I’m not sure living in the city off handouts, charity, and free tax payer provided facilities exactly promotes his no money philosophy. His life relies on the things he despises, if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death.
Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans
I've heard the nobility of homelessness and joblessness expressed as an ethos countless times by people who wouldn't care for the work of living off-grid. I happen to work in a town with some of the highest taxes in the country that's also one of the most attractive places for indigent campers. The park across from where I live has become a tent city. I get the pleasure of paying for its "upkeep" while also having to step over needles and human waste every day. A natural extension of the philosophy that people who work for a living are amoral slaves, and that only the indigent are noble is, of course, that it's permissible to steal anything any worker drone has. When I got to the part in this article about his glee at erecting tent cities I really became disgusted. What's beautiful about it? It produces nothing of lasting value. It erodes the physical and social landscape. At best as a society itself, it's a drum circle, getting high, talking about the universe without doing anything much, and escaping. What future is there for anyone who wants all the parks filled with tent cities?
The one thing you can't do without money, without an economy, is take care of anyone else. You can give them things that other people gave you - castaways of castaways. But you can't produce anything new to help anyone. So what claims to be cooperative and egalitarian is really just parasitic.
Maybe it's not surprising that the largest effort made on behalf of parasitism is its attempt to disguise itself as something moral.
He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes?
Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses.
The alternative is for the leaders to have some type of power to compel people to do the dishes, and some type of punishment to mete out.
There are certain tasks in society that no one wants to do. In order to get them done, you have to choose the carrot or the stick. Money or punishment.
If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on. It can work in theory, but in practice, a society based on punishment tends to snowball out of control, with the people in charge of punishment going too far. The people in charge make a small mistake in the size of punishment relative to the transgression. With money, small mistakes like this happen constantly, and they are constantly being adjusted by changing prices and salaries. The garbage man makes a higher salary than other manual laborers. But without money, the process has more steps, and is harder to get right. People protest, the leaders listen to the protests, go through the rule changing process, and eventually adjust the punishment to fit the transgression. Without money, more people are involved in the process. Some are removed from the actual issue. It takes longer for the adjustment to be made. With only the tool of punishment available, it's more difficult to fine tune every mismatch. In practice, it's really, really hard to get a punishment based society just right.
I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke.
It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects.
Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?
Before money people traded favors. You help me butcher my cow, I help you rebuild your house (which was more work then the cow), so maybe later on your brother helps fix my plow knowing he'll eventually get something in return, and now I am trading favors with you and your brother, etc. This bonded people. It would have been insulting to say "here are two chickens for your lamb, we are now even, I owe you nothing evermore!"
Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.
Money has made it possible for us to build impersonal systems at gigantic scale. It seems to have paved the way for more stuff, but it does come with some downsides.
Debt, The First 5,000 Years [0] by David Graeber talks about this stuff.
Haven't you ever done your own dishes? I use something so that it gets dirty, so I'll wash it off.
The jobs "no one wants to do" is usually work people are happy to do for themselves or occasionally their friends and family. The idea that "no one wants to do them" embeds the presumption that you spend eight hours a day doing just that. Of course no one wants to do that!
> They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done.
While I agree with most of what's said above, the proposition about "usually women, making the sacrifice" is dubious at best, if not untrue.
In any society or commune few will lead - the rest will be workers or followers. These will be both men and women, and they will both suffer from necessary sacrifices. Women are not a special class of people in those societies, and to claim that they suffer more prejudice is the usual sort of feminist-speak that has nothing to do with the reality of such communes.
> If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on
The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat.
There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. If you don't go out and get food, you don't eat, unless you are gifted food as the young, old and infirm are. There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach.
Of course in civilized society, there are a class of rentier heirs who do not work, who have a relationship with those who do work, of expropriating their surplus labor time. Obviously this is done with coercion and punishment.
I don't understand why the dishwashers leaving needs to cause societal breakdown, though. After they leave, surely someone thinks "Hm, we have no clean dishes any more and nobody's volunteering, so I guess I'll need to clean some dishes, if only for myself, but then once I'm in dishwashing mode it's efficient to clean more dishes than I personally need, and even better if someone decides to reward me for cleaning their dishes by doing my laundry since they realized someone needs to do that".
