304. You Are What You Can Afford

 

Who decided to put a number in front of Life? Is that the real mark of the Beast? the Fruit of our Evil? The price to pay for our sins? A lesson to be learned?

Continuing from :

• 281.The Benefits of Redefining Rewards in Equality
• 283. Private Property and Equal Money Capitalism
• 284. Capital Goods and Equal Money Capitalism
  • 285. Who Taught us What We Want in Life?
  • 286. The More Goods we Own, the More Good we Are?
• 288. Goods and Equal Money Capitalism
  • 287. You get Happy with your Paycheck?
  • 289. Our Lives as Money-Making Machines
  • 290. How to End Slave Servility? Equal Money
  • 291. First Learn to Love thy Thyself
• 293. Services in Equal Money Capitalism
  • 295. Human Desire: Profitable Drive for Slavery
• 296. Profit in Equal Money Capitalism
  • 297. Why Are We Never Satisfied?
  • 298. Accumulating Consequence through Capital Accumulation
  • 299. More for You is Less for Me: Self Forgiveness
• 300. Redefining Accumulation of Capital in Equal
  • 301. The Rules to Play the Game
• 302. Competition in Equal Money Capitalism
  • 303. Competition: War Against Each Other – Self Forgiveness

For context on redefining capitalism, read: Day 180: The Word ‘Capitalism’ in ‘Equal Money Capitalism Redefined

 

Redefining CAPITALISM

Capitalism is an economic system that is based on private ownership of capital goods and the means of production, and the creation of goods and services for profit.^[1][2] Elements central to capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, and a price system.^[3]

^{source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism}

 

 

Pricing System

You might remember your first acknowledgement of what money is through looking at prices as a child and this being the decisive factor to know how much money your parents had, what you were able to afford and what type of living ‘lifestyle’ you had access to.  This is the closest encounter with the ‘money system,’ probably the easiest one to understand and the easiest one to accept ‘as is’ without further questions.

I remember being given money on a weekly basis as a means to create the habit of saving, and I was pretty good at it because I simply didn’t require to spend it. Money in such a way was no different to the loads of fake bills that I had to play with as a child, it was only when going to the grocery store that you confront the ‘pricing system’ for the first time. The money  I had was really not that much to buy all that I would want to, and so I became aware of what it was like to have a ‘lot of money’ which meant having the ability to buy Lots of things, instead of having to choose and be limited by getting only one thing or two.

Then comes the supermarket experiences wherein you want to get something that is not precisely a need – like your cereal, milk and fruit – but a Want: I wanted this toy and learned to see these ‘exorbitant numbers’ as ‘unable to be afforded/ too expensive/ don’t even think about it.’ And so, I learned to stop asking to buy such products from the get go, I would see more than 3 digits on the price and I knew t was simply unthinkable for me to have it.

Desires began forming about money: All that I could buy if I had all the amount of money I wanted, I could buy looots of things and enjoy myself with it. But, unfortunately, I learned that I could Not have access to that as easy as I could dream of: one had to study, become a worker, escalate in social status to be able to earn more and more to then become part of the elite that I saw could afford just the amount of things I thought was my ‘aim’ to obtain as well – this was the pursuit of happiness linked to money here, which would allow me to be ‘free’ and ‘enjoy life’ without limits. Smell the conditioning here?

 

Comparison began taking place: why can’t we afford that other family’s lifestyle? What do they have that we don’t have? And then even worse things became part of my awareness: there were children begging for money on the streets and often pondered what would they be able to afford with such amount of money? – not much, that’s for sure. That’s where I learned that I had a ‘better life’ than those begging on the streets and I have a ‘lesser of a lifestyle’ when comparing my life and my family’s economic station to that of the super rich with gigantic houses and multiple toys – of course since that was my item of comparison at the time.

Inequality was tattooed as an inherent condition to everything. Life was then not seen as Life but as something with a price tag, without ever having seen Mother Earth precisely doing the price-tagging or the bar-coding and charging interest rates for that or scheming how she could ‘get the most’ by setting the higher prices… no, none of that was able to be seen around me.

