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What time is it. See that? He checked his watch. He asked it what time it is, and it told him. And without question or quarrel, without ponder, he believed it. A machine and a human being, working together. But that system doesn't end quite so simply. He believes that watch because he set it himself. How did he do that, though? He set it to match the time on the clock on a college computer. He trusted the computer. He asked the computer, "What time is it?" And it told him. Then he told his watch the time, and it remembered, and kept track for him. So later, he asks, "Watch, what time is it now, based on the time the computer told me?" And it answers. But it goes even deeper than that. How does the watch base the difference between the time now, and the time when it was set? That was exactly three hours, ten minutes and four seconds ago, the watch says. And we believe it. The computer based its time on a website. The Internet said, this is the time. And the computer trusted the Internet. In turn, we trusted the computer. The Internet website knew the time because it checked a world atomic clock. "Hey Atomic," said the web server, that ran the website, "what time is it?" And the atomic clock answered. The server believed it. And so it goes. This amorphous, intangible idea of 'the time' is almost a religion. A series of people and machines work together to create a system of belief. There is no basis into what the time is except for what everyone agrees on. The way we begin to count the start of the day, the way we split time into 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds, rather than using base 10 [100 hours, 100 minutes and 100 seconds] or anything else. When the year starts and ends, how many months to that year. It's all arbitrary. Surely, history played a very important part in these systems. But our trust in them isn't necessary for our survival. It is just implicit to daily life.

How much is eighty times seven-hundred and nineteen? Again, we ask a calculator. This small and focused machine answers. And we believe it. We may even ask the calculator a number of times, to be very sure. But you'll notice, we do that because we want to make sure we typed it in right. Concern for accuracy is based on our own human shortcomings, the unavoidable fact that we make mistakes. And one mistaken press of a button results in a poor answer. We don't blame the system, we don't pull it apart and see what went wrong. We trust the machine, and assume that we the people made an error, and try again. And after a few repeat attempts, we find a consistent answer, and we use it in real life.

But then we move to a real quandary.

How much money do you have to your name? Notice I said money. Not wealth, or happiness, or possessions, or health or stability, education. Do you have a summer home, do you have a stake in Wall Street, do you know where your next meal is coming from? I didn't ask any of that. I asked, how much money, in this world, is yours. When you let yourself admit it, you realise that the answer to this is just as arbitrary as the time. Your best bet, to get a decent answer, is to check with your bank. They will give you an exact number. Maybe you'd also go through your wallet, check the couch for a few rolling coins. Your credit card would also count too, as your available credit is money you can rightfully spend. And if you can spend it, it's yours. Maybe the bank tells you you're eligible for a loan. That's money you can spend, too. After a while the exact answer to the question, "How much money do you have?" becomes very flexible. Maybe tomorrow you'll forget to pay a bill. Suddenly your credit rating drops, maybe that was enough to put you over a line, now you cannot get a loan, your credit card is cancelled. How much money do you have now? What if you have a house? Let's say it's worth $300,000. You didn't buy it, you got a mortgage for it. And if you don't pay that money off, bit by bit, then you'll lose it. Is it yours? Who has three hundred thousand of these things called 'dollars'? You? The bank? The person you bought the house from?

Money is a system, run collectively by machines and people, to create a group belief that everyone has a certain amount of barter-worth, and what that amount is. We could all drop this system of belief tomorrow, or edit it severely, if we wanted to. But we don't.

But why not? How many people benefit from it, as a whole? How many people have enough 'wealth' to get by? By every count, very few. And those who do, want more anyway. If this set of beliefs is so detrimental to most of the people following it, why follow it? Are we afraid of being strange? Do we baulk at the power of the system? Are we avoidant of attracting attention from police? Is it a respect for the people who run this system?

When we have mass starvation, wars, pollution, corruption, ignorance and fear on one side, and a utterly arbitrary belief system on the other, why does it continue?

"A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. The bottom half of the world adult population owned 1% of global wealth. Moreover, another study found that the richest 2% own more than half of global household assets." - Wikipedia, 'Distribution of Wealth'

With over half of the world living on less than one dollar a day, why do we continue?

In 1895 a New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, based on his own experiences as a shift worker. He argued that more personal time in the afternoon would be beneficial to society, since a lot of daylight was wasted sleeping by the general population during Summer. To this day, Daylight Savings Time is observed, and although its positives and negatives are debated, the fact remains that the very fabric of a widely-held belief system, that has been in place since ancient times, was in recent history, simply changed. The entire world, with notable exceptions, pauses to edit their belief, twice a year, every year, agreeing to collectively go to sleep one hour differently, and rise the next morning with the same adjustment, shaping their very lives.

In 1971, France adopted an entirely new way of calculating. Rather than using the variable and oddly counted imperial system, they chose to base units on solid facts, and then base other units on the number system already in place: decimal. Due to its ease in math, its accuracy and stability, it is now used as the standard for every country in the world, excepting the United States, Myanmar and Liberia. The world view of how long something is, how fast something is travelling, how heavy something weighs, has changed drastically, because the people who believed in the old system discarded it for something collectively seen as better.

Today we have an overwhelming opportunity to discard our beliefs in money, and replace it with what we agree on to be better. A fair system, based in facts, solid truths, and the natural world, rather than history, fiat and brute force. Using Daylight Savings and the Metric system as analogues, we can imagine an economy that would suit the people as a whole, not only allowing for green technology, conservation, recycling, sharing, honesty and abundance, but in fact upholding them as all important, as driving forces. Like the imperial system, a world old-hat to such a 'natural-economy' would gawk at our current way of living, and wonder how day to day life was accomplished with such a needless and consistent hurdle.

So tell me. Would you give something like that a try?

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_savings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth