A Blueprint for the society of the future

• Preface
• Work, Education and Flexibility
• The most basic requirements and the useless burden of maintenance
• The unnecessary concept of ownership
• Food, the most important basic need
• The new Society
• Agriculture more in depth
• Health
• The burden of economic profit
• Change
• Conclusions

Preface

Let’s start with some bold statements first, then I will go into details as the text goes on. I decided to write this book to present my vision of a future for our planet and all life on it which I believe will be nothing less than grandiose. Please bear with me for at least 50 pages, don't drop the book before, else you will not understand what I am trying to describe, because I offer a complete rewrite of how society works! Usually everyone agrees with my vision and that it is a great plan for the human society to be based on, even if it's a plan that is just to vast to envision, but I also always get into arguments at the beginning! Loads of arguments! Because when I say something, it is linked with many-many other aspects and without grasping the whole of it, some things I explain seem completely crazy and impossible to implement. Again, this is so, because one has to completely undo the way he/she sees society and how society has been for the last century; obviously this is not an easy task because this is all we've seen since the day we were born. Don't drop the book too early, please, I know you will like what I present when you start to grasp the whole vision of it. So let’s start with bold statements that usually get me into big arguments with everyone when I try to start to present this vision of our society.

Eight hours of work a day? That is way too much, we need a maximum of two or three hours a day to fulfill all the needs of the planet. Also we will only be fulfilled in our lives if we work during our whole life until our death. But work shouldn't be painful, it should always be fun and something that we enjoy, we shouldn't work because we have to work to make money to survive on this planet, this is completely wrong. So by two three hours a day, I mean the necessary time to take care of the survival of all of us, which is simply about growing our food, collecting water and a couple of other tasks, then the rest of the day is ours to decide whatever we want to do, hobbies, whichever, personal hobbies or social hobbies. Work should be a joy and not a chore like it is actually for a lot of people. Some chores are needed but they are minimal and that is not disturbing when fitted with the whole vision of the society I present here.

About politics now; left, center, right, conservatives, democrats, green, socialism, capitalism, communism etc. It's all the same, it's like each is the side of a dice, the dice with just one side is useless, it only fulfills its purpose if all the sides are present. Some aspects of our society are best handled in conservative ways, some better by being proactive and promoting change, some by capitalism, others by socialism. Everything is useful when used for the right purpose, I just laugh when I see people voting for this or that group in politics and then change their minds every 3-5 year and vote for the opposing group... This is plain useless and will never work! It has never worked! Everything is needed, people should be voting on which way is better to handle a particular situation and that vote should take place when it is needed, not at some predefined intervals of time that are not really related to the problems at hand!

We have an abundance of resources for everyone on the planet, scarcity is just an economic construct that has no reason for its existence. Everything on our planet is at our disposal, but instead of nurturing it we just abused it, abuse is bad in any situation; smoking is not that bad, but when abused it is; eating is not bad, but when abused leads to all sorts of health alignments; sport is good, but if abused can also become some sort of addiction; sex has a purpose too, but addiction to sex can be a big problem... Everything is about balance, anything can become bad if abused and that's what we have with our planet at the moment, it is being abused.

Another bold statement: we are dumb! I am not saying that in a derogatory sense, we think we are so intelligent, us humans, yet we have so many problems on the planet and it doesn't seem to get any better, so in that way we are dumb, we think we are the most intelligent beings on the planet and somehow we still hide ourselves from the truth, which is: we can't handle our own problems as a civilization. What is wrong with us? It's simple, we think we are better than what's around us, so we invent our own methods of doing things, which seem efficient, but we never think so much about the next thousands of years. Do we? We plan things for an immediate future, a human scale future, which never really goes above 50 years of thinking ahead.

We should copy what works! And not reinvent the wheel until we've first understood what works. And believe me we have a lot to understand! Babies copy their parents to learn, because that's the only example they have. What example do we have to follow apart from our own kind of people... Nature! Nature is and has been efficient over aeons of years, so that's a good start.

The next statement I want to emphasize: our educational system is completely wrong the way it is heading, it can and will not work, it has to change. Nowadays in the civilized world, the commonly accepted best way to succeed in life is to get a higher education degree or many and then get a high-ranking place in the society. This is a principle that has worked for some decades, but it is doomed to fail and that is already happening. Higher education usually leads to work in the tertiary sector, if everyone keeps on studying and everyone ends up in the tertiary sector in the next 50 years, well it will be the end of the world! Without the second or the first sector of the economy there is no reason for the tertiary sector to exist. The people in the second sector are the ones building/producing what is needed for the tertiary sector to exist, buildings, structures, car, appliances, etc. The tertiary sector by itself can’t do that. Furthermore, without the first sector, nothing would exist! They produce the food for all other sectors, they dig the materials needed for the production of the second sector, etc. We arrive here at the conclusion that balance is what is needed, all types of activities are needed. That's why the university education system will keep on existing. But we do not need so many universities and we do not need so many Masters/Ph.D. graduates either, without the first two sectors these graduates have no purpose in life. A revamp of the way we view education and our individual purpose in the society has to occur. Please bear with me, because it will take a long time to fully grasp what I want to explain.

I know some of you are already thinking that I'm crazy and it's fine, I'm used to it, just keep on reading!

Let’s recap these statements in a simple way. Work should be something we enjoy, we should work till the end of our lives, but work in a relaxed manner and not in survival mode!

There is an abundance of resources! I know this doesn't seem right, but believe me, it is!

We should copy nature, because nature works and worked ever since the dawn of time.

Our education system and economic system is flawed at its core.

Actually the whole society is flawed, we need a complete revamp that will benefit everyone, even the rich people who everyone who's not rich despise. It's not completely their fault, they don't know how to make things work. It's not the hundred billions that corporations and rich people have that is going to solve anything. The 'money' system is rotten in many ways, it cannot work for a world that has become as populated as ours. Where did these trillions of debt go? Every country is in debt, every bank lives on debt, there is something completely wrong in that system too.

But I don't want to fixate on money, it is not really necessary, if any economist is reading this book, keep on reading, I will explain things from completely new points of views. I don't need the actual way of understanding economy to make my vision of a society a reality. Economy means household management after all! The economic system must change, because even if all the money rich people have was reinvested to help the poor, it would fail very quickly! Consumerism has to change, the structure of our society has to change, the way we carry merchandises around the world has to change, the way we build cities, the way we use natural resources, the way we produce usable goods, the advertisement industry, almost everything has to be revamped and rethought from a completely different perspective. The world as we know it is doomed to extinction, actually the whole human society is doomed if all the changes I will describe are not made during the next hundred years. Remember also; human society is doomed, nature isn't, it can go on without us and restructure itself after we're gone, but we won't be able to go along if we don't change almost all aspects of our human society.

Now that you think I'm one of those crazy utopians, let's go, it's a perfect starting point.

First of all I also have to warn you, there will be no really defined chapters in this book, because it is impossible. To describe the society I want to describe, I have to jump from one subject to the other constantly, there is no linear way of understanding it all. Hence I will go to one topic, then to another one and another one, then jump back to the previous one and add some more to the previous topic, then jump to a new one etc. There can be no well defined structure in describing it quickly, you have to understand it as a whole; because all parts of it matter for the whole to work. That's the way nature work; you can't study plants without studying the weather of where they grow, without studying the surroundings, without studying the seasonal changes, without understand what animals and other plants are related to these plants. It's a whole and as such I don't want to compartmentalize anything. I know if it is to be implemented, compartmentalization will be needed, but to describe everything as a whole, compartmentalization is superfluous.

There are some chapters but don't expect the chapters to fully focus on the subject in the title of that chapter, I am not able to do that, it is not possible, many topics have to cross-reference each other.

Work, Education and Flexibility

Let's start with work!

Ah that dreaded word. When we were kids we were all told life is not easy, we will have to work to earn a living and make some savings to enjoy the time when we'll be retired.

What an awful thing to say to kids! Basically our whole life will be close to slavery so that we can enjoy the end of our life... I never liked that and I haven't found many people who do like that, especially the younger ones, as society is disintegrating faster and faster, just one simple example; the way it is going, in 50 years pensions will cease to exist and there won't be enough resources to keep all of us alive, almost everyone is aware of that and something has to change.

Back to work, not many enjoy that aspect of life and yet everyone says it's part of life, there is not much we can't do about it! If that's the life that is ahead of me I don't want to live that life, I'll do all I can to change that, until my death! And that's what I'm doing, what's the point of living if I know in 50 years I won't have any money to enjoy my retirement or even if I have money by then, there won't be enough clean food to live on...

Back to work again; I think it isn't part of natural life; it's part of the way of living in the 'civilized' human society, it's not how it works in nature! Work is part of life, but work as we describe it in our society is not part of a normal natural way of life!

Maybe that's why I have so many ideas on the subject and ended up figuring out a completely new way of working for our society, what we call life is not what I call life! Life is meant to be enjoyed in its fullest, in its whole, all the time, everywhere we are. Yet what we are supposed to do is kind of make big compromises to keep society running and ignore our full happiness and keep that for when we are much older at a point when we won't be able to enjoy all what life has to offer? And apparently there won't be much left to enjoy anyway by that time apart from pollution, resource scarcity and the lack of many other things.

I know some people like their jobs and that's great! That's what life should be about, being busy all day long, all life long doing what we enjoy. But that's not how it is for many people in this day and age.

This is a mandatory prerequisite for everyone on earth if our society is to be enjoyed by all of us: WE MUST ENJOY OUR DAY-TO-DAY WORK. And add on top of that that we must enjoy it from when we are born until the day we die. Obviously there might be times where we have to compromise and do some things we might not fully enjoy, but these periods shouldn't last half of our human life! They should last a month or perhaps a year but never more than that. Obviously there are jobs that not many people would enjoy, so here we should find a way to get rid of the need for such jobs as much as possible.

When I talk to people about working their whole life, they answer: hmm, but no one will want to work their whole life, people want to relax and enjoy holidays. This is an understanding on how our society actually works, I wouldn't like it a bit to work my whole life the way work is designed in our current society! No way, but there are ways we could work our whole life without being stressed at all. Imagine a simple change. Let’s say the average human has a lifespan of 100 years. Nowadays our life is approximately composed of 20 years of studying, then 40 years of work and then 40 years in retirement. Really? We have to wait 60 years to be able to finally enjoy real long holidays. Not many of us can take a vacation of 6 months during their working period. Actually almost no one!

Let’s change that in a really basic way; let’s make it 20 years of studying and then one year of work, one year of holiday, one year of work, one year of holiday... And we follow this pattern until the end of our lives. Wouldn't that already be much better? I know, I know, people have given me hundreds of arguments saying that this is impossible, because for example some jobs require physical stamina and after a certain age this is not possible any more. Well then let’s change it a bit further, let’s mainly assign physical jobs to young workers and 'paperworks' are assigned to older people? What do you think of that?

Again people tell me, yes, but then people have to relearn a new job at a relatively old age! No, not necessarily, the ones who did the physical work in their young years have evidently gained a lot of experience and skills doing that job for so many years! They can then take the job of professors and teachers to teach the new young workers the job they took half of their life to master. The older people won't need to do the physical work itself, but they will give tips and training to the new workers in the same job, that doesn't require much of a change in career! It follows the actual way of our society, we start as apprentice and go up the ladder to become experienced seniors and then as experienced seniors we can teach what we learned. This is a perfectly viable solution to the problem that many people are facing nowadays if they lose their jobs when they are 5 to 10 years away from their retirement. Why reconvert? Actually it is happening nowadays, older people rise in the hierarchy and become mentors for younger ones, but something is still very wrong, why are the younger workers and older workers the ones who are usually most affected by unemployment?

