Letter from Johnny Gould IV

Dear Socialist Viewpoint,

Can you imagine a world without monetary value on labor? If money were taken out of the equation would people not work, or would we realize the need to cooperate? If social services and safety nets were taken out of the equation would capitalism work, or would society slide further into iniquity?

For eons humanity survived without monetary value on their labor. Everyone knew it was in the best interest of the nations as a whole for each person to become skilled in ways that fulfill the needs for the greater good. It was self-evident.

Of course, roles vary, but the concept makes each person equally important because they were depended upon by everyone else. Without the shaman, people would get sick, without the elders’ wisdom, the people wouldn’t have their experience to learn from. Without the seamstresses, without the hunters, without the children learning ways of stewardship with the Earth, the tribes wouldn’t have successfully survived. Each person with their own personal identity and usually more than one role, it was interdependence.

The individuals intrinsically understood that each depends on the whole, and the whole depends upon each person’s contributions—something our society fails to recognize, and arguably, intentionally fails to teach. Today we are many-generations removed from cooperative social norms, but I would argue, only one or two generations away from reclaiming it.

Now, to just remove money today, overnight, yeah there would be trouble, because we don’t understand life through the lens of those ancient and timeless teachings. They are not lost, they are ingrained into our DNA, with some of us more or less removed from them. Our traditions today reflect those more recent generations that have been alienated and removed from a healthy stewardship of the planet.

Social change happens in stages. Each stage we learn to adapt to new circumstances and conditions. There are always those lone voices trying to call attention to the repercussions of society’s actions globally. The truth? There are those who have power and spend trillions to control thinking with narratives in the corporate-controlled media that put up smoke screens to blur reality and only tell half the story.

But with instant communication and up-to-date information at our fingertips, we have more of a chance than ever to reclaim and incorporate our past cooperative relationships and cultivate a society of stewardship of the planet—lessons that still live in and yearn to be learned from our collective genetic memory that our future depends upon.

—Johnny Gould IV