There was a lot of positive reaction to my last post: society, reimagined … and it was encouraging, to say the least. Lots of people want to live in a world that’s car-free, digital (except for books, which many people don’t want to give up), unschooled, locavore, non-consumerist, with lots of free time instead of wage slavery.

Here’s the thing: you can already have it, right now.

So often we forget that the things that constrain us … they’re in our heads. They don’t exist in the real world, except where we believe they exist. Money, for example … we already live in a moneyless world, as money only exists in our heads. Sure, there’s the physical paper money or gold coins, but those have no value except the value we believe they have, and our ability to buy things with money, our need to do work for money, our stress over not having money or owing money … it only exists in our heads. The world around us, if we suddenly stopped believing in money, would be moneyless.

Governments are the same. The U.S. Declaration of Independence states that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” … but actually, they exist only in the minds of the governed, and only have power so long as the governed allow them to have power. The same applies to any system: schools, work, banks, and so on — they exist in our minds.

And so, to live in a world reimagined, we only need to use our imaginations. We have that power already. Read more »