I mean, isn't this "the invisible hand of the market" at play, just without the intermediate medium of exchange?
It is true, though, as the end of the article points out, living this way defies pretty much any kind of planning, and that can be scary for people.
Is it "usually women" who do the unglamorous jobs that no one else wants to do? This doesn't really seem true, but maybe you have a source that shows it?
Maybe if it was only the people who did the jobs that no one wants to do who get paid then people wouldn’t be trying to get rid of the money system. How many thousands of years would a dishwasher need to work in order to earn what someone does in one year from making 100 million in a year as a corporate fat cat, a sports player, movie star or a business owner
Societies can work without money, or without using them that often, there used to be many self-sufficient peasant communities (villages and even entire mountain valleys) that used to manage just fine without actually using (much) money. Of course that modernity and the industrial revolution put a stop to that but it can be done.
I do my own dishes now, I'll do my own dishes then.
Your thesis is non-sequitur, and speaking frankly, degenerate and extraordinarily cynical. Communes are experimental, experiments often fail, that's just the way shit works. Out of those failures, there are communes that have succeeded - you fail to mention them. You don't need gods, or leaders, or governance just the instinctual wanting for both community and self-preservation. Government is reactionary, not preventative,[1] and coercion is endemic to the human population it's tit-for-tat, and even more so in the modern era the great equalizer is among us and widely proliferated. It's not a question of genetic lottery anymore.
Money isn't actually the problem, it is disproportion and, duly, the concentration. That concentration equates to leverage, which is influence. Influence has been used to commit atrocities from times immemorial, it is, if not the foremost then among the foremost elements of human oppression. Historically this has been aceded to by the mass population through various modes of manipulation. It is actually exploitative predation which is founded on artifice, suppression and innate blind spots in social and economic cognition.[2] Worker owned cooperatives, at least superficially, seem to be the only structure that isn't human-perverse which promote both autonomy and community without being disruptively disproportionate in their allotment of power - Mondragon Corporation for example.
[1] Think of how often laws are violated despite the possible consequences: murder, neglect, speeding, embezzlement, bribery...
[2] Artifice being the hard work fallacy, which is actually predominately luck with lottery ticket odds and personal delusions of exceptionalism. Suppression being the ceaseless toil the masses necessarily endeavor in to support their livelihood. Blind spots in being inherently biased towards trust, economic blind spots emerging out of ignorance promulgated by that status quo and the nigh-complete opacity presented to workers.
Devil's advocate here. Failing sufficient encouragement to do tasks (psychological/sociological rewards as got through volunteering), most of those tasks can be automated or replaced by an alternative.
Didn’t groups of people live without money just fine for most of human existence? We worked together. Money only entered the equation when the groups we lived and interacted with started getting too big and impersonal. Generosity is easier when you know the people benefiting from your work. Greed and freeloading are easier when you don’t.
I feel you are presenting a false dichotomy. If this was true, why are the most boring jobs not paid the best? It seems that capitalist money is just hidden punishment: do something you don't want to do for a pittance, because you have no leverage. In a family, in a community there are also ways to incentivise prosocial behaviour just by culture, which is why e.g. most of German emergency operations are volunteer based. And in most associations, people are if not happy then perfectly willing to do the boring job if that's the way they become a part of the association. Social norms and customs and their establishment are a whole lot more complicated than "punishment from leaders"
The Victoria man is a radical, he's there to start an interesting conversation, he's succeeding.
> power to compel people to do the dishes... and some type of punishment to mete out.
Moneyed, Adam Smith style capitalist economies still had slaves, colonies, wars of plunder.
It's tough. I see from your other commenters you're rooting for the guy. The mainstream opinion that executives should be paid less, that the lowest wages should rise, these are freebies and could be implemented in an afternoon, with no consequences. All the changes in a person's day to day life would be for the better. Mainstream people advocate against inequality not the elimination of money, but yes, there is a transfer, a "handout," as part of those goals.
