The Story of How Humans Came to Live in Peace and Plenty
The story of how humans came to live in peace and plenty is a developing conversation. The initiator is David Braden, who proposes that we network, but with an additional dimension. Instead of only interacting on a flat, person-to-person basis, Braden says that we must also consider the larger system and our environment in what we do, and he calls it 3D Networking. You can get a good idea from his website 3DN Introduction, which explains three dimensional networking in its bite sized, linked pages.
David Braden, initiator of 3D Networking
One particularly interesting proposal is what Braden calls the Self-help Corporation. Today's economy does not have any place for people that aren't directly involved in making more and more profit for the corporate players. At first, these were only the people who did not have the right skills, but more and more people are being laid off because the corporation that employed them is cutting costs. It is nothing for a huge corporation to buy its competition and then start "slimming down", laying off thousands of people who thought they had secured stable employment. Thus, the ranks of those who don't fit keep swelling.
Braden's self-help corporation (this link is to an abbreviated description) is a way of balancing the needs of these individuals against the focus on profit which is a characteristic of the corporations and which does not allow giving someone a job simply because they need to make money to live.
"The self-help corporation is a simple, practical and economical way to alleviate the resulting poverty. It does not require public consensus, expensive government programs or massive charitable fundraising. One can be started now, by anyone, anywhere in the world.Poor people are poor because they do not have skills that can be marketed in the “market economy” or their labor is valued by the market economy at a level that does not provide them adequate resources for a decent standard of living. They are not, however, without skills and resources. In particular, they possess the skills and available labor to produce basic necessities."
The question is whether such an idea has real transformative potential. Will people actually come together in solidarity and contribute their money or their skills to make it possible for a whole group to take care of basic necessities in a way that's much more economical than today's 'everyone for themselves' way of doing it.
The vision is growing and it's becoming more focused. A part of this process is documented in a discussion around The Story of How Humans Came to Live in Peace and Plenty on the "open money" Ning group.
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