would simply make it meaningless – wouldn’t it?

The answer to this question may seem intuitively obvious but sadly the world doesn’t work in intuitively obvious ways, not when there are such huge powerful vested interests pushing it in other directions!

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A good question to ask ourselves is how can there be less money today than there was yesterday? Surely all the money that was here then is still here now? If there is a shortage of money today, isn’t it just that people are sitting on their money and not spending it out of fear? Could it be that an economic crisis is something we talk ourselves into, a simple problem of liquidity?

Whilst this seems like a plausible explanation its not as simple as that. The truth is that there really is less money in the system today than there was 1 year ago and to understand why you need to understand how the monetary system works today. You need to know how money is actually made, where it comes from and what it represents.

The explanation is so outrageously incredible that if I simply told you, in all probability you just wouldn’t believe me . To have any hope believing what I’m about to explain, you need to understand how we slowly and gradually arrived at the current situation over a long period of time. The best way to do this is to go back in and look a the history of money, why it evolved and what it is supposed to represent.

This will be the topic of the next article in this series.

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In Good and Evil, Choice and Responsibility I speculated that if an entity is not conscious, nothing that it does can be determined to be good or evil. There must be conscious and therefor active choice involved for an action to be labeled either good or evil. Once an entity attains conscious, everything it does is a choice for which responsibility must be taken. What we describe as evil only exists when conscious beings do not actively choose to manifest good.

Could it be that what we fear most is the burden that the responsibility of choice places upon us? The thought we might be alone in a cold, dark, infinite and lonely universe is the most terrifying thought imaginable. Could it be that we need God to blame? How many times do we hear ourselves asking how could God let something happen? Aren’t we a little like children frightened about leaving home and having to take care of ourselves for the first time – pushed from the garden of eden by our father?

There are proportionally very few evil individuals who wish to act against the natural order of things. The problem is not the number of people being evil, it is that the number of people who are not being good.

Why then do a large majority of human beings who consider themselves good not act in accordance with their beliefs about themselves as being good? Why do we tolerate evil and allow it to exist and flourish amongst us? Why do we not act to manifest good in our world?

Out of fear most of us attempt to escape our responsibility by choosing to do nothing. We look the other way and tell ourselves that if we are not committing evil, we are by default being good. However, if conscious choice is a prerequisite to good and evil, there can be no such thing as passive good. In order for an act to be good, we must take full responsibility for our ability to choose and consciously act to manifest good.

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything — Albert Einstein

We convince ourselves that since the difference we can make as individuals seems so small that our actions must make no difference at all. Our conclusion from this is that since we can’t change what’s happening in the world by ourselves, it can’t be our responsibility.  So instead of acting to manifest good, we sit at home watching the world through our TVs condemning what we see happening but accepting no responsibility for it.

After the second world war, many German soldiers tried to use the fact that they were following orders as a legal defense for participating in or not opposing atrocities committed by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945. The International Law Court at Nuremberg refused this defense and made a ruling documented in the Nuremberg  Principles that declares that individuals have a legal obligation to follow their moral code.

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him. — Nuremberg Principles, Principle IV

All human creations exist solely through a constant effort of will. No matter how large the creation or how long it has endured, once the will to create is gone, it takes very little time for the creation to return back to the entropy from which we created it. Modern scientists estimate it would take less than 1000 years for all traces of humanity to be erased from the planet if our species were to become extinct. Good too is a human creation manifest through an effort of will.

I could never understand the concept of Original Sin as taught by the church. It seemed absurd that an innocent child who had never even drawn breath could be tainted with sin. It didn’t help that no representative of the church that I questioned on the subject could tell me anything more on the  subject than the doctrine taught in theology class.

Writing this series of articles about Good & Evil triggered a realisation.  Could it be that the concept of Original SIn is an attempt to convey that there can be no such thing as passive good? Once we became conscious, we are required to remain vigilant and act consciously to manifest good, for if we fail to, we are condoning evil which must surely be a sin?

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There seems to be a movement in the blog community to talk about good and evil at the moment. I’m not sure what’s driving this urge, possibly the approach of Halloween or maybe something deeper? Whatever the motive, I have decided to take the opportunity contribute to the discussion.

After thinking deeply on the subject of evil, I notice the following:-

• It requires human beings to observe and judge evil into existence.
• Only human beings can commit an evil act.
• When humanity becomes extinct, evil will vanish from the universe with us.

The terms good and evil arise from the dualistic way in which we view the universe. In reality there is only action followed by consequence. A spider eats an ant, a dolphin gets washed up on a beach, a forest is destroyed by natural fire an infant is born and a new star is created. Without human beings to observe these actions and pass judgment, declaring them as either good or evil they are neither good nor evil. They just are what they are and there is only natural consequence following on from the action.