I hate arguments like this. People who want clean dishes will do dishes. And no there's no free-rider problem because they don't have to do dishes for anyone else.
I don't see how taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral. If everyone did this we'd all live in a far worse world.
This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive. I relate to him in that I value money very little as a medium to facilitate my own happiness, but I still want to make a lot of it so I can give more.
He seems sweet though. I think I would get on with him were we to ever meet.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's a leech on society. He has two children he could not support (and has no contact with), he's constantly mooching off others for his basic needs, and there's not a word in the article about him ever doing a single thing productive for society. And unlike many other homeless people who legitimately are unable to contribute productively, this is all his choice.
He's lucky he's in modern society where we at least take some care of people like him. Go back further in time and he'd have been ostracized from his hunter-gatherer community for not contributing, and would've lived a short life as a hermit.
I agree. His heart is in the right place. And he's fighting the good fight. There is something wrong with a system which won't allow a spot somewhere in the city to put up tents. He's right about that.
But I don't think everyone has to go as far as you, and give more than they take. I think we can find win-win situations where we both benefit. I cut your your hair and you paint me a picture. We both win. But it's hard to find good one to one barter like this. Money is the way to find more win-win situations. In a system with no money, you're back to only one to one, so there are less win-win exchanges, and everyone is poorer.
> I don't see how taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral.
Taking? It seemed pretty clear that he doesn't ask anyone for anything. People give him things of their own free will.
> This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive.
Give more money than you receive? There are other things that can be given, like time, companionship, love, etc.
The guy from the article is striving to make the world better for those who can't afford a home in Canada (Vancouver being ridiculously expensive, a separate conversation), and prompting an interesting conversation about how focused we are on money. I think those are valuable contributions to society.
Or should society force everyone onto the same page, and moralize against those who can't or don't want to keep up?
(These are questions that I think of, just throwing them out there...)
> I don't see how taking from everyone and giving very little in return is moral. If everyone did this we'd all live in a far worse world.
We have a large upper class that does exactly this and not only do many people seem not to mind, they find membership of this class aspirational. It’s how capital income works and what capitalism is built on.
> Epiphany Two happened a few months after they met, on June 27, 2003, almost six years to the day after Epiphany One. Johnston’s father had sent him $50 for his birthday. With it, he bought beer, pot, and cigarettes, and then threw himself a small party at Beacon Hill Park. He overdid it and found himself lying on his side behind a bush. “I was just pukey drunk,” he says. “It was embarrassing. And then it just hit me. Like, I've had enough of this. I'm not playing this game anymore. And I was done. I had no use for money.”
Uh, I'm not sure that's what I would have taken away from this.
Alternative title: a bum glamorizes his parasitic lifestyle.
Money is one of many solutions designed to allocate resources on a large scale. Of course, there are others, but he doesn't propose any alternative system. He's just a parasite. A pre-industrial society most likely wouldn't be able to support his existence so easily and he would either starve to death or start working.
Money is only one kind of power as I learned from going from working stiff to millionaire (thanks software biz!) to homeless broke person (cursed alcohol.) There is the shamanic-like power of a deeply spiritual person. There is the leadership power of a good manufacturing supervisor or ship captain. There is the moral power of Martin Luther King or Solzhenitsyn. I've come to the conclusion that accumulating money is how people who otherwise wouldn't have any power to purchase it. There's a easy test I do in this industry when a rich person publishes a thought piece that doesn't move me: Would this person have any power if they weren't rich? A lot of times the answer is no.
This Victoria man has another kind of power: The power that gets other people to take care of his needs for him without objecting or rejecting him.
Money is simply a storage of future labour. You're given it in return for the labour you perform today for someone else (or as a benefit from society due to not being able to perform laborious tasks.)
Money isn't evil. How you utilise it is evil.