We learned so many things throughout our life, it's best to pass the knowledge along instead of trying to learn something new. Please bear with me, there will be many more different examples as I go along, that's just one! More and more people nowadays do many different types of jobs throughout their life and that's great too, no matter what they did, they learned something that they can teach to others at some point, there is no doubt about this evident fact.

About that change; seen in a simple way, old people could become teachers in schools or just take care of youngsters for various sorts of formations or even just plainly take care of kids! Isn't that what is already somewhat happening in some countries? The man and woman of a family are so busy nowadays with their jobs that in many countries it's the grandparents that help with the education of their grandchildren. Old people in good health usually learned to become patient and have seen life, so they are well suited to teach kids! This will also slowly but surely get rid of other problems that are facing teachers nowadays, respect for our ancestors! Don't forget too that in the way I see life, parents will have much more time to spend with their children because work will be spread out over their whole life; that half work/half holiday vision.

If the old teachers keep telling the kids or their own kids; whichever way; that one day they (the kids) will do the same as them, kids already know what their life purpose is! Learn and teach it to others; whatever they learn! And that's really important, because it puts less pressure on the shoulders of the young kids. Because nowadays this is kind of a problem too, we ask kids to choose what they want to become when they are 16-17 years old! What kind of world do we live in, you cannot choose wisely before you've had a chance to try anything? A non-threatening way of telling kids what their future will be is much more suited. They have their whole life to decide what they want to do; they can even decide to do a lot of things; some will already know very early what their passion is; but taking into account everyone, no matter is they know or not what they want to do, they will know that their life already has a purpose, whatever the kids growing up will learn, at some point they will teach it to others, this is as simple as it can be.

Kids thus will not need to know exactly what they want to do, or maybe they will, as I said already, some of us have passions that we like to follow our whole life. But for the ones who have no idea, they still know what the future ahead of them awaits from them, to teach their own experience to others, whatever it may be, and this is already something great to know!

Each of our lives has a useful purpose.

Now let's go to education from where we are; don't forget what I presented; 20 years of education, then one year of work, one year of holiday, one year of work, one year of holiday etc. Or maybe not exactly in that pattern, but basically half of our life after education will be work, the other half holiday, some might choose 1 month work, 1 year of holiday, 2 years of work, 3 months of holiday etc. Whichever pattern, what matters is that our complete life after our education will be balanced between about half work, half holiday. Even going further, as you start to grasp the whole picture, you will understand that most of us will even choose to work all of our lives, holidays will be work, relaxed work, even if it is not needed, that's what will happen if we are relaxed and not stressed out by our work.

For the moment, let’s stick to half work, half holiday. Then this is wonderful, because we won't have to tell our kids, enjoy school while it lasts because you'll have much less holidays when you work! It's the opposite now, we can keep the actual holiday schedule from most schools and we'll tell our kids; once your education is over you'll have even more free time, so do well and you'll enjoy even more what comes afterwards! What a way to motivate them to study! Isn't it? Most of us, the young people, in the actual system were not looking to the end of our studies, because it might mean more money and independence but it also meant much, much less holiday time! In the system I present this will be completely reversed...

I'm aware that some also don't like studying and want to quit school at 14-16 to start working straight away, this is fine too, actually I blame the education system for these drop-outs! For example if someone aspires to become an artist and has great skills in drawing or playing music etc. What is the need for them to study geography or history or maths or things that are not related to what that young person aspires. If afterwards there is all the time in the world to study some more, they might as well just learn what they want in priority, and some basic prerequisites that will allow them to learn more in the future if they so wish; these basic prerequisites are writing, reading and a bit of maths. The rest can be studied later if needed, there is plenty of time!

What should be taught in schools too, in priority, is; how to study well! Because our education system doesn't take individual characters into account, some people are better with visual memory, some are better with auditive memory, some are better with kinaesthetic memory. Not everyone is the same, hence these differences should be taken into account to teach kids how to study well and not force the study of all subjects on everyone! One thing I must still emphasize from personal experience is that it is important for kids to learn two languages early on with teachers who speak these languages properly, because being bilingual, not perfectly, but still adequately good in two languages will open the doors for these persons to learn any other language much more easily afterwards; I don't know exactly why but it seems to help immensely to be able to speak at least two languages early in our lives.

But even that is not really that necessary, if youngsters are taught how to learn properly and have the basic knowledge of writing, reading and some maths properly taught; anything else can be learned later on in their life.

We all change, some people hated history at school and then started loving history later on in their lives; some discover a love of music or arts as they grow older, which they did not like at all when they were young.

What school should provide is a plethora of options for kids to experience, so they can make up their own minds about things even as kids. Let's take one example; some kids started liking music because their parents forced them to try at a young age; some didn't have that chance and would have actually liked music too, had they had a chance to try when they were young.

Another thing that will happen with a wide available choice of subjects at school, is that kids will learn more quickly that mastery of any subject takes time! That is good too for self-esteem, because the actual school system crushes the self esteem of some kids, because not all of them are allowed to learn something they are good at, the option is not there... Not everyone likes advanced maths or is not even suited for advanced maths; why force them to study it then? As long as they can count, make additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions approximately well, they have enough to get along in this world.

Not everyone has a good verbal memory and remembers historical facts, why force them to learn dates by heart just to get a grade? Maybe these same kids who are bad at remembering historical facts would have been great at remembering how to play some music partitions on a piano? There again the type of memory we have is really important; school pays no attention to that. One cannot develop such aptitudes by being forced to learn them, the best way of learning is when one is interested in the subject!

So why not make reading, writing and basic maths mandatory and all the rest optional, with the exception that by the end of a year of having access to let’s say 20 different options they will have to have chosen at least one of these optional subjects. (history, geography, music, sports, arts; all these subjects have many sub-facets: music: piano, guitar, drums, clarinet, harmonica, trumpets, accordion... history: ancient, contemporary, mystical... geography: so many subjects.. sports: so many sports.. arts: so many types of arts)

There are plenty of options for kids to try. Then some tell me, yes, but this would require too many teachers! Really? What do you do with all the older people who have mastered many of these topics during their whole life and who now in the vision of the society I'm presenting have plenty of time to spare! I'm sure many of them would enjoy being able to teach it to kids. Even if there is one kid by subject! There are enough teachers for all of them. Though these teachers won't be available 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, because they will probably attend other tasks too, tasks required to take care of the well-being of our society.

This brings me somewhere else, flexibility in schedules! Schedules nowadays are way too strict. For some people it's good, some of us like to do the same thing for our whole life and that's great too. But others like to do a lot of different things! They might not be masters in any of the subjects they know, but they are experienced enough to teach kids who have no experience at all. You do not need someone who has painted his whole life, to teach painting to a kid who knows nothing about painting! That person will know more than enough to explain the basics to someone else who is inexperienced. Why not even make mixed classes, but not mixed classes as people consider it nowadays, by mixed, I mean mixed! All genders and all ages! Continuing the previous example, you might have a person who's 70, along with another who is 50, along with another who's 30, along with some young kids all there in the same class learning the same subject! Why separate adult classes from young classes, this is another big drawback of our society, we can mix all ages together. This shows kids that there is no age restriction to learn, even more, some old people might learn quickly and assist teaching in that same class, or even talented kids might learn faster that their older counterparts and also assist in teaching. It can go either way and it's all fine. This groups together many people of all ages that want to learn the same subject, whatever the subject is; here it's painting. But it could be planting vegetables and taking care of plants, or playing an instrument or anything else.

But this requires a lot; let me emphasize that; A LOT; of flexibility in schedules and nowadays this is not the case at all.

May 2014: A Great project going into the direction that I describe has emerged in brasil, young people wanting to become fluent in english in brasil (once they have some basics) connecting over internet with people in retirement houses in the US to speak with them.

Furthermore going back to the education system, diplomas are another problem! Seriously, taking an example with piano, do you really believe some who's played piano for 40 years needs a diploma to prove that he/she can play the piano? Just ask them to play something on the piano, if they can play the piano properly, they are good enough to teach other beginners how to do the same!

Let’s take it further, someone who's been building pianos his/her whole life, do you think that person needs a diploma to prove he/she can build pianos? Isn't the result of those works enough to prove the skill, e.g. working pianos coming out of their workshop. For me that's enough of a proof.

Hence back to the flexibility topic! Flexibility in all matters is required, a diploma in my opinion is less of a proof than actual skills learned through a lifetime!

And anyway, back to the schoolroom, if the teacher in whatever subject it is, is bad at teaching, we can let the learner rate him/her. This is again a flexibility that is not very present nowadays; then if the students find that teacher to be bad, that teacher can be assessed by some other people good at that skill to see how bad that person is and maybe that person can simply just be switched with someone more experienced and instead that person will go to a class suited for him/her to learn these skills properly.

There are soooo many options available, why restrict ourselves in our choices.

Even to that person who has been rated bad at teaching that specific subject, this 'bad' rating is not meant to discriminate him/her or diminish his/her aptitudes, if that person is honestly trying to learn that skill, he/she will just attend another class suited to his/her level.

But again I have to emphasize, we need flexibility in our society, flexibility in all aspects of our society. Not just education, but everywhere.

Just a break, I told you I would have to switch from subjects to subjects and I hope you understand why now, to talk about all the parts of our society and all the different kinds of persons who exist is kind of a mess, it is impossible to make a map or a well laid-out plan. Everything is intertwined with everything, I must use examples and examples and examples that relate to different aspects of our whole society.

Talking about the whole, let’s change now from education to parenting. Now I expect you to have fully adhered to the paradigm of a life where we all work and have holidays, in a balanced way, where there is about half of our time spent working and half of our time spent on relaxing/holiday. But in the end relaxing will be work, enjoyable work or enjoyable learning time or anything else! But I don't believe in the end that everyone will be happy just sitting in front of a TV for their 40 years of holiday time! If there is freedom, people will want to do more with that time.

Let’s even take a bold example related to parenting; kids who spend too much time playing games. Do you really expect that if your kids (or even for that matter grown-up adults) had all the time they want to play video games, would do that all the time. I don't think so, there aren't enough games to spend a whole lifetime playing! Let’s take kids who are stuck in front of the TV or computer playing games all day long. Or so it seems. Remove all the history, geography etc. classes that are not considered compulsory from the point of view of the society I describe; only learning, reading and some maths are required. So let’s say this takes about 3 hours a day (one hour of each subject) every day of the week; except weekends naturally. Weekends are needed even if there is also so much free time in the society I describe.

I know, I know, everyone is thinking this kind of society is anarchy, everyone does what they want and no one does the essentials that keeps society running... bear with me it will take a long-long time before things start to make sense; granted for the moment this would be anarchy, but we have yet to address so many aspects of our society, I am far from beginning it all. It takes a lot of time to put all of it together.

Back to kids playing computer all day long. First of all they are not playing all day long! In the actual society they are at school 7-8 hours a day, or some days 4 hours. Whichever... But half of their day is at school, so literally, they don't spend all day playing video games, barely one half of the day. Let’s change their school time to the 3h of compulsory studies I mentioned above, now they will have more time to play video games. So let them play, believe me they will get bored if you let them play for months without telling them to stop. A single game, even online one that has seemingly no end will become boring if you are allowed to play forever. The natural thing to follow is that they will go to another game once they get bored with the previous one. Then they'll get bored again and go to a new game; months will have passed, even years and they'll have played many video games and learned nothing valuable, right?

