... CONTINUES.

This concept has been taken further by Internet giant, Google, who operates a policy known as ’Twenty Percent Time’. Instead of being given a day or two each year to work entirely freely, without set aims or objectives, Google’s engineers operate totally independently of management for twenty percent of their overall employment time. From this, some of Google’s biggest successes, including Google News and Gmail have arisen; in a talk at Stanford University, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience stated that “half of all new products are the result of ‘Twenty Percent Time’”.

These trends have led to the development of an entire philosophy regarding motivation and work, known as the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE). ROWE accepts the fact that in both business and the wider world, results are often the only recognized factor in measuring success. As such, businesses that have adopted the ROWE approach do not set their staff hours, offices, targets, objectives or any other requirements that paralyze creativity. Employees are allowed to work when they choose, where they choose, to whatever means they choose, as long as they reach the specified final result. They are not taught how or when to do things, allowing them to develop their own uniquely creative methods and motives. Thus far, in all cases where the ROWE philosophy has been enacted, worker satisfaction has increased, worker engagement has increased and overall productivity has increased.

In 1993, Microsoft began a little-known project to create a digital encyclopaedia, named Encarta. You may have correctly assumed that Encarta is little-known because of the fact that it was largely commercially unsuccessful. This lack of success came despite heavy investment into paid professionals to create the encyclopaedia entries by strict deadlines in excellent working conditions, contrary to what we are told about monetary incentive driving human achievement. Eight years after Encarta’s inception, another encyclopaedia project was launched, this time utilizing an entirely different model. In this model, there are no wages for contributors, nor is there any other sort of tangible, materialistic reward. It is based simply on the fact that people enjoy expressing their creativity, and relish the chance to contribute to a cause larger than themselves. As a result, Wikipedia is undoubtedly the best-known digital encyclopaedia in the world today, far out-stripping the achievements of Encarta.

What these successes all prove is that allowing our beliefs about how the human race can operate creatively to stagnate in the outdated pool of monetary-ism is simply unproductive and inefficient. Until we accept that, we will continue to live in a society where decency and ethical behavior are fundamentally impossible.

“We were saying how very important it is to bring about, in the human mind, the radical revolution. The crisis is a crisis in consciousness; a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms; the old patterns; the ancient traditions. And, considering what the world is now, with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression, and so on, man is still as he was: is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive, and he has built a society along these lines.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

The other half of the ‘basic economic problem’ is arguably less ambiguous: ‘the world’s resources are finite’. However, this should not be interpreted as ‘money is the only way of distributing something of a limited quality’.

It is true that if we continue to fuel approximately 300 million automobiles with oil, we will run out. It is true that if we continue to heat our homes with coal and natural gas, we will run out. It is also true that, in his work The Republic, Plato identified that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. This essentially means that, whenever humanity runs out of a resource, an alternative will be sought. This is no less true today than it was in 380 BC: realizing that our energy sources are dwindling, massive investment has been made in ‘green’ fuel – perhaps more so than you even realize. The fact is that we could stop burning all fossil fuels tomorrow and never run out of energy using today’s technologies. Geothermal power alone has been proven to be a source of potential energy potent enough to fuel the world as it is now for the next 4000 years.

Additionally, the world’s core heat constantly renews itself, allowing geothermal energy to realistically power everything on earth infinitely. Although I have only briefly addressed the issue of energy, it does not require a well-qualified scientist to even begin to guess at the limitless number of possible alternative materials and resources that could be harnessed, given man’s incredible known propensity toward innovation.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States of America, first started seeking ways for his country to enter World War Two, the US owned roughly 600 fighter jets, and lacked the money to invest in more. Yet, what they did have access to was the resources to produce fighters, and by the end of the war, they were creating 90,000 every year. What this shows is that, in times of war, we are more than capable of producing arms at incredible rates, regardless of the availability of money. Imagine if this same efficiency was applied in times of peace, and we instead chose to produce food and build schools and hospitals instead of fighter planes. This is a testament to our true ability to produce abundance when necessary.

I hope that you will assess this article with an open mind. Evidently, it is difficult to accept that everything your teachers and text books have taught you about the way Man operates within this system is a combination of lies and nonsense, but I hope that you are intelligent enough not to accept the first thing you hear or read as gospel. In a world where so much is concentrated in the hands of so few, at the brutal expense of so many, it is easy to see that something is very wrong. Your duty to yourself and to everyone around you is to never stop asking questions. ‘Be a teacher and a student; inspire everyone around you through your example’.

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“Money is only important in a society when certain resources for survival must be rationed and the people accept money as an exchange medium for the scarce resources. Money is a social convention: it is not a natural resource, nor does it represent one. It is not necessary for survival unless we have been conditioned to accept it as such.”
- Jacque Fresco

Author: Liam Blee - Source: thezeitgeistmovement.com