> Epiphany Two happened a few months after they met, on June 27, 2003, almost six years to the day after Epiphany One. Johnston’s father had sent him $50 for his birthday. With it, he bought beer, pot, and cigarettes, and then threw himself a small party at Beacon Hill Park. He overdid it and found himself lying on his side behind a bush. “I was just pukey drunk,” he says. “It was embarrassing. And then it just hit me. Like, I've had enough of this. I'm not playing this game anymore. And I was done. I had no use for money.”
The lesson here hasn't been learned. Simply don't exchange money for those things. Exchange them for something else, something healthy, and you'll be fine.
I feel like this kind of protest stems from a degree of immaturity with money; not knowing how-to utilise it, what its reasons for existing are.
> As we walk through the city, Johnston offers a small disclaimer, putting out in the open what he calls his one “debatable” act of spending, post-31st birthday. If you count a gift card that someone gave him back in 2012, which he used on Big Macs and coffee, then, he says, he’s been money-free for only nine years.
This raises a point that article doesn't address: what is "money"?
If Johnson trades those cigarettes he makes from tossed butts for food, is he using money? Cigarettes have been used as currency in some special situations like war time.
Likewise, if Johnson accepts a product created through the use of money, isn't he in fact using money, if only indirectly?
Then there's the big question that never gets asked or answered: what happens if every single person on earth lived like Johnson? Money is fundamentally a way to fulfill future needs and wants. Abandoning money is really abandoning a path to build a future deliberately.
Storing grain, smoking meat, or building a shelter serve exactly the same purpose as money in this context. They are ways to make the future more predictable. They also have the interesting property that they can be traded for other ways to make the future more predictable. And that leads to the main problem that Johnson seems to be trying to solve: how to stop focusing on optimizing one's future through the accumulation of things that can make the future more certain.
What does a world of people who have abandoned the idea of making a future for themselves actually look like?
* Intentional destruction of currency tenders is a criminal offense in most countries. There is nothing worthy of hero-worship here.
* The guy leeches off the goodwill of others. He doesn't internalize that the amenities offered to him as charity, are being bought with someone's money. Food & coffee doesn't grow on trees. Heaters in winters don't work on magic spells. He doesn't spend his money. It is someone else's. Public money mostly, and the charity of sympathetic Samaritans
The glamorous-pious/moral-homeless trope is BS. If he wants to do better, then live in one of the BC forests. Into the wild, all the way in. Seriously, if you take out these nutcase views/agenda, he is no different from garden variety homeless. Most people I have seen are destitute by their bad luck or lack of opportunity & education. This guy is a wreck by his parasitic fetishes.
> “It would be a lot easier if everyone quit money at the same time, make a day of it, and then everyone can co-ordinate and start planting.”
> He takes a drag on his cigarette. “Yeah, it would be a shitshow. But there's certain steps that need to be taken, and I'm sort of the disposable one that can't be bought. So I can make the horrifying decisions that no one else can make."
The guy says he doesn't believe in evil. The only time in history that money has been abolished was under the Khmer Rouge. They also had no concept of evil, and made a good many horrifying decisions in service of total economic equality through forced poverty and mass enslavement. Because of course the people who don't want to quit earning, spending, owning and trading their goods and services need to be forced to do so, or else be eliminated.
Just because he doesn't touch the money, what does that have to do with anything. If someone like Queen Elizabeth never touches the money herself, mean that she does not spend money? If Jeff Bezos has a person following behind him 24/7 and never touches money, does that mean he has no money and doesn't spend? Of course not.
If someone gives the dude food for free, the homeless guy still paid money for it. Maybe not cash, but he paid some form of money. The person purchasing the sandwich loaned or gave the homeless dude money, and then paid for the sandwich on behalf of the homeless guy.
The homeless guy spends money living in the guy's house.
Not only that, the sandwich he received for free is taxable by the IRS. It's like on those game shows where you win a car for free, you still have to pay taxes on it. That is because it is legit income, as in money to you. The gameshow gave you money for the car, but the gameshow then bought it for you, hid it behind a wall, and made you work for it.
