I recall writing the section about Recoinciliation in the middle of the night (lucid dreaming and then forcing myself to pull back out before I fall asleep) and thinking, oh how wonderful, imagine using our currency to incentivise peace rather than competitiveness, which creates distrust, acrimony, jealousy and fuels war.
When someone is given a Hoarder Coin the recipient will be reducing the Settlement’s chances of peace through the confiscation of their coins, a ramification none of them wants, appears to be effective, at least fictionally. It would require the population to respect and honour it though, which in our cynical and contrarian world would be a hard ask.
We are similarly shaped by our dog-eat-dog financial system. Often we talk about our deficits as human psychology based, but I dispute that. At least some aspects of who we are is formed by the competitive world we live in. It’s not too late to change direction and use money to incentivise the revival of a dying global ecosystem. Even Adam Smith, the father of capitalism said it had a natural endpoint. Would it be difficult to change our invented financial system and adopt another? Enormously so, but either it dies or we do. It might just be worth the effort and short-term (decade?) of disruption to transition to a system not designed around perpetual growth. This is the basis of my next book, The Quiet Revolution. Non-fiction.