Well this is how it is in our society nowadays, but let’s dwell much further. I am going to focus on a house in a rural area for the moment, urban cities are harder to examine and change.

Imagine that kid is in a rural area, in a small city with perhaps a thousand inhabitants. Each house has their own garden, with some poultry, a small vegetable garden which provides food for let’s say half of the year, in the spring/summer time as is usually the case when we are able to grow vegetables in the garden.

Let’s say now this is a rule in the society, in the spring/summer the local community must live of their own produced food. Now I have to add to that that fast food snacks do not exist, neither do unhealthy chocolate bars and chips and all sorts of junk foods, local stores that sell these do not exist. All there is for each family is what grows in their gardens and neighbours gardens, assuming there are no climate calamities, a family can live of what is in the garden, a big enough garden to sustain each family member. Let’s ignore autumn/winter time too.

I know, there are a lot of 'ifs' and 'imagine' prerequisites, but let’s go ahead with this. Now the parents grow the vegetables they like, vegetables that the kid doesn't enjoy. Well then if the kid wants to eat something he likes, he will have to get out into the garden and plant what he/she wants, because else it won't be available.

That will already force the kid to work outside and let go of the video game, there is no way around it, if he wants food he likes, he will have to grow it, else there is only what his parents and community will grow. Worst case scenario, the kid won't plant his vegetables, he will stay inside anyway. What next? Well there are only natural products to eat! Eggs from the poultry and vegetables and fruits, so whatever happens, the kid will still eat healthy! Alcohol and other things are not available either in shops. Everything in the spring/summer period must be acquired by ourselves.

Again, there are a lot of aspects that don't fit in this example, but I cannot explain in a single page something that will take hundreds of pages to explain. So let’s go ahead, not forgetting parents have a lot of free time whenever they want from their usual job. What else is there to eat in the house? Stored foods from winter, nuts, walnuts and all sorts of fruits that last a very long time, vegetables in vinegar, maybe some salami and meats kept fresh with salts like it was done in the past. The kid will maybe overeat on those. Well let’s say the kid is allowed to eat all the meat in the house. He's finished it and there are only fruits and vegetables left... Now he wants some more 'bad' food? There are no shops? He will have to go ask the neighbours and probably neighbours might accept within a limit. Then he'll go ask more neighbours and so on. This might happen one year or two, but believe me the kid will feel ashamed to go ask all his neighbours every summer for their food savings for the winter! Before you know it, it will be the end of the kid being stuck in front of the TV every single day and abusing food of others. He will start to grow his own things! Why? Because he is allowed to do so, he is allowed to cook, he is allowed to go take fruits of trees!

I know this might seem far-fetched and I agree myself, but this will be put in a global scope as we go along. This might more be sort of a transition between the actual society and the society I imagine for our future. And again, I know many people tell me I'm crazy, no one will want to get rid of shops and convenience stores, that's why they are called convenience stores! No one will want to get rid of easy-to-access foods and other commodities...

Again, wait before bashing me and read along, there is a lot to put together before any of this makes sense! We can have convenience stores and processed foods, but in the whole scheme that means we will have to keep a strict work schedule like we have nowadays, long working hours as nowadays, many boring and useless jobs like we have nowadays. This is all hard to understand as a whole. Basically it can be said as: consume more, work more; consume less, work less. In fact in the society I envision everyone will either have time to cook every single meal and even better, just go to eat a nice freshly cooked meal in a restaurant every day without needing to worry about money. If you had all the time you want to eat and the choice between fast food and a really fancy restaurant, without bothering about money, what would you choose? I see a society where fancy restaurants would be all around the planet free for all!

Keep reading!

Back to this kid, in that situation, he's stuck playing video games but forced to eat healthy anyway, there is no other option, so that's already a good thing! Imagine that continues for many days and we have hundreds of millions of kids and even adults playing video games all day long. For the sake of this example, let’s assume this doesn't affect the well-being of the entire society. All of them are playing video games, but now assume no one has bothered making video games any more or even making computers and consoles better! Well at some point these gamers will get bored, they will have exhausted the whole repertory of available games. They will want new games? Well? They will have to make their own video games since everyone has stopped making them, this will force them to do something else, they will have to learn programming and everything that comes with it. This will bring them to a new 'cyber' environment and probably from there they will start to get interested in other things, because it takes many years to make a video game, but a couple of months or some years to get bored with the game. The gamers at some point will have to learn the hard truth that they have to spend a lot of time to make a single good game! Actually what could happen is that they will get interested in other things, making websites, controlling networks etc. This is the logical follow-up of anyone who spends too much time on their computers... Computers become tools for all sorts of productive work. Someone has to make the computer components too... Nowadays this is relegated to cheap labour countries; for example China and India, but trust me it won't be that way forever, once China and India modernize, the 'West' won't be able to exploit them any more, then people in these countries will want standards of living similar to the west! What will they do? They might temporarily start exploiting Africa for cheap labour; it is already happening in fact, but that will stop too. Then how can it go forward? Africa will exploit the West again for cheap labour? I don't think so, by that time, if this happens, all the planet will be over-polluted, a lot of things have to change. The 'West' cannot continually reap profits by exploiting other places on the planet, if there is profit, then someone has been 'abused' to obtain that profit, the point where we have to arrive as a global society is equilibrium, there is no other way around it; and that's what that kid being stuck playing video games will have to learn too! You can not abuse someone or something infinitely; said another way you cannot reap profit from someone or something infinitely, we have to get to a worldwide equilibrium.

Anyhow I hope you liked that story that didn't reach any conclusions it seems. I was just trying to prove a point; at some point everyone will have to learn to reach a state of equilibrium and do what is needed for life to coexist harmoniously on this planet. Else the human race will disappear, it's that simple. What I am trying to show is that in the example above; where the kid is forced to depend on the immediate surroundings to remain alive; is a great way to force him to learn basic rules of human coexistence. In the actual society we are so far from these realizations, our food comes from places we don't know, the stuff we buy is produced in places we will probably never visit, we have no immediate contact with anything that has been used to build our houses, or fill our fridges, or build our electric appliances etc. Some of us do one part; for example some of us gather the minerals; some of us are in the construction industry, some of us build electric appliances or cars or... But none of us see the whole of it. No one does. And we will never see all of it; it's too vast. However we must understand it and understand the consequences of each part. Like industrial farming which pollutes water streams, depletes oil resources for the fertilizers, uses hundreds of tons of plants to feed animals that will produce only some tons of edible meat, these beef factories stink like not many of us can imagine. The production of electronics pollutes a lot too, so many chemicals are needed, so many waste by products etc.

The list is endless.

The problem is that as we cannot see all the harm we do to the planet in separate places, we kind of ignore it or do not feel concerned. Well, we know it's happening, but let’s say for Europeans, our toxic wastes for the production of electronics for example are disposed of in many places in Asia, since many things are manufactured there, so we don't see it and care less about it. Our garbage is placed in landfills in places we never visited, in some not so populated rural areas.

So there is always time to change things, it's not bad at our door, so it's fine.

Well, it isn't, if everyone could see the whole of it as I see it, it's a mess, a serious mess! We'd better start sorting it out as quickly a possible, because it's going worse all the time.

But we cannot see the whole of it!! And all the consequences! But it's happening, more and more sicknesses, more and more pollution, scarcity of many resources etc.

It's hard to describe.

With the example of the rural area above, with the kid playing game, it's not so much the kid that is important, it's the concept of living that way, ignoring the kid story for the moment. These people in that small town have to live on the food they produce locally and this is good, because this also forces them to realize that if they pollute their own gardens, they won't be able to grow the food for their own survival, this way of living is about bringing the whole picture as much as possible in front of our own eyes, so that we are directly faced with our own mess, such as to not avoid it! Simply imagine, if you live in a village somewhere, that all the garbage you produce is buried in your own garden instead of some far away place that you don't know of? You will probably stop buying a lot of things! Because we produce tons of non-recyclable garbage every year! This is completely unsustainable. If it was buried in our own gardens it would be a nightmare for all of us. Our gardens would have foul stenches, that would prevent us from opening our windows to get fresh air. Yet when it's buried somewhere else we don't really notice how bad it is...

Think about the industrial places that produce the beef we eat; if that was right next door we would stop eating beef I can guarantee it, between polluted soil, undrinkable soil water, horrible stenches etc. we would choose to become vegetarians. As a side note, I don't like that word either, PRODUCING meat, this is completely wrong, we cannot produce animals, we must care for animals, producing animals is horribly wrong. What if we produced humans? That doesn't make any sense.

All right! Now you must be getting a small grasp of one important aspect of my vision for our future society; trying to bring everything we need for living next door or even in our garden, so that we cannot avoid facing the consequences of doing something wrong. This has many great repercussions as you will start to figure out by yourselves as we go along. I will ignore big urban cities for the moment as this is really an amazingly complex problem we are faced with. Just imagine the garbage collection was halted for a month in a city like Tokyo, this would create such a mess with bad odours, dirty things all around the place. No one can imagine that and actually no one wants to be faced with that problem, it would be too overwhelming; we've seen examples of cities where garbage collection was halted for some weeks because of strikes, we all know how bad the situation looked; yet when that garbage is thrown somewhere else out of sight we are fine with it, or so it seems.

Anyway let’s stay in rural areas for the moment, because cities are faced with huge problems which are very hard to all take into account, let alone solve; garbage is just one of the problems that faces a big urban city.

The most basic requirements and the useless burden of maintenance

Let us go back to our example of a small city of about a thousand inhabitants. What are the basic requirements for that city to be able to sustain itself? Energy (electricity and/or gas), water and food. That's about it. Therefore in the vision of the world I propose, all these should be free and available to anyone, though getting there will require a lot of work, but once this is established, the basic requirements to sustain the inhabitants of this city will be there. For the moment let’s say this city is somewhere in a temperate climate, I know there are many other places we will have to look at too and all will need their own variations of the basic system I will present to sustain themselves.

Energy or more precisely electricity, petrol is not really needed; I think we all agree that if we had an infrastructure nowadays that would support electric cars, that would be a much better option than petrol-based cars in many ways, the most important being less pollution and less maintenance since we wouldn't have all the burning processes destroying our engines slowly but surely.

Thus what do we have for energy sources? Let’s start with the one that many companies are trying to push forward by claiming it is relatively safe: Nuclear energy. Well, relatively, but not that much, we all know about Chernobyl and more recently Fukushima; these energy production methods might be safe but there are always ways to disrupt them and if a big problem happens, it is everything but safe! It's basically a nuclear bomb under control but if we lose control of it, it can blow up and the devastation that ensues can be multifold; it can simply blow up and wipe out a large chunk of our Earth, with radioactive by-products that will stay around for aeons of time and pollute the whole planet in uneven ways; even if it doesn't blow up, it can leak radioactive materials that will also impact the surroundings for hundred thousands of years, if not more. I'm ignoring many minor events, but basically, nuclear energy is not safe at all. Now we have to look at what is needed to keep these nuclear reactors in activity, plutonium and uranium; I don't really know the entire process but it doesn't matter, we know some primary radioactive materials are needed which are then refined to produce the uranium 235-238 that is needed to power up these things. Where do we get these materials in the first place? We have to mine them out from some places on earth, so there is a limited supply, even if it doesn't appear like that at first sight! Even if the authorities are right in claiming that these radioactive materials can be recycled and reused, this still isn't an answer; all I've seen for the moment is recycling into un-enriched materials which are then added on weapon shells used to go fight wars in other countries! This doesn't solve anything, once again it just puts these toxic/radioactive materials out of sight. Furthermore I believe that if something is deep within the crust of the planet, it has a purpose there, it shouldn't be brought someplace else where it doesn't belong. Also we all know about the places where they pile up the by-products of used radioactive materials; not many of us know where these places are; but they do indeed exist and we've all been told these materials will lie there, buried into the soil and require billions of years to decompose again! Billions of years.