If the guy needs healthcare and goes to the hospital for free, he's not going for free. The doctors and nurses and rent and utilities and tools all cost money that someone pays. Nobody is working for free. The homeless guy is getting money from everyone, he just doesn't touch the actual cash, but it is all the same thing. He is spending $10,000 or $50,000 or $150,000 or whatever the medical care may cost, in value.
This only works if not everyone in society does it.
It’s easy for a lone person to ride on the backs of others, who are actually, you know, working for money, but if tomorrow we got rid of money society would collapse.
With the way NYC is, I could quit my job tomorrow and mooch off others (SO many do).
I’d be uncomfortable, but I’d live. If everyone did this there wouldn’t be a NYC anymore.
The monks of old (Eastern and Western philosophies) would live off the largesse of others in terms of food, clothing and shelter. They gave back in the form of teachings and wisdom or a temporary place to stay for travelers, without judgement or payment.
This man is just taking, and not giving anything back. That makes him a mooch, and little more.
> While meditating down at the ocean—and tripping on acid courtesy of the motorbike’s new owner—he experienced what would become for him unshakable insights having to do with patience, fate, and love.
I was waiting for that part since I started reading the article. Isn’t this what the hippies in the 60’s figured out as well?
> ..Refusing to spend money is the only moral way to live.
> ..Not only did money enable what he deemed insane behaviour on a grand scale, the dependence on it, the fear of losing it, the focus on acquiring it wrecked people’s lives and drove them to be dishonest with themselves and others.
> ..People are putting themselves through hell, living in situations that are just making them nuts to avoid being homeless.
> Every taxpayer is an indentured servant until this debt is paid.
> Only one solution appears just and good, and that is a society without money.
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|4 years ago|reply
Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
The one thing you can't do without money, without an economy, is take care of anyone else. You can give them things that other people gave you - castaways of castaways. But you can't produce anything new to help anyone. So what claims to be cooperative and egalitarian is really just parasitic.
Maybe it's not surprising that the largest effort made on behalf of parasitism is its attempt to disguise itself as something moral.
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
In my home country we actually still have people living off their land and animals, off hand dug wells and cut down trees, using no money.
That's rather extreme, though, most villages have electricity at least.
[+] [-] kangnkodos|4 years ago|reply
Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses.
The alternative is for the leaders to have some type of power to compel people to do the dishes, and some type of punishment to mete out.
There are certain tasks in society that no one wants to do. In order to get them done, you have to choose the carrot or the stick. Money or punishment.
If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on. It can work in theory, but in practice, a society based on punishment tends to snowball out of control, with the people in charge of punishment going too far. The people in charge make a small mistake in the size of punishment relative to the transgression. With money, small mistakes like this happen constantly, and they are constantly being adjusted by changing prices and salaries. The garbage man makes a higher salary than other manual laborers. But without money, the process has more steps, and is harder to get right. People protest, the leaders listen to the protests, go through the rule changing process, and eventually adjust the punishment to fit the transgression. Without money, more people are involved in the process. Some are removed from the actual issue. It takes longer for the adjustment to be made. With only the tool of punishment available, it's more difficult to fine tune every mismatch. In practice, it's really, really hard to get a punishment based society just right.
[+] [-] AussieWog93|4 years ago|reply
I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke.
It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects.
Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?
[+] [-] mikem170|4 years ago|reply
Money originated as a way for kings to pay troops, who operated outside these village economies.
Money has made it possible for us to build impersonal systems at gigantic scale. It seems to have paved the way for more stuff, but it does come with some downsides.
Debt, The First 5,000 Years [0] by David Graeber talks about this stuff.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt
[+] [-] boomlinde|4 years ago|reply
The jobs "no one wants to do" is usually work people are happy to do for themselves or occasionally their friends and family. The idea that "no one wants to do them" embeds the presumption that you spend eight hours a day doing just that. Of course no one wants to do that!
[+] [-] knighthack|4 years ago|reply
While I agree with most of what's said above, the proposition about "usually women, making the sacrifice" is dubious at best, if not untrue.
In any society or commune few will lead - the rest will be workers or followers. These will be both men and women, and they will both suffer from necessary sacrifices. Women are not a special class of people in those societies, and to claim that they suffer more prejudice is the usual sort of feminist-speak that has nothing to do with the reality of such communes.