 

I learned that my education was ‘big numbers’ in price as well, I learned that my books were expensive, that renewing my uniform as I went growing up would take money, that food prices would constantly go up every year, that I had to ‘always seek for the cheapest price’ when being at the store and call it a convenience and refrain from even looking at some other ‘treats’ just because they were mostly expensive and not really nutritional. I got scarcity and lack imprinted within me as ‘who I am toward money.’ And prices became a compulsive manner to measure myself according to the cheap and the expensive, the poor and the rich and being always in the limbo that seeks for cheap deals while walking a life aiming at being able to ‘afford it all’ as an ultimate dream. Life became a series of dreams to attain such high power of acquisition later on in my life, and this reveals to what extent ‘consumerism as life’ became the ‘measuring point’ for ‘who we are’ within our social system.

 

In essence, I’ve lived a life wherein I got used to being ‘price-conscious’ according to what I am able to afford and what I would like to be able to afford. Every decision moved by fear of not having enough money later on, every choice made based on the eternal dilemma of price vs. quality, the kingdom of god was simply never on sale, and we certainly were not equal at all. Even if I tried to pretend that I didn’t care as much for what I was able to afford , it did shape ‘who I am’ according to others and this sense of injustice became an unspoken anger to see people begging for scraps of food because of them not even having access to a proper job to afford basic needs while I could see others spending obnoxious quantities in clothes, cars and useless things that could pay an entire month of someone’s school.

 

My first great shock with the ‘pricing system’ was when I was 9 years old in what was then a ‘big city,’ we went to ‘check out’ a luxurious clothing store, I remember randomly grabbing the price tag of a shirt and discovering it was as expensive as my monthly school fee at the time, or even more. I could not believe my eyes, in that moment I realized that there was something absolutely Wrong in this world: how could a single shirt be worth an entire family’s sustenance for an entire week or a month, who knows! This event allowed me to see and realize one thing: I was not part of the rich that would regularly buy at this store, and their wealth – I got told – was the ‘product of their hard labor.’ But is it? Not really.

 

This is an introduction to the pricing system, the confrontation of one’s power of acquisition in a world wherein one gets a direct realization of our social position according to the amount of money that we have, we are either rich, poor or middle class, you live in abundance, you starve or struggle to always make it through with the amount you have. You can either feel free and relaxed or oppressed and worried in the shopping experience according to the numbers in the items you require to buy, either for need or pleasure, it is all determined by our pricing system, essentially who can afford to live and who can’t. Is this the way we want to continue existing as? No, of course this is an absolute demarcation of individuals and their ability to live, a full-view of discrimination and speculation everywhere and every time that we require money to buy, to live.

 

Our life within this system can have a price, and we’ve believed this to be ‘true’ since money has become the decisive factor to enable or limit one’s ability to live. But life is certainly priceless and money is a social imaginary convention that should not exist as a means to measure your ‘economic status’ as more or less than, but as a collective agreement to support each other as Life, as Equals – and this is what will certainly give an end to everyone’s lives of scarcity, fear of losing money, fear of not having enough to live, fear of having to resort to getting loans and ending up enrolled in endless debts, fear of missing out on ‘the great life’ just because we can’t afford to miss a day’s salary, fear of not ever having the life of your dreams because somehow t is not affordable to all.

This must end, this whole social conditioning must stop here: Equal Money Capitalism 

to be continued…

 

 

For further reference, read  the Equal Money Wiki

• Place your questions as the Equal Money Forum and Equal Money Capitalism at Quora

• Visit the Group Capitalism vs. Equal Money group on Facebook.

• Read the Equal Money Wiki

• Read Economist’s Journey to Life
  

 

Blogs to Understand More about Reality:

• Day 300: The Encryption of Systems (Part One)

• Day 301: The Encryption of Systems (Part Two)

• Survival Management vs. LIFE-Regulation (Part 6): DAY 305

 

Tales on Money :

• Life Review – The Money Experience

• The Novelty of Poverty as the road to Wealth – Life Review

• The Soul of Money – Part 17: The World’s Great Divide

Eqafe Interviews:

• Self Honesty within Honesty – How does that work? – Part 154

• A challenge – Hacking your Mind – Reptilians – Part 155