So now let’s suppose in our small city we decide to use nuclear power, then as we want to know where what we produce is going, we will bury the radioactive materials right in our gardens! Would you want that? No one wants that. So nuclear power is out of the question for many reasons, it is a bomb that is always likely to explode, even if very unlikely, still likely to explode and the by-products have to be disposed of and burying them in our own yards is not something anyone wants, no one would really want it either; for example China using the by-products disseminated in electronic devices that they ship back to Europe or the US. There is no way around it, nuclear is not an even remotely safe thing to be dealing with; I would also suspect that no one would really want to work in a nuclear power plant or in a place where the radioactive by-products are reprocessed; if we all had a free choice no one would do that kind of work.

Radioactive materials are deep inside the planet and they should remain there! End of the subject.

What other option? Coal-, gas-, petrol-consuming powerplants? Once again these things require resources that come from deep inside the planet, these resources should stay where they are! Not forgetting that burning coal, gas, petrol generates many other unwanted by-products when combusted. Would you for example like to have a car running constantly in your house to provide the electricity you need through the electric alternator all cars have? I don't think so, the air would smell bad all the time and this would surely induce some respiratory problems.

Once again these options are out of question. Furthermore we have to consider all these options, nuclear, gas, coal, petrol, that enormous amount of work and travel and... and... and are needed to get these resources out of the soil, moved to where they are needed, then moved away from where they are unwanted, then somehow recycled (as if that's really possible?) an so on. Wouldn't it be better just to have something set up that would provide power without needing to be recharged with some resource all the time. Not mentioning all the resources needed themselves to mine these resources out of the crust of our planet. We use petrol to gather petrol, what a stupid and inefficient way of doing things, we use petrol to mine coal, we use all sorts of energy resources to gather all sorts of energy resources, not even mentioning that we need a lot of maintenance to keep the oil and gas pipes in working order.

Anyway, we use resources to gather resources! This is completely wrong. Millions of people around the world are working endlessly to keep these resources flowing... Wouldn't it be better to not need to do all that useless work. These resources might have served us well up to now, helped the society develop, but now these resources are running out, we all know that and even if they are not running out, we should still stop using them. So why not use some more of these resources temporarily to set up a system that will produce energy endlessly and that will not require too much maintenance; thus saving millions of uselessly spent hours of unnecessary work in the first place.

Some people tell me, yes, but jobs are needed, no one will like options that induce the destruction of millions of jobs. Well in the actual society this is true, but in the society I envision, the less work the better. Please keep reading, I am not a utopian or a lazy person, but why create jobs that are not needed in the first place? This is another very important aspect of the society I envision, reduce the amount of working time to the minimum possible and needed. I am fully aware of the thousands of reasons why destroying jobs is bad for society, but please keep reading, you cannot understand the whole of it without understanding the whole of the society I envision for our bright future on Earth. I am talking about less jobs in a society that works completely differently than the actual one; somehow following the principles of permaculture, but applied to society as a whole.

Let’s go back to the energy source. All methods that require constant refuelling of some sort are out of the question! We are left with the so-called renewable energies, this is already much better; windmills, solar panels, hydroelectric power mainly.

I want to exclude hydroelectric power, more precisely, dams! Hydroelectric power is useful, but building dams is completely wrong, we shouldn't divert water streams in such unnatural ways, because water flows for specific reasons science has yet to understand; but this a topic for another book, let’s ignore that aspect for the moment, do not believe me if you don't want to, it's not important. But let’s talk about another fact, erosion caused by water, we all know this as a fact, if some water flows very strongly, it slowly erodes parts of the places it flows in, there are no doubts about this fact. So dams are not an option that will last forever in time, they will expire even after a long time; the cement will become more and more fragile over time. So these things, dams, require also a lot of maintenance over a long time period, that's why they are not a good solution for long-term solution. They have to resist a huge amount of pressure constantly and we've all seen in smaller scale that walls we build around flowing water streams (to prevent the water from flooding inside cities etc.) are always prone to breaking at some point, they always require maintenance. As a general rule, trying to stop the flow of water is doomed to fail; or will require a lot of constant work over the years; flowing water always wins in the end, no one can block the flow of water infinitely without putting a lot of work into it!

Now, putting turbines in a flowing stream without hindering the natural flow of the water stream, that's alright, because we are not preventing the water from flowing, so the water won't need to destroy something that is blocking its natural flow. As a general rule, if something flows, it's best to let it flow; it's like trying to build up a wall in the middle of a motorway, if you keep launching cars at the wall, the wall will eventually break at some point.

We are left with windmills, solar panels and turbines that use the natural flow of things in a non-obstructing way. Windmills are actually the same, they use the wind flow without preventing it from flowing. But yet again it's best to avoid windmills and turbines, because they have moving parts, those require maintenance anyway! We want to avoid maintenance whenever possible. So the best options are solar panels, they don't move, they require the least amount of maintenance. Therefore the best would be for our small city to put solar panels on every single roof and covering the whole roof. Roofs are useless apart from the fact that they protect us from the rain and what is falling from the sky, thus well protected solar panels can fulfill that same purpose while also providing power.

And yet solar panels are not that great, they have lifespans of about 20 to 50 years tops, with the amount of power they generate slowly decreasing as time goes by. But if we focused on that technology instead of everything else, we might find ways to refurbish old panels correctly without pollution and without wasting anything. Let’s say the solar panel is covered by a thick layer of glass of 10cm and below it are the photovoltaic panels. First of all, pure glass is easy to recycle, if it's broken, the parts just need to be gathered and the whole just needs to be reheated and remoulded again, there are no by-products, assuming the energy we use to reheat this glass is also produced by other solar panels. Then if the photovoltaic part could be reprocessed and remade as efficient as originally without any by-products, that would be all. The panels could be rebuilt every 30 years or so without wasting anything or needing anything more, except some work. But that work is still much less than all the work needed nowadays to gather the expendable resources like petrol out of the soil.

Anyway this is not perfect, but you see where I am going, I would like the solution we choose for energy production to be one that needs less maintenance and also require no use of new materials for its refurbishment. So once the factory for refurbishment is built and all solar panels are built (in this case), then we won't need to go again mine more materials to rebuild new ones. We gather the resources needed to make all the panels once and make a factory for their handling and that's it; this system after that won't produce any more waste for its use over the coming centuries, every part will be reused all the time. It seems we cannot have something that will work infinitely without wearing out, hence let’s accept this and make a system that will at least infinitely be able to recycle these products without requiring the mining of new materials; or if mining is required, then it should be as minimal as possible. We have to spare the resources we have, especially in the construction sectors; materials for building homes, materials for building infrastructures etc. they should all be self-recyclable/refurbishable as much as possible without needing any additional materials.

Now I'll present other ideas for the engineers here and try to make people understand a controversial subject of free energy devices; for me it is a certainty that they exist and can be built, but let’s keep the standard point of view: i.e. that perpetual motion is impossible. Think about magnet, a perpetually rotating magnetic motor would not be violating any physical laws, it would just be converting the static energy present in a magnet into a rotational energy. It's not perpetual anyway, magnets lose their magnetisation over time, however they do so over hundreds of years. Thus the machine would seem in perpetual motion from our point of view at a human time scale, because in hundred years the magnet would still be able to power that motor, but after many centuries the magnets would also lose their magnetisation. Thus it's not infinitely perpetual, it's just perpetual over a very long time scale. That's why I believe this is the best option we have to look into for energy generators, if we make a magnetic motor where the magnets can be taken out when they are demagnetised, they can be re-magnetized and reintroduced into the motor. This would need to be done only once every century or so, the maintenance is reduced to its bare minimum. I am also aware how I previously stated that it is best to have generators with no moving parts, because the more moving parts, the more maintenance. The problem here is mostly due to friction, this is what destroys motors slowly but surely. However, I believe and I myself have ideas of how to do it; that one can put a rotor on a vertical axis instead of the nowadays mostly horizontal axis, and put magnet rings at the base and top to hold the metallic shaft of the rotor in a floating position where it would not touch anything while rotating, thus eliminating that annoying friction problem that is the culprit for the slow wearing off of motors nowadays. Then the rotor could be held by an attractive magnet placed at the top, so the bottom of the rotor shaft does not touch the ground. Eliminating all types of frictions.

Then the only thing left to do in such a motor is to re-magnetize the magnets when they weaken. Re magnetisation doesn't require much work; like glass, one needs to melt the metal and then make it harden again inside an electric field to realign the electrons. Well this part is for engineers reading this book. I want to present ideas and also try to convince everyone that perpetually rotating magnetic motors are completely possible, it doesn't break any of the laws of physics commonly accepted nowadays.

Now to present another idea too: a self-pumping vortex using water. You have a large rotor on which you put a funnel-shaped form filled with water, the water will naturally flow downward because of the gravitational attraction. This would cause the water to spin into a vortex, thus it would convert the gravitational attraction into rotational energy. Then you close the water system by putting a pipe at the bottom of the vortex which brings the water back up into the top of the vortex funnel, this system would need to be closed completely, hence the suction caused by the spiralling water should be enough to pump the water back up into it again, since the water circuit is closed, the pressure caused by the vortex sucking the water down would naturally attract the water in the upper side to pump in right back down and the gravity acting on the water spiralling down would constantly reinforce the spinning vortex. If this works then we would really have a self- pumping water flow, but it would not break any physical laws either, because it is the gravitational force that is converted into rotational motion inside the water and that spiralling force should be enough to pump the water by itself. Then as I said earlier, this system would be put in the middle of a rotor, since the water would constantly be spinning this would slowly with forces of inertia force the rotor itself to spin faster and faster over time. Then as with any electric generators, we just add magnets on the rotor to induce currents in coils on the stator and there should be another electrical generator that provides free energy without breaking any laws of physics.

I am not sure this idea would work, but it's worth a try. What I want to encourage engineers to do here is to think outside of the box, we have a force at our disposal that we can use continuously without ever depleting its source; it is gravitational attraction. One should figure out a way to convert this force into a rotational motion and we would have electric generators that would never require any refuelling of any resource! Let's just use what is freely available anywhere on the planet.

Well enough technical talk. Let's go back to the wider concept, we need electric generators that require no refuelling and as little maintenance as possible and possibly the maintenance process should not need any additional resources. Thus once the generators are built, they will be maintainable forever without requiring us to take more unneeded resources from our planet.

Nuclear, coal, petrol, gas are not a viable option at all.

Let's continue with that, now assume every house in this small rural city has one such generator at home and that the electric grid system is just there to redistribute energy to other houses; so in case the generator in one house fails, that house will still have electricity until its generator is repaired or maintained.

What need would we have to pay for electricity any more? No one is needed to gather resources, there is no need to maintain a huge grid system around the entire country to distribute the energy to this city, the energy is produced inside every house of the city and the generators last for tens of years without any maintenance. Assuming we still have the same economic system as now, all what would be needed is some kind of small yearly fee to pay for the sporadic maintenance of the generators; which should all be made to last at least 50 years without any big maintenance; and the sporadic maintenance of the electric distribution system inside the city.