[+] [-] VictorPath|4 years ago|reply
The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat.
There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. If you don't go out and get food, you don't eat, unless you are gifted food as the young, old and infirm are. There's no coercion other than a hungry stomach.
Of course in civilized society, there are a class of rentier heirs who do not work, who have a relationship with those who do work, of expropriating their surplus labor time. Obviously this is done with coercion and punishment.
[+] [-] indigochill|4 years ago|reply
I mean, isn't this "the invisible hand of the market" at play, just without the intermediate medium of exchange?
It is true, though, as the end of the article points out, living this way defies pretty much any kind of planning, and that can be scary for people.
[+] [-] pmichaud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suifbwish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tunap|4 years ago|reply
That sounds like modern retail workers who have spouses to supplement earnings to house & feed themselves.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] iamadog1029|4 years ago|reply
Your thesis is non-sequitur, and speaking frankly, degenerate and extraordinarily cynical. Communes are experimental, experiments often fail, that's just the way shit works. Out of those failures, there are communes that have succeeded - you fail to mention them. You don't need gods, or leaders, or governance just the instinctual wanting for both community and self-preservation. Government is reactionary, not preventative,[1] and coercion is endemic to the human population it's tit-for-tat, and even more so in the modern era the great equalizer is among us and widely proliferated. It's not a question of genetic lottery anymore.
Money isn't actually the problem, it is disproportion and, duly, the concentration. That concentration equates to leverage, which is influence. Influence has been used to commit atrocities from times immemorial, it is, if not the foremost then among the foremost elements of human oppression. Historically this has been aceded to by the mass population through various modes of manipulation. It is actually exploitative predation which is founded on artifice, suppression and innate blind spots in social and economic cognition.[2] Worker owned cooperatives, at least superficially, seem to be the only structure that isn't human-perverse which promote both autonomy and community without being disruptively disproportionate in their allotment of power - Mondragon Corporation for example.
[1] Think of how often laws are violated despite the possible consequences: murder, neglect, speeding, embezzlement, bribery... [2] Artifice being the hard work fallacy, which is actually predominately luck with lottery ticket odds and personal delusions of exceptionalism. Suppression being the ceaseless toil the masses necessarily endeavor in to support their livelihood. Blind spots in being inherently biased towards trust, economic blind spots emerging out of ignorance promulgated by that status quo and the nigh-complete opacity presented to workers.
[+] [-] sumnole|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliekelly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redsummer|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] igorkraw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] an_opabinia|4 years ago|reply
> power to compel people to do the dishes... and some type of punishment to mete out.
Moneyed, Adam Smith style capitalist economies still had slaves, colonies, wars of plunder.
It's tough. I see from your other commenters you're rooting for the guy. The mainstream opinion that executives should be paid less, that the lowest wages should rise, these are freebies and could be implemented in an afternoon, with no consequences. All the changes in a person's day to day life would be for the better. Mainstream people advocate against inequality not the elimination of money, but yes, there is a transfer, a "handout," as part of those goals.
[+] [-] lrdswrk00|4 years ago|reply
Presumably the person who dirtied them. So they can use clean dishes and not get sick from mold growing from the old food?
Science has given us plenty of evidence to do as we do in a number of contexts.
Deferring to the politically empowered is an unscientific basis for economic activity.
We need not rely on the superstitions of dead men who were less educated than us.
[+] [-] guerrilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kypro|4 years ago|reply
This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive. I relate to him in that I value money very little as a medium to facilitate my own happiness, but I still want to make a lot of it so I can give more.
He seems sweet though. I think I would get on with him were we to ever meet.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|4 years ago|reply
He's lucky he's in modern society where we at least take some care of people like him. Go back further in time and he'd have been ostracized from his hunter-gatherer community for not contributing, and would've lived a short life as a hermit.