The judgment as to whether something is good or evil is pretty flexible too, which is not an attribute of something that is real. Judgment is influenced by many factors including personal & cultural values, historical influences and environmental factors. What is considered to be evil here and now may not be considered so in another time or another place.

Sin is geographical — Bertrand Russell

Sin is temporal — Visionary

If a tiger kills a child in the woods, it would be a tragic event but no one would ever dream of calling the tiger evil. It’s just a natural consequence of walking in woods where tigers live. If however, another human being killed a child in the woods there would in all probability be a majority consensus that it was an act of evil perpetrated by a monster. Swiftly followed by demands for punishment and retribution against ‘a’ perpetrator.

Since the outcome of both scenarios is the same a child is dead, the act of killing a child cannot be inherently evil. Why then do we see the death of a child at the hands of another human being as evil but at the claws of a tiger tragic?

It comes down to consciousness and choice. We know that the tiger has no choice over its actions. It isn’t conscious of what it does, its only following instincts to hunt, kill and eat. It’s simply doing what nature designed and programmed it to do through its DNA coding. It’s being a tiger!

Human beings on the other hand are different. Since Adam & Eve kindly ate from the tree of knowledge on behalf of the species, we have been uniquely self-aware. We were granted consciousness and with it came choice. We are no longer slaves to our instincts like the tiger; we have freedom to choose what we will do. However, freedom to choose brings responsibility and whilst we might appreciate a little bit of choice, not many of us are ready for responsibility yet.

Dan Millman defines choice as – “Giving up something for something else that we want more”. Personally, I can’t think of a better definition, but what if we don’t want to give anything up? What if we just don’t fancy ticking any of the boxes above? Consciousness was a one-way trip though, there’s no going back, no way around our responsibility. There is no choice not to choose. Even refusing to choose is a conscious choice for which we must take responsibility.

If evil exists at all, it exists as the label we give to conscious choice made selfishly without regard for the burden of responsibility we have to those with whom we share the planet. It’s up to us all to make conscious choice at all times in full knowledge and acceptance of the responsibility that choice brings. If we try to ignore the responsibility of our choices we allow evil into the universe.

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How many times have you heard say that “there’s a fine line between genius and madness”? Yes, it’s a truism but what is it about this statement that rings true with us? In terms of the effect on an individuals life, these two states couldn’t appear to be more different.

Genius on one hand, though possibly mistrusted by many, is still respected and revered for the benefits it can bestow on an individual and society. The genius’s gifts often allow them to prosper greatly in society. If the genius applies their gift altruistically like Einstein did they are revered and idolised by society for the quantum leaps they allow humanity to take. Even if genius is used exclusively for personal gain or criminal activity, society has a closet respect for the uniqueness of the talent the individual displays. How many stories have been written and movies made that revolve around an evil genius as the central character?

Chambers dictionary defines the word genius as ‘someone who has outstanding creative or intellectual ability’. The entomology of the word is 16c: Latin, meaning ‘guardian spirit’ or ‘deity’. Interestingly, the plural of genius is genii, which also translates as ‘a spirit with the power to grant wishes’. Do we believe that genius allow us to grant our own wishes? Could this be the source our fascination?

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Madness on the other hand is feared and reviled by society. The stigma attached to mental illness so damaging that society is still reluctant to discuss the subject openly and honestly. Individual sufferers are usually incapable of functioning in society by themselves let alone prospering. They are vulnerable and dependent on others to look after their well being and cater for their material needs. The loss of control and self determination associated with mental illness terrifies us. So much so that through out history we have tried our best to hide from the subject,  locking those who remind us by their unfortunate presence in institutions and sanatoriums where we can’t see them.

If the physical manifestation of the two conditions can be so different, how do we instinctively know that they are closely related? What is it about genius and madness that links them so closely that we know that there is a fine line separating them?

The race to create artificial intelligence has spawned a big scientific effort to understand what constitutes intelligence. Recent theories suggest that what we describe as intelligence is actually the ability to identify patterns in things.  IQ tests, the accepted norm by which we measure intelligence use our ability to spot patterns in words, numbers and shapes as an indicator of intelligence.

Patterns in nature

The evolutionary competitive advantage in being able to identify patterns that others cannot detect is clear. For example, noticing patterns in seasons allowed our ancestors to start planting their own crops at the right time of year and move from nomadic to settled lifestyles. Noticing patterns in the stars allowed us to set to sea and start exploring an unknown world, then navigate home safely. Noticing patterns in the weather allowed prediction of storms so the boats could dock in safe harbours. Noticing patterns in our own bodies allowed the development of modern medicine. Nowadays, individuals who are good at seeing patterns can make millions playing the stock markets apparently gambling on turns in markets that they can see coming days, weeks even months before the rest of us. Consistently buying and selling stock at at just the right time to make the best profit, may seem like like magic to those of us who can’t see the patterns. To those who can though, it’s just the writing on the wall.

