If you have to ask, you'll never know.

I think we all can agree that some degree of healthy competition can be enjoyable and bring out the best in people—the GOOD in people. But promoting outright evil is, well, evil. And yes, psychopathic.

Then there is the question of how to introduce it into the economy. Currently it is by loaning it out at low enough interest rates to allow sufficient productive returns to pay interest back. This has proven to lead to speculative booms, when interest rates are lower than assets are appreciating, creating feedback loops that increase appreciation and thus more speculation.

A viable system needs to recognize excess money is inflationary and by the Fed's logic of selling bonds to reduce the money supply, excess currency is in the hands of those with an excess of wealth. So, since the stability of the currency is a public responsibility, it should be taxed, not borrowed. If we tax out excess currency to contain inflation, then how about tax credits to introduce money into the system, when prices seem to be deflating? That's what they are doing now, with all these rebates and it does serve to support productivity. Another method is for the government to spend it into the economy. This has been tried with various levels of success over the ages, but needs prudential management to not get out of hand. In the governmental budgeting process mentioned above, this might entail some degree over spending to control deflation and under spending for inflation.

Another issue would be the variability of needs by different communities from their currencies, so possibly a system of various currencies could be developed, of different exchanges rates, inflationary expectations, etc. Then countries/banking collectives could join what most suits their needs and if necessary, switch from one to another, or start new ones. Obviously somewhat chaotic, but it would be an evolving system and would engender a deeper understanding of economics among the larger population, thus making them less vulnerable to financial predation.

I think that on a metabiological scale, humanity is a nascent central nervous system for the planetary organism, but we are still at a fairly juvenile stage, since the function of a mature and healthy nervous system is to protect, preserve and advance the entire organism, not just obsess over its own compulsions and make large messes in the process.

Since money is drawing rights to productivity, the question is how to formulate a viable and healthy production based currency system. Money serves as a store of value and a medium of exchange. As a store of value, it is private property, but as a medium of exchange, it is a public utility. As property, there is the desire to accumulate as much as possible, but as a medium of exchange, more money than productivity degrades the value of the money. Money should only be treated as a public utility. In that way, it would be similar to a road system. You own your car, house, business, etc. but not the roads connecting them and no one seriously cries socialism over that. Treating money as form of public commons would make people very careful what value they would take from social relations and environmental resources to convert into currency in the first place. This would be healthy for society, the environment and the monetary system. Of course, it would create a slower, but more sustainable economy. We all like having roads, but there is little inclination to pave more than we need. If we applied the same principle to money, life would be in better shape. Instead of valuing ourselves by how big our bank accounts are, our sense of worth would be on how strong our community is and how healthy our environment is. A smaller money supply would go a long way to limiting the size of the government and the banking system.

The function of the central bank is to make maintaining the value of the currency a public responsibility, while leaving private banks to profit from managing it Political power started as private enterprise and eventually became monarchy. When monarchs lost sight of the fact that their purpose was to guide their people, as opposed to simply exploiting them, they tended to be overthrown and eventually the whole system of hierarchal power was replaced by political power as a public trust. Democracy works by pushing power down to the level it is responsive. If we were to make banking a public function, it would also be bottom up. Local credit unions would use local deposits to loan to local enterprises and use the profits to fund local needs. They would then form regional banks for broader investments.

This discussion reminds me of the old African saying that if you want to travel fast, go alone, but if you want to travel far, go with a group. As valid today as it was ten thousand years ago, when the first version was probably originally expressed.

The point being that at this point in human history, the efficacy of traveling alone has been about used up for the time being and it's time to start making sense of what being a group entails. In that regard, I think there are two primary social constructs that need to be revisited; God and money.

The concept of god originated as a plural. Polytheistic deities were what we would currently describe as memes. Basic concepts to which the larger group accepted, such as the singularity and status of the group one is immersed in. Geographic and astronomical features. Seasons of the year. Group and cultural activities, such as celebrations, war, death, sex, sleep, illness, etc. All the myriad connections between these concepts naturally lead to a pantheistic network with a mythology of allegorical relationships. This pantheistic unity was difficult to describe conceptually, so it was natural to have this state defined as a unit and then to give it some form, the adult human male being the logical default option.

As we understand today, unity and unit are two profoundly different concepts. Unity is a state of connectedness, while a unit is a set. Effectively it is the difference between zero and one. While we think of zero as nothing, as an equilibrium state, the absolute, it is also everything. A potential spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell. The problem is that human knowledge originates from the focal point of the individual and after attempting to peel away all the details and complexities of life, we have settled on this idealized conscious knowledge as our God and in a fit of megalomania, projected it onto the entire universe. To the extent there is a spiritual absolute, no matter how far into the abyss it extends, it is this raw consciousness to which we give form, while knowledge is a feedback loop with physical reality.

Top down theology assumes a moral theory of good and bad as a metaphysical duel between the forces of light and darkness. Actually they are the basic biological binary code, the attraction of the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental. This elemental relationship is a polarity out of which exponentially complex relationships develop. What is good for the fox is bad for the chicken, yet there is no clear line where the chicken ends and the fox ends. Life is a process of creation and consumption as it bootstraps itself upward. We may all be branches of the same tree, but the result is we all point in different directions. Morality is a complex code, similar to language, which groups of people develop in order to coexist and obviously differ in detail from one group to another, but serve the same basic function. Between black and white are not just shades of grey, but all the colors of the spectrum.

It should also be noted that polytheists invented democracy, possibly because a pantheon requires a process of negotiation and resolution seeking. Monotheism has often been a logical bulkhead for validating monarchy and other forms of top down rule.

In fact, what's wrong with evil? Isn't destruction as necessary as creation? Why don't we promote bald-faced evil.

Here's the world I want to live in: I want to live in a world where two people talking about their aspirations could get together, and when one says "I want to be the next Stalin!" and the other says "I want to be the next Gandhi!", they could look at each other and both say "Awesome!" It's all a GAME, guys! We rip off our masks at the end of time and all is forgiven!

It's working out. If it doesn't, that just proves I was too weak.

One of the big lies – or more generously, misunderstandings – of Darwinism is its unscientific emphasis on individual organisms.

In ecosystems, individual organisms barely exist. An ecosystem is symbiotic and interdependent, by definition. It is impossible for any complex organism to survive without a viable support network.

You can only pretend to be an individual because – like all multicellular life on Earth – you're a communitarian collection of transient self-sacrificing cells.

If evolution hadn't evolved cooperation, the Earth would still be populated by competing single-celled organisms each frantically trying to gain advantage over the rest, to no great effect.

Do you want to have the social intelligence of an amoeba? Because that's all that libertarian individualism can give you.