Here’s why I feel so strongly about this.

Because we’re on the losing end of the message. The message has been controlled for generations by those who see the world through a power lens. There are people who are born thinking in terms of power, whether taught or instinctual. Most people who constantly think in terms of power are interested in gaining more of it. So while you and me and spent our lives thinking of smaller goals and dreams, whatever art we’d create or who we’d help, other people have galaxy-mind about how to control people.

I’ve come to thinking about power later in life, as a defense against the dark arts, and realized just how ignorant of power games most of us are.

We’ve got to stop it or whatever empowerment we have at present is going to be ripped away. (Empowerment is power over our own choices.)

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#AbuseCulture

This guise that money is wealth is obscuring more effective ways of thinking and talking about power. Money is a shiny bauble tossed across the room for us to squabble over. A distraction. The levers of power are pulled with or without money. Money is an invention. It can be infinite. It’s a plastic Monopoly piece as a stand in for “I can obtain what I want; I can make you do what I want.”

Whenever you think of money, replace it with “unit of power.” Unit of control one person has over reality or another person. Even the money in your own bank account. Even credit. From the spare change up to the billions. Watch the world shift on its axis.

[The thread gets a little broken here so be sure to click this post to see the rest.]

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#AbuseCulture #money

Can you eat today? Power.

Can you move your body place to place? Power.

Can you move your residence? Power.

Can you move your residence to a desirable place? Power.

Can you occupy yourself with the activities you desire? Power.

Can you occupy someone else with the activities YOU desire? Power.

Can you make the rules for people who are standing in a particular place (like your property)? Power.

Can you obtain more places where you can make the rules for anyone standing there? Power.

Can you entice or even make people stand in those places? Power.

Can you say whatever you want to millions of people all at once? Power.

Can you gain the attention of people whose attention you want? Power.

These and many other things we normally talk of in terms of “buying” and “affording.” In these sentences, I’ve removed the abstraction and put it down to the solid framework underneath.

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#power #AbuseCulture

When a billionaire adds more zeros to the end of his sum of money, he’s not thinking about the money. He’s thinking about the power.

When I add a paycheck to my bank account which will quickly be gone, I am thinking only in terms of money.

This differential itself is powerful.

Shifting this thinking gives us a little power for free, power that was always ours for the taking.

It also helps us see how *we* might misuse our own power, when we remove the buffer of money.

Not tipping because of bad service? That’s not about money, it’s about power.

Choosing to not give a dollar to an unhoused person because they’ll just spend it on drugs? Power.

Talking about how the poor are lazy? Power.

Picking the cheapest contractor? Power.

Bought a product made by children in a far-off land? Power.

Donating to mutual aid? Power.

Supporting a good cause? Power.

How else have you wielded your power today?

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This doesn’t need to be a moralizing process, by the way. It is an aid to moral reasoning, but remember, anyone reading this operates with near-zero power in this system, and sometimes we have to compete with what we have for survival.

That’s why I said money is the shiny bauble tossed across the room for us to squabble over. We all play power games, all the time, with everybody, from birth. I’m playing a power game with you right now by trying to influence you towards outcomes I’d like to see for the world. (But in this particular game, I’m not using money, because there are other forms of power —but wait! The more that I think about it, I require money to have this phone and command the resources the internet service requires; my instance owner needs money to store and deliver this message, and money wielded to create the internet itself.)

If we’re going to win empowerment for everyone, we need to start thinking in terms of power. Because our enemies are.

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#AbuseCulture

But most of us, even those of us with an anti-materialist bent, think in terms of money. Shift that. Empower yourself and others by replacing your money thoughts with power thoughts.

You don’t earn money at work. You earn a piece of power. You don’t trade money for food, you enact your bits of power. You don’t spend money on rent or mortgage, you spend a piece of power to gain the right to live where you do. You don’t invest for greater returns, you invest to gain more power.

Again, gaining power isn’t a bad thing. Power itself isn’t moral. How you use power is moral. And we’ve all got to take more power. Not from EACH OTHER. But from those who are misusing their power (money!) to control the lives of every single one of us.

This is how we deconstruct our conditioning from those with exponentially more power than us. This is how we break free from the thought-terminating cliche of money.

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#AbuseCulture

When we look at money as a measure of wealth differential, we’ve obscured the reality and we can pretend we live in a “free” society. Where freedom is a somewhat equal distribution of power. Freedom is the ability to exercise power over one’s own choices.

When we recognize that money is a measure of power, now we can recognize the vast power differentials, and the concept that we’re in a free society quickly society quickly erodes. According to my bank account (rounding to the nearest order of magnitude), I’m 1e4 powerful. A low-end billionaire is 1e10 powerful. Musk and Bezos are, if my math is correct, 1e12 powerful.

Unhoused: 1 powerful
Me: 1,000 powerful
Low-end billionaire: 1,000,000,000 powerful
Bezos: 100,000,000,000 powerful

^— this is what we’re calling a free society.