[+] [-] kangnkodos|4 years ago|reply
But I don't think everyone has to go as far as you, and give more than they take. I think we can find win-win situations where we both benefit. I cut your your hair and you paint me a picture. We both win. But it's hard to find good one to one barter like this. Money is the way to find more win-win situations. In a system with no money, you're back to only one to one, so there are less win-win exchanges, and everyone is poorer.
[+] [-] brnt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yboris|4 years ago|reply
It's a great community where I think you'd fit in: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
[+] [-] mikem170|4 years ago|reply
Taking? It seemed pretty clear that he doesn't ask anyone for anything. People give him things of their own free will.
> This is basically the antithesis of my own moral code to give more than I receive.
Give more money than you receive? There are other things that can be given, like time, companionship, love, etc.
The guy from the article is striving to make the world better for those who can't afford a home in Canada (Vancouver being ridiculously expensive, a separate conversation), and prompting an interesting conversation about how focused we are on money. I think those are valuable contributions to society.
Or should society force everyone onto the same page, and moralize against those who can't or don't want to keep up?
(These are questions that I think of, just throwing them out there...)
[+] [-] theonlybutlet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|4 years ago|reply
Noo! You can't do this. If everyone did this everyone would be better off!
[+] [-] totony|4 years ago|reply
This is mathematically impossible to apply universally. Can it be a moral code if it can't be universal?
Although this might be applicable if you live in a wealthy circle and there are poor circles.
[+] [-] djrobstep|4 years ago|reply
We have a large upper class that does exactly this and not only do many people seem not to mind, they find membership of this class aspirational. It’s how capital income works and what capitalism is built on.
[+] [-] cbanek|4 years ago|reply
Uh, I'm not sure that's what I would have taken away from this.
[+] [-] nootropicat|4 years ago|reply
Money is one of many solutions designed to allocate resources on a large scale. Of course, there are others, but he doesn't propose any alternative system. He's just a parasite. A pre-industrial society most likely wouldn't be able to support his existence so easily and he would either starve to death or start working.
[+] [-] okareaman|4 years ago|reply
This Victoria man has another kind of power: The power that gets other people to take care of his needs for him without objecting or rejecting him.
[+] [-] eplanit|4 years ago|reply
"Johnston’s feelings about money are inextricably bound up in his certainty that refusing to spend it is the only moral way to live."
It's ok for others to spend on his behalf, though. It sounds like he is applying an effective story to a nicely vulnerable population of marks.
While his philosophy is BS, I cynically admire his hustle.
[+] [-] mjfl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] movedx|4 years ago|reply
Money isn't evil. How you utilise it is evil.
> Epiphany Two happened a few months after they met, on June 27, 2003, almost six years to the day after Epiphany One. Johnston’s father had sent him $50 for his birthday. With it, he bought beer, pot, and cigarettes, and then threw himself a small party at Beacon Hill Park. He overdid it and found himself lying on his side behind a bush. “I was just pukey drunk,” he says. “It was embarrassing. And then it just hit me. Like, I've had enough of this. I'm not playing this game anymore. And I was done. I had no use for money.”
The lesson here hasn't been learned. Simply don't exchange money for those things. Exchange them for something else, something healthy, and you'll be fine.
I feel like this kind of protest stems from a degree of immaturity with money; not knowing how-to utilise it, what its reasons for existing are.
[+] [-] aazaa|4 years ago|reply
This raises a point that article doesn't address: what is "money"?
If Johnson trades those cigarettes he makes from tossed butts for food, is he using money? Cigarettes have been used as currency in some special situations like war time.
Likewise, if Johnson accepts a product created through the use of money, isn't he in fact using money, if only indirectly?
Then there's the big question that never gets asked or answered: what happens if every single person on earth lived like Johnson? Money is fundamentally a way to fulfill future needs and wants. Abandoning money is really abandoning a path to build a future deliberately.
Storing grain, smoking meat, or building a shelter serve exactly the same purpose as money in this context. They are ways to make the future more predictable. They also have the interesting property that they can be traded for other ways to make the future more predictable. And that leads to the main problem that Johnson seems to be trying to solve: how to stop focusing on optimizing one's future through the accumulation of things that can make the future more certain.
