imagination - transformation - metamorphosis

Imagine a perfect money system that simply enables people to trade equitably and efficiently with a money that only connects, people to people, business to business, each to the other. Imagine money that circulates in communities and networks so that what you spend always comes back.

Further imagine a perfectly open money that is available to all, created by us, sufficient to any and all needs so that there is never any shortage of money. After all, money is just the symbol, the thing we give for something of real value.

Imagine what we could do.

Henry Ford said the essence of good engineering was "to simplicate and add lightness" - to get to just what's needed and nothing more. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.''

The open money system is a perfect system for its purpose. All its individual components are necessary and all together they are sufficient - there's nothing else required.

Although there's nothing you can take away, there's lots you can add - so long as it's value that's added, not options limited, not control imposed.

Is LETS a perfect open money system? If it is, then it is an idea that is worth understanding, embracing and propagating. You decide for yourself.

"Our cultural life is full of things that seem to propagate virus-like from one mind to another: tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. In 1976 I coined the word meme (rhymes with cream) for these self-replicating units of culture that have a life of their own." (Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene)

As a meme, an idea about local money, LETS has quickly developed a life of its own. Connecting mind to mind, it has become the best known and most widely used open money system in the world.

But most of these initiatives have been started without a full understanding of the model and its potential, as though one bought a piano to play one note, or a computer for one program.

There is now a Japanese initiative that may well reach the full potential of open money development. Imagine a perfect open money system developed in Japan and shared with the world.

"If Japan changes, the world is sure to change. I believe that this is a necessity of history." (Masaaki Ikeda)

"Metamorphosis is more than just transformation. It is the transmutation from one state of being to another. A coming into being of something new. The archetypal paradigm in the nature kingdom is the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly, but there are many other such examples. In Egyptian mythology the scarab beetle is chosen instead of the butterfly, but the basic idea is the same." (M.Alan Kazlev)

The butterfly metaphor is particularly useful when trying to describe such dramatic and wholesale changes. Elisabet Sahtouris has captured the idea perfectly:

"My favorite metaphor for the current world transition is that of a butterfly in metamorphosis. It goes like this:

Inside a cocoon, deep in the caterpillar's body, tiny things biologists call 'imaginal disks' begin to form. Not recognizing the newcomers, the caterpillar's immune system snuffs them. But they keep coming faster and faster, then begin to link up with each other. Eventually the caterpillar's immune system fails from the stress and the disks become imaginal cells that build the butterfly from the meltdown of the caterpillar's body. If we see ourselves as imaginal discs working to build the butterfly of a better world, we will also see how important it is to link with each other in the effort, to recognize how many different kinds of imaginal cells it will take to build a butterfly with all its capabilities and colors."

Perhaps a new society will emerge in the best, most human image of our collective unconscious. Perhaps a money that is free, that only connects, can help us create a new world where the natural law of mutual aid takes precedence over the natural law of mutual struggle.

Imagine butterfly, imagine beetle.
Just say yes, and do it.
Only connect.