Moreover, getting rid of the country-wide electric grids will save a lot of energy straight away, because this is not a fact known by many people, but as much as 50% of the energy produced in a power plant is lost along the electricity lines transporting it to some faraway city. Thus in the actual system, as much as half of the resources needed to produce this power are probably just wasted stupidly.

Now, with this home generator system, it will also mean we won't have all those big ugly cables everywhere around nature that pollute the beauty of nature, neither will we have big smoking and polluting chimneys. That is all gone and with that also all the useless jobs necessary to maintain an unnecessary electric grid system, not forgetting all the drilling platforms for petrol, the pipelines around the world and so on, millions of jobs rendered obsolete.

Electricity sorted! Now let's talk about gas, this is still great for many applications, we cannot rely only on electricity, welding, cooking and many other activities in our society are best done with gas or even require gas. Well, now that we have an endless supply of electricity available locally, we can use that electricity to make water hydrolysis and obtain hydrogen and oxygen from water; assume water is abundant too, I will get to that point later. So we have abundant water and use the electricity to separate water and hydrogen, now with that we can make as much gas as we need, dosing it the proper ratios this makes a perfectly fine gas to burn. What are the by-products of hydrogen/oxygen combustion? Water vapour and heat. What a great self-recycling system, we use water to make and we get water back, what else could we ask? There is no CO2 or anything else for that matter, just water vapour is released out of that combustion; then for example with cooking we have already all we need to recollect that water with stoves. In all cases we just need to recollect that water in some way or another. Recollection of water is not even needed, it can go back into the air and that's it, nature will take care of the rest.

Thus there is no need to extract any methane, butane or propane or any other gas from the bowels of the planet, water is there at the surface and that's all we need to produce gas, provided that we have the electric generators. It all boils down to electricity in fact, if we have free electricity, then gas produced from water will also become freely available to anyone. Each house in that city could have their own gas generator, or there can be a generator of gas for the entire city. But again I don't believe this is a good choice, because we would need to maintain a system of gas pipes around the city! Remember, we want to reduce maintenance costs to the bare minimum, so if there are just pipes to maintain in each house it's even better, less pipes means less maintenance needs. Lets cut down on all unnecessary jobs wherever we can.

People tell me they are afraid of hydrogen, it could explode. I agree with that, so we can just place the hydrogen generator outside the house in the garden, buried into the ground at let's say 1 m depth and make sure that the capacity of the tank that collects hydrogen is small enough so that in case it explodes, the explosion will not even be able to open up the place where the generator is located. These are just engineering problems, they can be solved easily if we put resources into making the right researches.

Anyway, now we have electricity and gas. For electricity as we said we will just pay a small yearly fee or something like that to maintain the local electric grid and the home generators. For gas it's exactly the same, as with electricity in this new society there is no need to extract the gas from the planet, no need to pay people for extracting the gas, no need to pay people to build gas pipelines around the world and maintain them, no need to maintain underground gas systems inside each city. This saves a lot of unnecessary jobs once again. So there is no need to pay for these jobs that don't exist. In this case we won't even need to pay a small fee to maintain anything, there is no public network to maintain! All we need is to pay once for the installation of the generator and the gas pipes inside the house and that's it. If there is a problem with the pipes inside the house then we will pay when needed and that's it, gas for almost free.

Now we have free electricity and gas; almost free, we just have to pay for the installation of the system and then it's free except the usual maintenance which will be reduced to a minimum.

Let's talk about water, the essential substance that keeps all of us alive. This one should evidently be free too, we shouldn't pay for using it, we should pay for the maintenance of the network, that's all.

A network here is the best solution, because changing things so that all houses have their own water supply is not that easy, sometimes it might rain more in some places than others, so in case of water it is best if there is a network to provide water from places who get the most to places who have the least. This is a variable factor, we can never be sure it will rain the same amount every year at exactly the same place, so in this case a distribution network is evidently needed.

In terms of water, the actual network is already good enough, but remember now, that electricity and gas is free, this will reduce maintenance costs extensively. Because this is one factor nowadays that makes the prices of tap water go up, as the people who maintain the network need to pay for the resources (petrol, gas etc.) they need to take care of the system, these prices keep going up, hence they have to keep increasing the price of water to cover up the costs of maintenance. Now that electricity and gas are freely available, this will reduce the expenses of the people working to maintain the network and hence reduce the price of water. I am aware that the price of materials also increase nowadays, but don't worry about that topic, I will get to it soon enough.

There are still things we can do to make the water system better and here I have to come back to windmills! There is their right purpose. The air is always full of humidity even when the air is the driest, there is humidity in the air! Windmills can collect air humidity by condensation on the palms, the technology already exists, you can look into it on the internet, a company called eolewater in France thought of that great concept, yet almost no one is aware of it.

Thus we could instead of installing simple windmills, install water-collecting windmills, not only would they generate electricity as normal windmills do, but they would collect water too. Now I have no idea if that water could be used for drinking, but one place where it could certainly be used is to collect water to irrigate farmlands. Thus some farms in dry parts of the world could install some of these windmills, they would help them immensely in not depleting the groundwater while helping them irrigate their fields when it doesn't rain enough; never forget the air always has humidity in it no matter how dry it is.

This option doesn't seem too bad to help irrigation, because we are not gathering water from underground, we are gathering water that is in the air to irrigate and the water will go back into the air anyway, it is kind of a cycle where water just above the farmlands can be reused in some amount and put back on the soil and then re-gathered from the air when it evaporates and then re-irrigated and so on.

The small city in our example could have one of these windmills if required, that would be good as water to water the public parks and things like that in the city.

Then we should also collect rainwater from all roofs into tanks as is done in many places already, but that should be a requisite for each house to have! A small tank for some hundred litres that can be collected in times of intense rain and kept to be reused when needed when there isn't enough natural rain.

Once again remember what I said way earlier, we have to follow nature, nature knows best; rainwater should be used to water parks, gardens, crops etc., not groundwater. That one in a perfect world is the cleanest of all, it has been filtered by the soil, cleaned up, re-mineralised and thus is perfect for drinking. Rainwater is perfect for plants, that's how it is in nature, it rains on the soil. Thus cities should have tanks to store rainwater which should be used only as was intended in nature, i.e. to irrigate soils. Groundwater should not be used for irrigation, that's not how it works in nature, or maybe in some rare exceptional cases, but nowadays we use drinkable water to water parks, to water gardens etc. That must be stopped, groundwater is not intended for that use. Now I have one particular example in mind, golf courses, they require large amounts of water to keep them green during the summer, golf courses should have water-collecting windmills and storage tanks. So that water can be collected from the air, since the greens are irrigated all day long, that water will evaporate, hence it can be collected again by water-collecting windmills, stored and reused. That would significantly reduce the use of groundwater in that specific case.

Well, I cannot think of all examples, there are millions of examples, but you should have gotten the point now. Storage tanks that collect water when there is excess rain and then water-collecting windmills for places that need to irrigate heavily during the summer, thus the water is constantly being irrigated, then evaporates again, then recollected partly and so on.

Anyway this doesn't have much to do with the price of water, but it will surely help agriculture in dry lands. Although we also have to consider the impact windmills have on wildlife, it is known that they kill many birds who unfortunately fly through the blades, so we have to be cautious about that too. There are so many aspects to consider, I am just presenting a broad view of the ideas that I have, there are surely other people around who have much better ideas for specific cases and situations.

Then I have another crazy but important point to make, it rains more where there are natural forests, someone should do a more thorough survey about this phenomena. I know it seems crazy, but it really seems to be that way, forests of natural trees attract more rain it seems. I know some people will tell me the opposite, it is because it rains that forests prosper. Obviously there are places on Earth where rain is more abundant than others, so there is more vegetation, but I also strongly believe that trees attract rain. I would really enjoy it if someone reading this book had the time to do such a survey, please let me know! I am just gathering loads of ideas together and fitting them all together, this is what I am good at, so I try to give you insight to go search more on your own.

2014: this has been proven, trees release fine aerosols that tend to induce more rain by promotting the accumulation of humidity in the sky into larger droplets that can reach critical mass more easily to become effective rainfall.

Back to our small city, free electricity and gas, basic fees for maintaining the electric network, some fees to maintain the global water network but also local water-collecting windmills if needed and each house has rainwater-collecting tanks and some are also placed around the city.

Now this city has almost all it needs to sustain itself and all its inhabitants on its own, the last basic requirement is food!

But first I have to finish one other point, evidently through this book I am not using specific numbers, so when I said reducing maintenance, removing pipelines, stopping unnecessary mining and extraction activities, I said it would save millions of jobs? I have no idea exactly how many people are needed for all these activities combined, maybe it's not millions, maybe it's just some tens of thousands of jobs, I frankly have no idea, but there is no doubt that many unnecessary jobs will cease to exist. I must reinforce that view: this is a very important part of my vision for a better society, remove all unnecessary jobs wherever we can. But then people argue with me that this will make millions of people unemployed... I am aware of that, this does matter in the society system that exists nowadays, everyone needs a job to live and pay their rent, taxes etc. But this is not how it will be in the society I am describing, so please still bear with me and don't think I am not considering these issues. I am and as we go along, it will make more and more sense that removing all these jobs is the best option for the future. Because if you think about taxes in general, what are they used for? Maintenance or improvement of the entire country, maintenance or improvement of the roads, maintenance or improvement of public lighting, maintenance or improvement of the healthcare system, maintenance of public buildings, construction of new infrastructures and so on and so forth, the list is very long. So if we reduce the maintenance needs as much as possible, this will also reduce the taxes, assuming we are still in the society as it exists nowadays. But then I still haven't addressed the topic of all these unemployed people. This is where it all fits. Assume we are remodelling our entire society to become somehow like the one I'm describing, temporarily as we make some people unemployed, the other working people will still keep on paying the same taxes and prices for electricity etc. This money can be used temporarily to keep paying these temporarily laid-off people to actually build the new infrastructure, because the people who designed, engineered and built drilling platforms, pipeline systems, electric grids etc. have skills that can be perfect to also take care of the design of the new infrastructure. Meanwhile others who are still employed as usual can keep on paying the usual taxes and fees which will still keep these other people employed in a new sector for the betterment of the entire society.

I am aware this is a humongous task and will need a lot of specific plans; I repeat I am just presenting a broad view; to implement most of the changes I am describing will require millions of people in each country to tackle all individual parts of that global remodelling. Anyhow as the redesign slowly takes place, slowly but surely maintenance costs for many parts of our society will decrease, at that point we can start reducing taxes. But that will make these people rebuilding the infrastructure unemployed once again won't it? No, not at all, these people can then help solving other problems and creating new infrastructures for better farming, better recycling and so on for example.

But yes in the end these people will lose their original jobs because it will be useless! But by the time the transition is set up and that's also why it should start with electricity, these people can go back to their houses, have free electricity, free gas and free water. Enough to live without any money, assuming they can get food somehow.

It's a very complicated transition to imagine, I am aware of that, but it is possible. The main aspect of the transition from the actual society to the new society I describe is to get quickly to the point where all basic needs for life are free. Electricity, gas, water and food. All the rest is useless and considered secondary for the moment; don't worry I am thinking about people of the tertiary/service sector and there will be plenty of work for everyone, you will have to keep reading to understand the whole plan once again, we are very far from having an entire view of it for the moment. If people already have a house, then temporarily they will not have money to pay some taxes, but they can be exempted of these taxes and instead go help produce the food for themselves and others. They will be doing something helpful for everyone else even though they do not have money to pay for anything, temporarily it doesn't matter, they will have what they need to live! Their house to live in and the basic requirements to stay alive.

