Respect as a Currency
Respect as a currency is a very simple concept thousands of years old with a somewhat different implementation than it started with. I came to the idea watching Marilyn Waring discuss world accounting in the documentary Who’s Counting Anyway.
Respect as a currency we recognize in promise held in a handshake or the tin can at the orchard stand in place of a cashier or in the neighbour caring for a garden while someone is away or ill. It is the people choosing to create Service Clubs and things like Drs Without Borders, Festival Organizers, Hospital Fundraisers etc.
It is something simply offered and hoped for within what we feel is civilized community. Still, when we are offering our respect to others and sharing the opportunity to create community, some of those opportunities are treated differently than others just as people and situations are treated differently.
Some get tax relief from donations or costs associated with events or clubs. Some get enjoyment from participating in events that could not happen without community involvement and funding. The majority of volunteer hours are offered by the semi retired, retired or those considered disabled, though by percentage there are many more people in other demographics volunteering. By hours, we are as a society taking time and talent from those who can least afford the gift and we return to them the least we are able to give as a collective society.
So what if we were to reflect the respect that needs to be offered to those making our communities, communities. What if every person was given the ability to accept our respect and thanks for their time and effort, through a card that everyone in the country (world) gets. That allows the person volunteering to log their hours and have society in the form of local government give them respect points that translates into discounts on anything the government supplies … swimming passes, library memberships taxes etc. Make the points transferable so those with enough can offer assistance to those with too little and allow groups to offer simpler support.
Let kids weeding their neighbors yard earn points toward education. Filling sandbags or storm cleanups help pay for a needed computer or mobility scooter. A temporary local, farmer worker or pruner, picker, busker, adventurer, vacationer, could as they travel click into an app that marks the time and GPS points along with any evidence of trash collecting/can picking/recycling as I’ve seen happen. Or like my dad, stopping to help fix a vehicle for someone stranded. When a musician goes into a seniors home and reminds them to smile and sing along. When a nurse already overworked stops to give a few hours to vaccinate. When the local farmers get together and harvest another farms field after a heart attack, or keeps milking the cows for months while they recover. When an 80 year old woman drives meals to the older community in need. I personally know these examples, they and our society deserve to see their value reflected in a closer knit community that is a natural stop gap in the roulette life presents. Creating for everyone of every diffability a place honoured. It merely takes a will to offer respect to the individual attached to the effort. With either club verification or GPS tracked time, place and date your volunteering we can address a great deal of the disparity and the prejudice it encourages currently.
The obvious missing part of this is how to translate that into a wider currency. Hope and the willing participation in change will be one driver of the currency but it will be the weaker one in comparison to its counterpart. Greed will come in handy here. Greed hates to leave currency on the table. Eventually there will be a car dealer or a home builder that will advertise they are willing to accept some respect points as partial payment, when it bleeds over into the retail market, we as a society can then start transferring as many transactions as society sees beneficial. It seems so odd to realize that the very weakness that let the community break down is the one we can turn into a tool to repair it.
Eventually this experiment will be tried. As inclusion and honoured service becomes more natural we will know quickly whether it will create a surthrival scenario for mankind. It certainly seems to have worked for the cosmos to find respect as a constant. You don’t see gravity sucking you flat to the ground one day and floating you down the street another.
Speaking of bigger shares… respects natural behavior allows us to invest growth in the behavior a sociopath or psychopath profits by. They do not care how the profit and “power” comes only that it does. We can with this form of currency give them reason to build rather than locust, to self impose limits rather than hoard the resources of billions largely uselessly.
We need an app builder and a government presentation that lets it be worthwhile for them to begin.
After that I’d love to see someone get onto building a bio suit that photosynthesizes for us with the nature of the tardigrade and its ability to weather open space. Getting rid of the need to continue with two things humans do that are hardest on Mama Earth. Feeding us and other than in extreme weather house us. Our humaneer would contain most of what the suit would need to keep a living balance.
Respect … every time. Thanks for being interested.
