How Can We Motivate People To Serve Without Money?

Okay, so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this lately.

It seems to me that the value of money is changing rapidly. It is totally losing its meaning and as a tool, it is frequently being misused and abused.

I just saw an interesting onine video at www.storyofstuff.com. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. Annie Leonard describes the full cycle that stuff goes through, at least for folks in the U.S. and how the current process is killing us and our planet. It is not sustainable, and that I truly believe. Don’t get me wrong, I think that capitalism has its merits, and is, perhaps, better than socialism. However, I see both of these as extremes, neither of which can live on their own.

So, with socialism and capitalism failing, what might be the next big thing? I mean, how do we strike a balance? How do we motivate people to stay active and continue to serve, where the service is needed, without money or law or nationalism to drive them.

Well, ultimately, I think religion will play a big part in that, but for now, I don’t see that happening.

I have some ideas to kick start the new economy, but honestly, I don’t have any answers here. I think that we all need to start thinking about this issue and determining if we can find a way.

I had one idea recently and found that I’m not the only one. I found the web site www.favorpals.com. I don’t know how long it has been around, but it looks relatively unused, as of the time of this writing. Even so, I think there is merit in the idea.

I was thinking of a sort of favor bulletin board, where people could post favors that they need and others could post favors that they are able to provide. Initially, favors would be completely charitable. So, in essence, people would give favors to those who need them. For those of you familiar with Law of Attraction and Law of Tenfold return, you would instantly recognize that nothing is ever truly sacrificed, as it always comes back. So this would provide an outlet, of sorts, for this sort of thing.

I was also thinking, however, that something could be set up to reward those who serve more. Some sort of point system or something like that, where, perhaps people with higher points appear higher on the favor request list when they have favors they would like done. Perhaps other incentives could be worked into the system.

This system would not do away with capitalism or socialism, of course, but could potentially be added to those types of systems to augment them and make them work better. Imagine if we could get a real following. Perhaps we could prioritize favors for people who have more needs. People in lower income brackets, children, elderly, people with special needs or circumstances, etc. could potentially be worth more points to do favors for. Perhaps certain types of favors could be worth more, like education, farming tasks and other favors that directly focus on the needs of people, versus their wants.

Anway, I hope this has inspired some thought. I would love to see some feedback on this.