That's what everyone should have for free, these are fundamental requirements for all human lives, no one should have to pay for these, but everyone should have to work a small amount to keep these basic necessities available to everyone. We will get back later to the transition from the actual society to the new system, it is very long to explain fully and to grasp how to achieve it smoothly without making millions of people unemployed as considered in the actual society system. Because in this society we have nowadays, if you have no job, you are a burden to everyone else and you cannot earn what you need to support yourself or you and your family.

If there are less jobs available in society, it is something that is considered bad in the actual economy, this is however a completely wrong concept. Now just imagine we are in the new society I describe, everyone works about 2 hours a day to help produce the food needed for the whole community and electricity, gas, water systems are maintained fully functional by some others who also work a tiny amount of time every day. Then why do we need more jobs? Assuming everyone has a house, the small amount of work everyone puts in is enough for the society to keep itself alive. Actually in the society I describe, the tertiary/services sector will be a hobby work, because there is nothing else to do, everyone will be a volunteer! We have to realise that a load of jobs nowadays exist because the system is not fully functional at its core, tons of unnecessary jobs. Let's name a few ones that do not make sense, why do we have to make our tax revenues every year, this requires every one of us to spend time doing it once a year and a big infrastructure behind it to handle all these papers. If it was just taken off our salary automatically every month, then all of us would not need to waste days in making these so dreaded papers, we would just need to declare extra things like tax-deductible house renovation activities etc. Then this would also require less government workers to look at these papers. Our system is highly inefficient in that it creates millions of jobs that are useless if the system was designed in another fashion. Some people tell me they prefer it as it is, because they have temporarily more money to pay for their expenses? Do not forget, electricity, gas, water and food are basically free! These are the expenses that we all have to pay for, if they are free and considered as a necessity for everyone, a lot of our expenses vanish. These expenses are the main thing that is keeping many poor people in a ditch in which they have to survive metaphorically speaking. Money should be a mean of exchange for commodities, not basic necessities! We will get back to this, not money, but the exchange of commodities.

Back to useless jobs. How many people end up in jail because they have to steal to get money to get their basic necessities? If the system was working well at its core, jails would be mostly empty, they would be used to help rehabilitate people who really have behaviour problems. Many people in jails do not have these problems, they are in jail because they did something illegal to get money to make a simple living! This is wrong. Today this phenomena is exploding, people robbing banks, stealing copper and all sorts of precious valuable materials. Granted some do these activities with bad intentions, but this is not the norm! Many people who do illegal activities to get money do that to be able to pay their rent, keep their houses and pay for basic needs. How many small drug dealers started that business because it was the easiest way to make money? I don' think all of them do it to keep people addicted! It's a business, they need customers to sell drugs and get money to make a living. Some make too much money, this is also true. But again this is not the norm. Anyway if society was working well at its core, we wouldn't have to deal with all these useless problems! If everyone was sure to have a home, have food, electricity and water, they wouldn't need to engage in illegal activities in the first place... All the people protesting and sometimes destroying buildings, burning cars, attacking the police. Why are they doing that? Because they want to have a decent life, nothing else. If the system worked well at its core, all these would cease, if the government was listening to them, they wouldn't need to destroy things to make their voices heard and draw attention to themselves.

Anyway, prisons are not a solution to anything, they are a by-product of a deeper problem; or stated otherwise, they are the effect of the problem, not the cause, the cause is what pushed these people to do activities that landed them there in the first place.

If society was working well at its core; and I'll repeat that statement many times again; in terms of prisons, there would be less prisons, less people incarcerated, less people needed to take care of prisoners, less judges needed in the courts, less police needed to go after them, less less less of a ton of other things. That's why it should be a priority in society to have a system in which everyone has a house and all the basic necessities to live, without needing to pay for it, or maybe a small fee as I explained for the maintenance of this basic infrastructure. Everyone would know that the 2-3 hours of compulsory work they do each day is something that benefits themselves and everyone else, because it is what makes all these basic needs free for all.

The unnecessary concept of ownership

On the base that all basic needs are free for all, a society can function well, otherwise it will never function properly because if these needs are not met, people will complain. But then some people I talk to tell me, yes, but it's human nature, if you give them these, they will want more. Obviously! And they can get more, there is plenty of time for everyone do to whatever they want, their basic needs are met for eternity! They know that whatever they do, if they do that small work every day, all their basic needs are cared for so they can engage in anything else. Then people tell me again, yes, but then people like to amass material things just because it's human nature. So be it! If someone wants 10 cars or 50 cars or a hundred plasma TVs or this and that. These things can be exchanged, no one needs them all the time. In the actual society people keep these because they can not trust others! Why can they not trust others, because if someone who is poor gets the car of some who's rich, that poor person might sell it to get other things. But if all basic needs are met, all these behaviours will fade away, what is the point of amassing material commodities if you know you can get them anyway because others trust you with it? If you can trust others, you can exchange all these commodities at will. Let's talk cars and console games for example, no need for everyone to have both. At some point one has played enough games and he can exchange his console for a car with someone who wants a console. Then people tell me a console does not have the same value as a car... What is the the point of value? You know that if you have a car or a console or a TV or whatever else, you'll still have a house, food, electricity and water. So why would you need to sell that commodity for something more valuable, value has no meaning in such a society. Why not give all your commodities to the state? It doesn't matter, the state doesn't need them to pay for extraction of resources, the state doesn't need them to pay banks; banks have little to no purpose in reality; the state doesn't need these commodities to make your life better or worse, your basic needs are already met. All commodities can simply belong to everyone.

Let's see it from another point of view. Nowadays people feel safe with commodities, some people own hundreds of houses, it means they have excess money that they will be able to use in case something goes wrong, i.e. in case they lose their jobs and cannot make any more money, at that point in the actual society if you don't have anything else to sell, you are doomed because you have no more money to keep your house and pay for your basic needs, hence you'll slowly sell all your commodities to meet these basic needs. But in the society I describe, these needs are there for everyone, you do not need a safeguard in case something goes wrong, whatever happens you'll still have your house and everything you need to remain alive and well.

Everyone will be more than willing to exchange commodities, you'll have nothing to lose. The reason we cling to these commodities is that they are a safeguard in case something goes wrong. Now let's talk about people who keep their commodities to show their success in life, the more material possessions you have, the more it means you've succeeded in life. Well let's take the former creator of Apple, we all know who that person is, we do not need to go to his house and see all his material possessions to know how much he's accomplished, do we? These famous people are known for their success anyway, they do not need hundreds of cars to show it! But in the actual society they keep their commodities as a safeguard, so that they know they will be able to have a great life until the end of their days even if it means keeping too many things, you can never have enough safety. Sometimes it's just also an expensive passion!

Well once again in the society I envision, everyone has their safety, it is a birth-given right. And people who accomplish great things will be known for what they accomplish, not what they have anyway! Nowadays they just keep these things to keep living a prosperous life and usually they keep way too many commodities for absolutely no purpose except safety to keep that lifestyle. Once again in the society I envision, everyone will have that prosperous lifestyle, everyone will be able to travel freely wherever they want to go, everyone will be able to do whatever they want, granted they just do a tiny amount of work that helps the whole society remain free and prosperous to us all. Accumulation of commodities will be useless.

Let's go to another example, people who like to have collections of expensive things, let's take a bold example! Planes, someone likes to have a collection of planes. Well in the actual society first of all it is a safeguard in case they have money troubles, but even if they don't, they still like to say they collected all these planes. Wouldn't it be better if all the plane collectors in the world could set up a humongous shed where they keep all their personal collections together. In the actual society it is not really conceivable, because some might be greedy and try to take possession of the shed and keep it all for themselves just because of greed and also because it would be a safeguard again. But if these plane collectors all knew they could have a house next door to this shed and go visit it whenever they want, freely, and that these collection items would never be repossessed because no one really needs them anyway. The planes would be safe there and available as a collection for anyone on earth to go and visit; all the collection amateurs could live next door and together exchange their ideas and thoughts etc.

Well I am not a hardcore collector, but I have small small coin collections. If I knew they could be placed somewhere else but that I always have the right to go see that collection freely, ownership or not of these items would not really matter to me, what could still matter is the history behind it telling everyone I am the person who found and collected such and such items, but the items are fine where they are, no one will steal them because no one needs to sell them for money, I don't really see any reason for anyone to go trash the place if everyone else has the right to come and visit or make the collections they themselves want.

These commodities would be safe wherever they are, that's it!

That is the problem nowadays, we are not safe knowing some of our belongings are somewhere else! Because these belongings are a safeguard, it can be exchanged for money in case something goes wrong. But if nothing can go wrong, what is the point of having any safeguard of any sort.

As a matter of fact, in the society I want to present here, the concept of ownership would be rendered useless, and with that comes the fact that no one would care about owning anything, it's available to anyone, so when you want to have a look at any commodity, you can just go and look at it. If you want to cherish that commodity, you can go live next door. If you want to use that commodity; here I am talking about everyday commodities like TVs, computers, gaming consoles, tables, cars, bikes, etc.; you can exchange it for some other commodity you have and you are not using at the moment. The value of commodities would cease to matter too, they would just be commodities that's all, not valuable objects prised for their values, they would be objects useful for different usages and nothing else. Ownership of anything has no meaning, you could be the inventor of that commodity, this is fine but you do not need that commodity if you're not using it. Nowadays we just keep the commodities we are not using because they represent a safeguard. If they represented just a commodity that has no intrinsic value, it would make no sense to be attached to these commodities.

Let's say car tuning, I have nothing against that practice, I consider it as an art like any other art, but the problem is that nowadays these cars are worth a lot of money usually because of all the hard work that has been put into it. But it's just an art in the end! These mostly guys like to go to gatherings and see what other people have done on their cars too, so they do this activity as a passion! It is a creative art of some sort even if not everyone might agree. Well they could hang on to their cars, but I am almost convinced that... and I would like it if someone reading this book and is into that would tell me their opinion on what I am about to say (in fact same for the collectors, please tell me what you think of my comments...); back to the previous sentence, I am almost convinced that if these people could get other cars and be free to modify other cars if money was not an issue, they would enjoy it too, why tune one car if you could tune other cars too. I mean they could play with one car and modify and modify it until they like it, but if they had the freedom to exchange cars without bothering about the value of anything, at some point I am sure they would enjoy exchanging cars and see what tuning they could do on another car and someone else could take their previous car and change it completely once again. Here again I feel the concept of ownership would be rendered useless, you would tune a car for the art and the passion you have of doing that activity, the final result would be your creation, but the car itself as a bunch of materials would have no intrinsic value. What I feel would need to change is that the process of tuning cars would just need to not be wasteful, i.e. previous parts remelted and reused to make new body parts, the plastic itself should also be some kind of material that can be recycled and reused infinitely; by the way hemp plastic gives that option unlike petrol-based plastic. Also using paints that do not pollute and anything else must not pollute. Then the art can become a life passion that harms no one, pollutes nothing and hence can be done forever without using more and more natural resources which we should not be taking out of the planet more than needed.

