[Cont’d from Part 4] … In a totally cashless economy, the gatekeepers will be able to apply pressure, using their privilege to commandeer those over whose assets and livelihoods they have total control.
Let’s pause for a moment to examine the definition of totalitarianism: a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience.
As simple as that.
The writing, like it or not, is on the (fire)wall. In the absolute control associated with a cashless world.
Here’s the deal. The principle that your money is something you don’t own has been around for a long time, and so have the banks that process it. But not having any physical access to money whatsoever — not being able to store it in your own space, or take it with you without it being subject to the control of someone else — is unprecedented. Never in the history of humankind has there been a situation where one’s ability to purchase or procure something is under someone else’s complete jurisdiction.
It’s like being on probation for life.
The champions of the cashless economy smirk. If you have done nothing wrong, they say, you have nothing to fear.
Every dictator’s favorite motto.
It’s what China said when it launched its social surveillance system.
It’s what all totalitarians say when they strike down liberties in the name of security and/or efficiency.
For the world to remain free and for the economy to work — and for human beings to feel good enough about themselves and their future prospects to make something of themselves, to contribute to the advance of progress — one’s money, like water and food, needs to remain tangible, accessible, and, to an extent, subject to those who earn it; something we can access during a crisis.
Forego that privilege, and we set ourselves up for the kind of life from which our progress has been trying to deliver us all this time. We’re back to square one, under the thumb of invisible omnipotent powers. Such a terrible waste of potential. From the whimsical and almighty God in the sky, to the gatekeeping gods in the Cloud, we will have merely traded despots, advanced only relatively, remaining subjects and slaves to the powers that be and their appointed agents and agencies.
The problem is that this will happen. The economists are too strong, our progress in desperate need of more efficiency. The result will be a cashless ‘heaven’ with an off-grid economy on the side, which, for all practical purposes, will be the future’s underworld, or, to continue with the biblical terms, the hell which the gods will command you not to enter, or into which they will cast you if you defy them.
From your annoyingly adroit and analog(y)-driven Spin Doctor,
Eyes open, mind sharp.