The more intelligent an individual, the more they are able to see subtle patterns. Those that we describe as genii are individuals who are so uniquely sensitive that they can detect patterns that are completely invisible to normal individuals and would never be noticed without the genius’s vision. The natural patterns these individuals notice and bring to societies attention can bring great benefit to the whole species just as Einstein did with his vision of relativity.

Fractel Paterns at Pool Harbour

The evolutionary pressure on us to be able to see ever more subtle patterns in nature can lead to problems. If we start to see patterns that aren’t there or start to imagine links between things, which don’t exist, according to modern theories of intelligence, we have just stepped over the fine line from genius to madness. For example, when you see the same person every morning on your way to work, if you start to see a pattern that they are following you when in fact they work in the building next door to yours, you are starting to see patterns that aren’t real or assign meaning to them, which don’t exist. We label people who start to see this sort of pattern as paranoid, possibly complicated with schizophrenia.

There’s more to come on this topic but I don’t want to put you to sleep so for now thats all. In the meanwhile why not try this little test just for fun.

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Then one-day tragedy struck, some how the gate to the horse’s field came open and their only horse escaped. Without the horse, it was impossible plough and farm the land. Both their meagre income and ability to feed themselves had gone with the horse. The horse represented a massive investment for the farmer and the son, which they could never hope to recoup without the ability to farm.

The neighbours in the area heard about the old farmers misfortunes and were very keen to come round and commiserate with the old man. “Oooh isn’t that just awful, what terrible luck for you both. How on earth will you survive now without your horse?”

“Good, bad, who knows?” replied the old farmer.

A few days later the horse returned to the farm. It had been wandering lost in the mountains and during it’s adventures, it had joined a heard of wild mountain horses. When the horse entered it’s field to be fed, the heard of wild horses followed. The farmer’s son noticed the horses in the field and ran out to close the gate. He managed to capture over thirty wild mountain horses. The farmer and his son had just gone from imminent collapse and starvation to being rich beyond belief in one moment.

The neighbours were back round again to mutter jealously about the old farmers unbelievably good fortune and the amazing turnaround in events.

“Good, bad, who knows?” replied the old farmer.

In an attempt to capitalise on their stroke of good luck, the old farmer asked his son to break and tame some of the wild horses so that they could be used on the farm or sold for a profit. Whilst his son was trying to tame one of the horses he was thrown from the beasts back. He landed badly and seriously broke his leg.

This was surely a disaster for the old man and his son. Too old and feeble to plough their field with a horse, who would work the farm now the son was injured? Starvation and ruin were hanging over the farm once more. Again the old mans neighbours were slightly over keen to come round and commiserate with the pair. “Oh my, what a terrible thing” they all cried. “Who will plough your fields and how will you eat this winter?” they all asked. “What terrible luck!”

“Good, bad, who knows?” replied the old farmer.

Several weeks later, war broke out between the old farmers country and a neighbouring principality. The army desperate for new recruits travelled through the mountains pressing any able bodied, eligible young men they could find into military service to help in the fight. When they came through the valley where the old man and his son lived, they took all the young sons of the old man neighbours. The old farmers son was no use to the soldiers with a broken leg so they didn’t take him.

Good, bad, who knows? You decide.

The way Amber openly discusses both her disabilities and her special gifts had a profound effect on me. Whilst reading the article and consciously appreciating Ambers openness, honesty and her willingness to share herself selflessly with the world, I noticed a growing sense of discomfort with what she was sharing. When I looked inside myself to find out why I was experiencing negative feelings, I realised that I was making several judgments about what she was saying. Awareness of these judgments set in motion a whole chain of self realisations for which I am grateful to Amber for.

I was irritated by Ambers ability to speak so freely about how special she is and what gifts the universe has bestowed upon her. I  also found myself increasingly irritated by the way she discusses her illness and disabilities so publicly. This is of course nothing to with Amber  but everything to do with the way I see myself and the world. The way I have been brought up as a true English gentleman is not to shout too loudly about my gifts and abilities. Heaven forbid if we should upset someone not as fortunate as we are, some poor soul who might think we were simply showing off what we’ve got to rub their nose in the fact they don’t have it! Almost worse than that, we should always keep a stiff upper lip – a true gentleman never makes a fuss about their problems in public – it’s just not cricket now, is it? Just grin and bear it old chap!

The more I thought about it the more I saw that I was irritated not with Amber but with myself. I saw reflected in Ambers openness and honesty the opposite of my own cowardice. It showed me that I didn’t have  the balls to walk up to the plate and take my place in the world by running the risk of admitting who I really am. After all, if I don’t admit who I am, no one can really judge me can they? They might have judgments about the persona I put out there, but thats not the real me, so my ego is protected and safe.