Okay, let's go back to food now. I went enough along the lines of ownership and how it becomes void of any meaning if people do not need any more safeguard to be sure they can live a decent life. A small ending statement, greed, envy and pride are not human nature in the case of material objects, everyone thinks it is human nature because of the way society is built! If the concept of ownership is rendered useless, so are greed and envy. If you can have free access to any material commodity, you will not envy someone who has it because you know you can have it too anyway. And if commodities are considered as having no intrinsic value and anyone can have access to these commodities, no one will be greedy and accumulate these commodities because it simply means nothing to have so many commodities, anyone could do it if they so wished, but for what purpose? We do not need any safeguards in the society I describe. Lastly pride; pride is good in the good sense, you can be proud of having invented something that is useful, proud of doing something that helps others, like I would be proud if this book helped the planet become a better place for us all, but negative pride like being proud of having 100 cars would be useless, anyone could do it in the society I describe, it would bring no benefits to have 100 cars in a garage lying there serving no useful purpose, this is again pride linked with greed, one is showing their success in life, but if we are known for achieving something big, people will know it anyway, they don't need to see that great person accumulate material possessions to know that that person achieved something important in their life. Do not forget, many aspects of what we believe to be human nature are wrongly thought to be so because of the concept of ownership which is heavily imprinted in our actual society and past history, the truth is that human nature is not like what we have been made to think it is! Now really, we have to get to the topic of food; as I said earlier, food is the last basic need that should be available to us all; there is a lot to talk about here.

Food, the most important basic need

First of all genetically modified foods are to be discarded once and for all and I will focus on that for the next pages because it has many ramifications. They have no useful purpose and very harmful to us and the whole planet in the long run; there are plenty of natural ways to get better harvests without needing them, which I will explain later. The genetically modified crops and various plants were designed to make harvesting simpler by having less weeds and resist pests. However as it is becoming more and more evident since they were first introduced, nature evolves! No matter how you try to remove pests, they become stronger and stronger and in the end require more and more toxic products to be controlled or killed. This is again a maintenance problem that will not get better if we keep on trying to improve nature instead of using natural harmonic ways to avoid the problems in the first place, which I will also explain later. As I explained about the prison system in society, if society was fine at its core, prisons would hardly ever be needed and this would free up human resources for more beneficial purposes.

For agriculture it is the same principle, instead of fixing the effect of the problem, we should fix the cause itself.

But first back to genetically modified crops and why they are bad in so many ways; sure it seems harvests are better at first, but nowadays to keep the same harvests farmers have to add more and more fertilizers every year; toxic petrol-based fertilizers that pollute the soil more each time they are used, we wouldn't put these fertilizers on our skins, so why would we put them on plants and on the soil everywhere? Back to the least maintenance principle, to produce these fertilizers, we need petrol resources, hence drilling platform, transport to carry the petrol around the world etc. Similarly to the energy concepts I described earlier, a lot of unnecessary work is needed to produce these fertilizers, and on top of that we are exhausting the resources needed to make them and the fertilizers pollute the soil more and more every year because they are not natural. Petrol comes from deep within the bowels of the planet, it should stay there, it has no purpose being used on the soil in any derived by-products form. Then on top of these fertilizers, genetically modified plants are modified to resist other chemical compounds that are deadly to insects, if these chemical insecticides are harmful for insects and natural plants, they are harmful for humans too. These chemical insecticides are also petrol-based, again requiring a lot of work to produce them in the first place considering all the drilling, transport, transforming etc.

I don't know how toxic the process of transforming petrol into fertilizers and insecticides is, but I would tend to guess this process too generates other toxic by-products.

I am still ignoring the fact that every year that passes, more and more fertilizer is needed because the soil becomes more toxic every year and also more insecticides are needed because the so-called pests are becoming more and more resistant. So what’s next? Modify these plants to become even more resistant to new deadlier insecticides so that the pests are killed once again efficiently? But for how long until the pests evolve again to become resistant to these new toxic compounds? It is exactly like antibiotics; the more we use them the more the bacteria become immune to them and in the long run we need more antibiotics for the same effect as ten years ago. This is a never-ending cycle that leads nowhere, except more and more toxic by-products, more resistant pests and bacteria, and more work put into trying to eradicate the never-ending supremacy of nature.

We cannot win against nature! We have to work with nature, or else we are always bound to put more and more human resources into fighting nature and believe me, nature has more than ample resources to fight against us; in the end nature provides us what we use to fight against itself; thus nature always prevails in any case. We are fighting a battle which we are poised to lose if we keep doing what it seems the civilised world is doing.

As I said earlier, the less maintenance, the less work, the better it is for us all. So now let’s reverse the whole genetically modified crops scenario on its head and view it from a completely different point of view. If we stop using fertilizers, stop modifying plants artificially, stop producing chemical insecticides, that will mean less jobs for these agricultural multinationals, right? This is bad for the world, isn't it? No, once again one has to look at the problem in its whole. As there will be no one drilling the petrol, no one building pipelines, no one carrying petrol around the planet, no one transforming petrol into all sorts of chemical compounds for agricultural needs, that frees up millions of jobs worldwide, many millions of people in fact, since agriculture is the first and foremost sector of employment worldwide, there are a lot of jobs at stake in the departments that produce products for the agricultural sector.

Now imagine, and here I am actually imagining that in the actual society, no need to implement any of the changes I discussed anywhere before in this book. So we are in 2012, imagine all these people are laid off in a single day and all the factories producing the chemical fertilizers, insecticides etc. are shut down. Again people tell me millions of jobs lost? That won't help the economy... This is a completely bogus way of seeing things, because now farmers cannot buy these fertilizers, they do not need to and cannot buy the modified crop seeds, they cannot buy the insecticides. This represents a lot of unused money, so what can they do with that money?

The simple thought most people have is that these farmers can sell their products at cheaper prices, because they have less costs now, but they will have less yields too because they do not have their fertilizers any more and no insecticides to kill all the pests. Well this is again a simple way of imagining how it would go! But...

back to all the millions of unemployed laid-off workers, I don't want millions of people to be unemployed all at once and have no job, no, not at all. And farmers shouldn't reduce their prices either; at least temporarily until their soils are fertile once again; they now have a lot of money to pay new salaries for other workers to work on their farms! And this is the key point here; millions of jobs won't be lost, they will just be transferred to a more helpful place! Granted I can imagine that such a transition would not be that easy, but it is perfectly possible nonetheless.

In fact we can even force the transition, these people working for chemical-producing factories for the agricultural sector can just decide to quit their jobs in mass all at once! It is hard for them I am sure because that would mean no salary, but this is not true, if they know that farmers will employ them straight away, no one will be hurt since they already have a new job awaiting them! This can happen, we don't need any government to help in the process, people are the power, the government has no influence on that. Sure the government could sue all these millions of people and ask for compensations, but that wouldn't work either, because these people are needed to help produce the food we all need to live, if governments try to stop them, they are basically saying we want the world to die of hunger... A lot more than just some millions of people would protest!

Again I am aware this is not easy, but still very achievable.

Let’s review the plan; people suddenly stop working for these factories that require petrol foremost to produce their products for agricultural uses. First of all petrol is not getting cheaper, if these factories are forced to shut down, they will require less petrol, from a simple economic point of supply and demand, there will be more supply and less demand, thus lowering petrol price as a side effect and remember that I am talking about enormous amounts of billions of tons of petrol-based products used worldwide, this will be a significant drop in petrol use. Then all of them just go work with farmers, because farmers no longer can buy these chemical products, they will have money to use to pay new salaries to new employees, now these employees can help cleaning up weeds and find ways on the farm to get rid of pests, even if that means planting other things inside the plantations to create a more balanced ecosystem requiring more work to be harvested. It's not a problem, plenty of workforce will be available and the money to pay them will also be available if farmers do not reduce the prices of their products temporarily.

This transition is about reallocating work in places that need it the most! Farmers need to kill pests and have sort of tidy plantations nowadays because they are often alone in taking care of hectares of land; this is the problem. More of all of us need to work in farms and food production as a whole. Farmers should not be alone in taking care of humongous-sized fields, obviously this is a work that attracts no one at the moment, here I mean industrial-sized production. Many people are interested in farming and growing their own foods as the general trends suggest these days, but many are also afraid of it because it means being in a kind of solitary confinement and it does not provide much money at the moment to live. Farmers are grossly underpaid, many individual small farms are getting shut down all the time because they cannot sustain themselves correctly. For the future society I envision, this has to change drastically, farming should be the first employment sector, the one where you are guaranteed to make a nice living, because you are making food for everyone else, that counts for something! Without farms the whole human race will perish, especially large urban cities! No one produces food there, the food all comes from the outside, no one has a vegetable garden, not even a garden for that matter. Rural areas are better off, because there people usually have a garden, even if without a vegetable garden, they have space in case they should need to grow some food on their own. Anyway that's why I'm focusing on rural cities for the moment as I explained slowly how a transition could happen that would not starve off urban cities, I don't want anyone to perish if the society is to change, the change should and must be relatively smooth for everyone, while slowly showing that urban cities have many problems to resolve and that problems won't be resolved by making the cities bigger and with more people fleeing to big cities to get a job, the complete opposite has to happen, people in big cities have to migrate slowly to smaller cities. Huge cities are bad in so many aspects that make them not self-sufficient, were they to be cut off from the rest of the world.

Also in the society I envision, farms could still be very large, but as there would be something like 10 to 20 farmers for such a farm, it would not be a solitary work any more and this would also solve another problem that prevents many people from wanting to become farmers; holidays. Farmers cannot go on holiday nowadays because usually they have to take care of a huge production all by themselves or as a small family. Instead if there were a whole bunch of people working in each farm, that would first of all make the work much easier because there would be more workforce to do all the work, nowadays a farmer with milk cows and planting crops must for example during the crop-planting/harvesting period; first wake up and go milk the cows, then go to the fields to sow/harvest and then come back and take care of the cows. This is a lot of work! If instead there were many people on the farm, they could share the tasks, meaning less work for each of them and also since there are enough people, some could go on holidays while others continue to take care of the farm. Remember, the owner of an average industrial-sized farm must spend many tens of thousands of dollars or Euros to pay for the chemical fertilizers, patented seeds and other things like that, now as I described, assuming these don't exist any more there will be plenty of money to pay at least 2-3 salaries per farm! Now one must also think about the fact that if there are more people, it could also mean that less heavy equipment is needed, not necessarily more, because there is still the same crop surface to take care of, so using just one tractor, in shifts farmers could work more hours in overall in one day etc. They do not necessarily need more equipment, I actually think the opposite can happen if work schedules are properly arranged so that the machinery is used as much as possible everyday by all the farmers as a whole, succeeding each others, while others go on to other tasks with other available machinery etc.

This community farming idea is a big part of what I envision, it's further in the book!

Back to agriculture, agriculture is a priority, not chemical production, not petrol extraction, we can not live off of toxic products or stuff that comes from deep within the planet; only above-ground soil in nature provides what we need to remain alive. So it should start there! I haven't yet approached the topic of cattle, poultry, and meat production in general; though I don't like that word; I will partly get to it, don't worry.

Now remember, I talked about less maintenance, less useless jobs before; this is hard to put all together as I stated so many times already, because the human society is a complex network of interdependences between all parts. I will never be able to explain a perfect plan throughout this book; first of all because I am just one simple human and like everyone else, I need others to have some of my needs met, as others need me to have some of their needs met. Interdependences! Hence my plan will and cannot be perfect, but I am trying my best to give ideas and concepts that could apply to many different parts of our society and that based on that initial rough idea, each of us can figure out our own new solutions that are better in the long term for the whole human society; based on some primary concepts I believe are the key to making everything better.

Less maintenance and less unnecessary jobs is a main aspect as I stated earlier. Why, more precisely?