No more obfuscation reveals a very different picture!

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#AbuseCulture #power #money #philosophy #politics

Look at what this implies now when we talk about income disparity between men & women. Or White & Black people. Next time you see those numbers floating around, don’t think of money, think of power. Then think about what “free society” means.

Or when a husband makes more money than the wife, or comes out of the divorce with the house & only half the debt, or if we think the husband should have control over the money because he has the job & she “just cleans the house.” Think of that in terms of power.

What else can we gain new perspective on with this shift?

I know we’re all on board w these conclusions about inequality, but I’m asking you to shift how you think of it, because sometimes even those right ideas are abstracted more than they need to be because of this red herring that money represents possessions. It’s not even material, because power isn’t material. It’s a quality, an action, an ability, an idea. Money is one of the most immaterial things there is.

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#AbuseCulture

So here’s a real-world example. I’m watching this movie about the Beanie Baby bubble. Near the end, there’s a line: “And overnight, $20 billion worth of Beanie wealth evaporated.”

That sentence doesn’t make any sense. If money represents wealth, it can’t just evaporate. Land doesn’t evaporate. Food doesn’t evaporate. Gold doesn’t evaporate. The produce from labor doesn’t evaporate.

But power? Yes, $20 billion in power did evaporate overnight.

Because the power (not value) of a collectible Beanie Baby was in its scarcity and the status and desirability it gave its owner. When the company removed scarcity, it removed power from collectors.

The masses aren’t going to flock to stores to buy a useless floppy lump of cloth that everyone can have in equal share. It’s the *differential* of having something special that gives the kind of power that we typically measure in monetary value.

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#AbuseCulture

This insight is giving me a tool to help answer a question I’ve been pondering (as I constantly try to innovate a better system): In a system other than capitalism, how does society decide which ideas get enough resources to research, develop, and manufacture, and which don’t? Many ideas require a lot of resources to implement, and some of them are objectively bad, so who decides who gets what resources to do what?

In our system, it’s capital investment. It’s a risk taken on by those with means, where some win, some lose. There’s incentive to seek “good ideas,” which is a ok filter, but as we’ve seen, it’s flawed.

Money = the power to make decisions over which innovations get the resources (aka “investment”)

We can remove money and think instead about balances of power, a much simpler consideration.

Let’s remove that confusing complication of money and think only in terms of power dynamics.

(It’s interesting that my phone corrected “consumers” to “commoners.”)

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#AbuseCulture

I need a hashtag to help me track this idea. It's part of my bigger #AbuseCulture idea, because it's a method of exchange of power, but it deserves its own recognition. #MoneyPower maybe?

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So yesterday I was thinking about government levied fines in terms of money as a unit of power. And it's elegant.

When a government fines you, that are taking away a piece of your power. This can be unpacked further to reveal some interesting aspects of our system.

For instance, a government has as much power as it does ultimately because of force. That is a raw form of power that is not directly represented by money, though there can be an exchange rate there. So the fact that the two major forms of punishment or justice a government can mete out is: 1. Force via imprisonment, a taking of all or nearly all of your power, or 2. A fine which takes away a portion of your power which can be represented by money.

So you don't need money to walk down the street, a kind of empowerment you don't have in prison, but it might disempower your ability to eat that day, or not have any effect at all. Next slide.

#AbuseCulture #MoneyPower

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We all know the saying, "If it's punished by fine it's legal for the rich," and this is another way of thinking about it.

Really it isn't the fine that's the problem, but the fact that a fixed fine has a disproportionate amount of power that it's taking away from you depending on your financial history.

A person with $1,000/mo income and no savings will be hugely disempowered by a $500 fine, which might take away power they otherwise would have exchanged to eat or have shelter.

A person with $1m/mo income and $1b in assets will not be incapacitated one bit by this fine. It's a tiny fraction of the power they have, not enough to impact them.

And from this, we can see a lot of aspects of power. In that human beings have a limit on how much power we can personally absorb or recognize. That point is one that needs further exploring but won't do that today.

#AbuseCulture #MoneyPower

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And that in order for a government taking power from a rich person to have any noticeable effect on them as a deterrent and as compensation for harm done, any form of fine-based justice needs to be somehow proportional to the amount of money power a person has at their disposal.

Again, all stuff we know, but thinking of money as power rather than wealth helps us realize what's really going on here. That these are all power games, NOT wealth games.

Money is about who gets the freedom to do what they want and who doesn't. NOT about who has the most toys.

The toys are a distraction. This is about being able to order people to do what you want. You're exercising this power when you get a burger (ordering a bunch of people to raise a cow, process the meat, cook it, and bring it to you). Or for the government to take some slice of your freedom rather than all of it for a time.

That's all for today probably. More later!

#AbuseCulture #MoneyPower
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