Ants Have No (or little) Problems With Food And Shelter

	CA Ideology

Bala Pillai is intensely promoting and actively bringing together a huge number of people tuned and open to the idea of effective shared-ethos mind ecosystems working at revolutionizing the way business is going to be run and organized in the next phase of our evolution on this planet.

Bala skilfully inspires and motivates those who have enough antennas to sense the deep change required for society and business to move to a higher evolutionary stage, where collaboration, cooperation and synergy replace competition, greed and secrecy.

Among the wonderful and fascinating memes Bala sends through the Internet some are particularly effective at grabbing people's unattended ideals, dreams and natural proclivities.

The main charge Bala sounds off when polling is networked "soldiers" for action rings:

"Ants have no (or little) problems with food and shelter. Ditto with birds and nearly every other species. Humans are bogged down by anxieties over food and shelter. With minds, shouldn't humans be thousands of times ahead, not trailing fractions behind ants?"

But outside the skilful motivation and insight one can glance though it, what is a challenging and valid answer to the above question?

I have chosen not to answer the question myself, as I myself have spent several years studying Edward Wilson Sociobiological research and have more than an evident clue of why we are so spectacularly unperforming when compared to ants. As the answer is charged with highly critical social, evolutionary and political elements, this is not an easy field to jump into without taking the risk of being misunderstood or altogether ostracized for appearing as a conspiracy paranoid.

I have so decided to interview and send Bala's meme to the three pioneering Communication Agents working at revolutinizing, from a different angle world and society as we know it now. Here is what Communication Agent Sepp Hasslberger of Health Supreme responded to my invitation of critically questioning the issue of ant's apparent inifinite success vs. our own very apparent evolutionary limits. Here is what he wrote:

"Dear Robin,

Thank you for a stimulating question. As Chris says we don't really take the viewpoint of other species, sometimes because of a conceited attitude - we think we are much better than them.

I would add that we also don't care much for their problems, and thus are not good observers, although we probably could learn a few things if we only looked.

I believe it is correct to say that humans are bogged down by anxieties over food and shelter and indeed, having a mind that can identify problems and arrive at solutions, we should be doing much better than we are. But sometimes the mind works also in reverse. Someone smarter than us thinks up a solution that is good for that someone but leaves everyone else out in the cold.

In my view, we humans are anxious over food and shelter, not because there is a real physical problem but because we have chosen to adopt an economic system that caters to the enrichment and empowerment of a comparatively few, while the rest of us are living a life of artificial scarcity. Such a system is completely unknown in the animal kingdom and if introduced, it could well wipe out a species in short order.

Only because of our mind - our inventiveness - have we not yet succumbed to the economic constraints that we believe are an inevitable part of our daily lives. Apparently our type of economy has been inherited from ancient times. From the Sumerians up through history, the idea that "money" must have a value of its own, has been with us quite constantly, with only brief respites here and there.

Economy is the exchange of goods and services. Production and consumption are the end points that are brought to meet by that exchange. As long as the consumer can produce what he/she needs, there is little or no use for exchange, but life would be limited to an extremely primitive condition, not something we would want to even contemplate. So exchange, and therefore some kind of economic system are things we cannot do without.

What is needed for exchange to work is some kind of accounting system. No problem today with computers ready to take the drudgery out of counting, but historically, some physical means - beads, shells, iron bars, copper disks, all manner of "useless" little items have been used to serve the purpose of keeping track of who gave something and therefore should be having a "credit" to receive.

Trouble started when we were sold the idea that the counters must have an intrinsic value, such as silver, gold or other rare merchandise. By this conjuring trick, control over all economic activity and even over governments fell into the hands of those who retained the "valuable" currency in safekeeping. Gold and silver being relatively heavy to lug around, their place was soon taken by receipts of paper, the "bank notes".

The connection of money (bank notes) to precious metals perpetuated a mythical scarcity of the means of exchange. What's more, the banks issuing these "notes", convinced us we were expected to "pay them
back", in other words we immediately entered a debt towards the banks every time we wanted to engage in economic activity. We also consented to pay for the privilege of using those notes. That fee we pay for our privilege is called interest. In its extreme form - usury - it was identified as an immoral and detrimental.

Unfortunately, prohibition of interest/usury could not be effective, although just about every major religion condemned the practice. The underlying condition - the intrinsic scarcity of the means of exchange - was never clearly identified and thus continued to be an effective control mechanism. The debt money system and accompanying interest has kept us chained to an insane belief: that we owe our money to someone and that whoever supplies it to us has every right to own us in return.

An efficient system of economic exchange which would not only allow us to catch up with the ants on food and shelter but bring unprecedented economic development and support great personal creativity, would have to work without assuming scarcity as a given premise and without a debt/interest mechanism.

Proposals in this direction have been made by Silvio Gesell in his work "The Natural Economic Order" and the principle of debt free money has found practical application in LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems).

The officially sanctioned economic control system however has withstood such isolated attempts at challenging its basic premises and has continued to accumulate monetary value and political power in the hands of a few.

Time for change?"

Sepp Hasslberger
Health Supreme
Communication Agents Initiative