It’s time for me to bite the bullet, follow Ambers example, come clean, admit and own both my strengths and weaknesses. So here goes …

Money is something we use every day so we might take for granted that we know what it is. Our parents, if they did their job properly spent a lot of time and energy explaining the use, function and importance of money to us from an early age. Our society and economies depend on it. Our food on the table depends on it, as does our health, homes and increasingly our status and our happiness and sense of fulfilment. Its association with our well being is bound up with the alternative names we use for money such as bread and dough.

Given how much our lives revolve around it I wonder how many people have ever stopped to ask them selves this very simple question – What exactly is money? It may sound trite and silly but if you can spare the time, please spend a few minutes now thinking about how you would define what money is. Excuse the awful pun but can you sum up money in a phrase using 8 words or less that captures money’s true essence, can be used to describe all its uses and can’t be simplified any further?

Common answers to this question include; a means of exchange, a token of value, a way of buying goods, a way of buying services or a virtual representation of material goods. There are many different possible explanations and all of them are of course valid descriptions of what money is. Yes it is a token of value; it has whatever value we assign to it. Yes we can use it to buy things or services from someone. However, to distil the answer to its simplest form, we must ask ourselves this question; when buying anything from another human being, what is it we are actually paying for. The answer is the same for every single thing we buy.

Let’s ask another question to get us thinking; why do you buy things at all? Every item or service you buy, you could in reality make or do for yourself. You don’t have to buy food you could grow it yourself. You don’t need to buy a tool you could make it yourself.  You don’t need to pay a builder to build your house you could build it yourself. So why do we chose to pay other people for things we could do ourselves?

The simple answer is time. As mortals, human beings are limited by the amount of time we have available to us. By specialising in a particular skill, we can become more proficient and efficient at what we do. This allows us to make or do what ever we specialise in much faster and to a higher level of proficiency. Thus saving us time and resulting in a higher quality product or service.

Take food as an example. To grow food we would first need some land. We would then need to learn how to grow vegetables, what time of year to plant the seeds, the right seeds for our soil type and the right methods of soil management. We would need to spend time preparing the ground, planting the seeds and tending them for months until they were ready to harvest. We would then need to harvest and store the food until we needed it. Also, we would need to invest either time or money in getting the right tools to do the job. All of which takes a huge investment in time and is built on the thousands of years of time our ancestors invested in learning those specialised skills to pass on to their descendents interested in specialising in those same skills.

In short, when we buy food, instead of growing our own, we are actually paying for someone else’s time. The centuries that humanity has invested in learning the specialised skills, the years the farmer spent learning his or her trade, the investment they made buying land and tools and the time they put into producing the food.

The same is true of every single thing we might think about buying. At the root of every transaction involving money, what we are actually buying is the other person’s time. The old proverb “time is money” is in a sense true and so money is time. To take this one step further and to a slightly more spiritual level, the simplest and truest definition of what money is that I can come up with is this

Money is token for life force.

Why this definition is important will become apparent as this Blog evolves. The next article in this series can be found here – What Financial Crisis

I can now reveal that I’ve been busy over the last week building a new site where I can host ‘Save Our Species’ myself. Why do I need a self hosted WordPress website I hear you ask? OK, I admit it, I’m a massive techno geek and the challenge alone of getting the website off the ground myslef was almost a good enough reason. Whilst hosting the blog at WordPress.com was a hassle free and very easy way to get a web presence quickly, I am now starting to find the limitations of being hosted there are holding me back and constraining what I am able to do and how I want to do it.

This has been brought to a head by events this summer, both personal and global. As a result, I have made some decisions about my future that have been pending for quite a long time now.With some coaching from a good and wise friend, I have been preparing myself mentally and physically for a mammoth undertaking. One which I have been on a path towards ever since I was a young teenager. No less than changing the global political system peacefully and quickly so that it supports us in what we as a species choose to do. It’s a scary prospect and not one I have much relished but one I have known I must face. I have put it off for as long as I can for various reasons which I will no doubt share with you over the coming weeks as the story unfolds.

You will find the new Save Our Species website here at www.saveourspecies.net. The site isn’t live so please don’t start replying to any posts you see there just yet. Before you do, I need you to register your openid on www.saveourspecies.net. This will allow you to access the new site when you are logged into WordPress.com without having to log into it. The benefits of this are that all the comments you leave  on the site will show your usual avatar and will link back to your blog just like they do here on saveourspecise.wordpress.com. You can find your openid by logging into wordpress.com and going to this page, remembering to replace the xxxxxx with your wordpress userid.

http://xxxxxx.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=openidserver

Please feel free to make any comments and or suggestions here. When I am ready to migrate to the new site, I will make a final post here to let everyone know that they should use the new site.