What does a world of people who have abandoned the idea of making a future for themselves actually look like?
[+] [-] k__|4 years ago|reply
He talks about living without money, but basically mooches on his parents.
[+] [-] dghughes|4 years ago|reply
He's a con man and a mooch. Nothing special. He just mooches off other people's effort.
[+] [-] srvmshr|4 years ago|reply
* The guy leeches off the goodwill of others. He doesn't internalize that the amenities offered to him as charity, are being bought with someone's money. Food & coffee doesn't grow on trees. Heaters in winters don't work on magic spells. He doesn't spend his money. It is someone else's. Public money mostly, and the charity of sympathetic Samaritans
The glamorous-pious/moral-homeless trope is BS. If he wants to do better, then live in one of the BC forests. Into the wild, all the way in. Seriously, if you take out these nutcase views/agenda, he is no different from garden variety homeless. Most people I have seen are destitute by their bad luck or lack of opportunity & education. This guy is a wreck by his parasitic fetishes.
[+] [-] tills13|4 years ago|reply
Additionally, he's actively using resources designed to help people who are in situations where they cannot work or cannot find stable income.
What a jerk.
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
> He takes a drag on his cigarette. “Yeah, it would be a shitshow. But there's certain steps that need to be taken, and I'm sort of the disposable one that can't be bought. So I can make the horrifying decisions that no one else can make."
The guy says he doesn't believe in evil. The only time in history that money has been abolished was under the Khmer Rouge. They also had no concept of evil, and made a good many horrifying decisions in service of total economic equality through forced poverty and mass enslavement. Because of course the people who don't want to quit earning, spending, owning and trading their goods and services need to be forced to do so, or else be eliminated.
[+] [-] France_is_bacon|4 years ago|reply
Just because he doesn't touch the money, what does that have to do with anything. If someone like Queen Elizabeth never touches the money herself, mean that she does not spend money? If Jeff Bezos has a person following behind him 24/7 and never touches money, does that mean he has no money and doesn't spend? Of course not.
If someone gives the dude food for free, the homeless guy still paid money for it. Maybe not cash, but he paid some form of money. The person purchasing the sandwich loaned or gave the homeless dude money, and then paid for the sandwich on behalf of the homeless guy.
The homeless guy spends money living in the guy's house.
Not only that, the sandwich he received for free is taxable by the IRS. It's like on those game shows where you win a car for free, you still have to pay taxes on it. That is because it is legit income, as in money to you. The gameshow gave you money for the car, but the gameshow then bought it for you, hid it behind a wall, and made you work for it.
If the guy needs healthcare and goes to the hospital for free, he's not going for free. The doctors and nurses and rent and utilities and tools all cost money that someone pays. Nobody is working for free. The homeless guy is getting money from everyone, he just doesn't touch the actual cash, but it is all the same thing. He is spending $10,000 or $50,000 or $150,000 or whatever the medical care may cost, in value.
[+] [-] booleandilemma|4 years ago|reply
It’s easy for a lone person to ride on the backs of others, who are actually, you know, working for money, but if tomorrow we got rid of money society would collapse.
With the way NYC is, I could quit my job tomorrow and mooch off others (SO many do).
I’d be uncomfortable, but I’d live. If everyone did this there wouldn’t be a NYC anymore.
[+] [-] glitchc|4 years ago|reply
This man is just taking, and not giving anything back. That makes him a mooch, and little more.
[+] [-] ronyfadel|4 years ago|reply
I was waiting for that part since I started reading the article. Isn’t this what the hippies in the 60’s figured out as well?
[+] [-] lioeters|4 years ago|reply
> ..Refusing to spend money is the only moral way to live.
> ..Not only did money enable what he deemed insane behaviour on a grand scale, the dependence on it, the fear of losing it, the focus on acquiring it wrecked people’s lives and drove them to be dishonest with themselves and others.
> ..People are putting themselves through hell, living in situations that are just making them nuts to avoid being homeless.
> Every taxpayer is an indentured servant until this debt is paid.
> Only one solution appears just and good, and that is a society without money.