The new Society

Imagine there were only 4 global work sectors available, works in the electric/gas department, works in the water department, works in the food production sector and finally house/building construction. Now bear with me before getting mad; imagine we are all forced to work in either one of these 4 sectors, there is nothing else, we are not allowed to do anything else, no sport, no arts, no music, no fashion, no movies etc; no entertainment at all. And also there are no social conflicts of any sort, just imagine, I know it's not the truth but I have to start somewhere! Imagine also we start on a planet that is not polluted and sort of brand new if you will.

Now we make the electric/gas network; as I showed examples previously; the most efficient, the easiest to maintain and with the least amount of work needed for maintenance, repairs and new constructions. Do the same for the water, gas network, then the same for food and the same for houses/buildings. At some point when all of these 4 sectors are set up properly and there is water, electricity/gas, food and a house for everyone, also the maintenance of these generates no pollution, no garbage (more precisely, self-recyclable garbage). Then, what a boring society this is, we are allowed to do nothing else and everything is set up, almost no maintenance is needed except perhaps in cases of climatic calamities. When all of this is set up, it might require barely 1 hour a day of work from each of us to make the food and maintain everything working properly. I started this book saying 2-3 hours a day, but frankly, one hour of compulsory work should be enough. It's just that without understanding the system I present, one hour of daily work just would have seemed too far fetched to start with!

Now we are at a simple easy life where everyone has all their needs met for almost no daily work.

What is really left to do?

Entertainment, or tertiary sector in the actual world!! Any entertainment we want, we have all the time we could ever want to do that. There is nothing else to do, apart from lying in the grass and looking at the sky all day long...

In this example we evolved from a perfect start to form a perfect society, it is easy to know the rules to make our entertainment activities entertaining while still not changing our ways so that we will not have to work more to keep our society healthy. All the principles we followed to build our society are to be followed to make anything for entertainment purposes. For example, people want a theatre and others want to watch that somewhere else in the world. We invent internet to transmit this information anywhere on the globe. But now that's where we have to include a new principle in the society that I've never talked about up to now, what is built should be as easy to un-build! Let's take the example of internet, this society is still primitive, they haven't figured out what fibre optics are yet, so they decide to lay some copper cables underground around the world. However now, from the point of us readers in 2012, we know at some point fibre optics will be discovered and this new society will have to update their network if they want to transmit better quality videos for example.

And this why everything that is built should be easily un-built and not polluting or wasteful in the process, because things always evolve and get better and there is nothing wrong with that process, but in that process it always means that some old things will be discarded for new things. I know there are wireless transmissions etc. But let’s just remain with that example; that they'll have to switch from copper to fibre optics, it is enough of an illustration for what I want explain. So in this new society they will plan carefully for expected unknown improvements, one way they can think of is that in the future the underground trenches they want to make for the copper cables might be used for something else too, so they will make very large trenches, actually this should have already been done with the country/worldwide water network as I explained previously which can be used to distribute water to places that need it more in case there is too abundant rain in some places and not enough rain in other places. So based on that thought for the future, since this water network links all cities together, it might be useful for some unknown purposes in the future for other networks across cities, and hence they made very large underground trenches, the size of very large tunnels in fact! Maybe 5-10 m wide trenches dug down to 5-10 m depths so that there is plenty of space to go around inside them in motorised vehicles, I know this would require a lot of time to build and let’s assume they took all the time they needed to build this network. They have these large trenches all around the world by now, covered by some protective roof by the way, so they can lay the copper cables inside these tunnels. But now they have to make sure that in case the copper was to be replaced, they can remove it everywhere and that it can be reused for other purposes if necessary, without polluting anything in the process or modify the cables to reuse them, so that brings us to what is protecting the cables, because copper is easy to reuse, it can be melted and reshaped into anything else and all the melting process requires is water, assuming the copper cables are naked. You just collect all the cables and take them to a place for melting/reshaping. Or if not needed, it is just kept somewhere in each city.

Fine, so if this is to be as easy as possible, the cables must be naked, but we know cables need to be protected by plastic at least if not even more, like shielding for interferences. These outside layers should also be as simple as possible to remove and require the least work possible. Plastic can be used but then not petrol-based plastic because it is not easily recyclable, probably hemp plastic would be fine because hemp plastic is biodegradable, so imagine the copper cable is inside a hemp plastic layer and then we need shielding for interferences, this could be another metal which again will be easy to reprocess and reuse since all metals can be melted and reshaped almost infinitely.

This society will go ahead with the designs for these copper cables, but they will also think of the future and make machines that will be perfect for un-making these cables, they will not need to build these machines at the moment, but they should plan for them. So that in case the copper wires have to be removed, the cables have been designed to be easily un-constructed by a machine that fits the design of the cables.

So imagine that! Now they arrive 50 years later and fibre optics have been discovered. Everything was already planned for that event, they know how to remove the previous copper cables, how the materials will be taken apart, the machine to build to do that, since it's also standardised, all cables are exactly the same everywhere in the world. Thus they go ahead and build thousands of such machines and use them to remove the old copper cables and according to the plans they made 50 years ago, they know where all the removed parts will go, the copper or shielding metal will be taken apart and sent to melting factories, then if it is needed there it will be melted, else the metal will just remain there for future use. As for the plastic, it was designed to be perfectly biodegradable, so they will take it outside and give it to farmers and inhabitants around the place for their gardens and crops. That's it, the copper network has been removed successfully with no pollution and no unnecessary new by-products, and the plastic was actually useful for the crops.

We have to remember here that the process of designing perfectly recyclable copper cables also applies to the machines they built to remove the copper network, once this is done, these machines will be un-mounted again and nothing wasted, let’s assume these machines were made entirely of metal, the metal will be taken to melting factories and disposed of there to be used for something else if necessary or just lie there for future use.

Then for the fibre optics network they will redo the same process all over again, make sure the fibre optics cables can be disposed of entirely and recycled fully and designed in a way that machines can be built to remove the fibre optics network if required in the future.

This is a planning process that is completely missing from our actual society, we always plan for things to improve the world but we never think about when they need to be removed and as such we make plans hastily that always come back to haunt us in the future, because everything evolves! Everything we build! So for anything we build, we should also plan exactly how it will be un-built successfully and make sure that all the materials can be reused completely. This standardises everything we build in ways very useful for sustainability, because everything is made to be un-built one day. I personally apply that process as much as I can to anything I create, knowing that someday I will have to un-build it.

The lack of this process is a huge problem in our actual society, we go hastily toward the future, improve technology, improve buildings but we never plan for when we will have new better things to replace the old ones. Like houses! Nowadays you destroy a modern house, 3 quarters of it go to a dump to be incinerated and buried! This is so wasteful and badly planned. We are acting as if we had infinite resources and infinitely-sized garbage disposal places. The problem with that is that we build hundred times faster than the time it takes for the old materials to be recycled naturally, this is completely unsustainable. If we want to build quickly, we have to be able to recycle as quickly too!

Back to the society and their theatres and cinemas. All these buildings must also be built in ways that make them perfectly un-buildable in the future, because this is the fate of all buildings, they are consolidated/maintained once in a while, but sooner or later they will need to be rebuilt. Thus they will build even cameras and other commodities needed to film and project their entertaining movies in ways that they can be un-built and perfectly recycled! There should never be any non-quickly biodegradable or remoldable/reusable materials used, also the commodities should be easy to un-build and the un-building plans should already exist for the future likelihood of the event of un-building!

Notice, I never use 'destroy' as a word, because this process is much more wasteful and untidy than un-doing in general and thus 'destroying' creates more unnecessary jobs as I will explain later.

So now I have to talk about what materials are sustainable. Glass: it is sand heated and transformed into another state, any time we want to, glass can be melted again and transformed into some other glass shape, so even if we break something made of glass, we can just collect the broken pieces and reuse them infinitely. Thankfully this is already done nowadays, glass is widely recycled and it is good.

Metals, all metals are good, because again they can be melted and reshaped infinitely. Ceramics are good too because they have the same properties, but it is hardly ever done nowadays because it is energy-intensive, but it can be done and when unending electric energy will be available it should be done at all costs, because ceramics are used for many-many things. Nowadays instead it is crushed into powder and used as an aggregate to make clay, this is not too bad and a non- polluting process, but companies that accept ceramic dust for recycling are really picky, so often if it is clay mixed with other stuff, it just ends up in a landfill again and there it will take aeons to be recycled naturally.

Clay can be recycled infinitely also.

Then other good reusable/recyclable materials are obviously all biodegradable materials, they can just be used as compost anywhere for the growth of new plant life, so we should use more of those instead of using non-recyclable materials. When I say non-recyclable, I mean non-quickly biodegradable, because in the end everything is recyclable but what we consider non-recyclable are materials that will take millions of years to biodegrade, which is not a good option because we use these materials at a much faster pace than the pace at which they can be recycled, this actually applies to all petroleum-based products, this is why we should avoid them at all cost, nature requires millions of years to convert above-ground materials into petrol underground and in about hundred years we will have exhausted (according to scientists) all the petrol that was produced by the natural ecosystem during hundreds of millions of years, this is completely unsustainable. I don't know, maybe estimates are wrong and there is plenty of petrol available for any time we want, but even if that's so, it is still not wise to use petrol, I believe what is underground has a purpose in being there! We should only use what we need from what is at the surface of the planet. Because there is another fact that is very occulted, everything that comes from very deep underground is radioactive and it is rightly so, radioactivity represents decaying matter! Matter that is at an advanced state of decomposition should stay were it is to finish its process, that is go deeper and turn into compressed rocks somehow and then lava etc. I don't know exactly what happens underground but I know for sure it is more efficient than what we can do with it as humans above ground. I wasn't finished, what I wanted to say is that petrol extraction sites become more and more radioactive as time goes by, because they extract decaying matter all the time. This is not discussed any more nowadays and completely occulted, but by looking at newspapers from 1950-60, you will find these stories about concerns on how to recycle the radioactively contaminated machines used for petrol extraction.

Agriculture more in depth

Carrying on, I must now emphasise the usefulness of industrial hemp, not cannabis/marijuana, just hemp, the one that has no use as some sort of drug. Firstly I have to get to wood, it is a very useful resource but we are using it again much faster than nature can produce it and this is becoming more and more evident as time passes by. Wood should be used for logs and big-sized trunks etc. but not as conglomerate or pressed dusts, except when they are the by-products of wood logging. We should first of all let trees grow on their own and just cut trees that are reaching the end of their lives, not when they are rotten obviously, but a natural tree will grow for decades and still be fine for use even after 50-100 years of growing and probably even centuries later. The process of planting trees and cutting them 15-20 years later is not helpful at all, because forests have a purpose in nature, they should not be artificially maintained at a rate that is not natural. Trees do not finish their life cycles after 20 years of growing. Above all, natural forests replenish themselves on their own, if we don't intervene, a forest will do just fine on its own and this is good because then less workforce is needed worldwide, because there is no need to replant trees, they replant themselves. What we can do is go collect some rests and cut trees that have lived long enough, this is perfectly fine and in accordance with nature, but controlling the growth cycle of a forest by planting a sort of artificial forest is wrong. We are putting in a lot of work that is not necessary once again. We can use trees nearing the end of their life cycle, we can use rotten rests for conglomerates and in fact we should not use too many trees at the end of their life cycles because they also have a purpose in rotting and providing new compost for the continual growing of a natural forest.

Now let's go to hemp, hemp is a superweed! Worse than any other existing weeds, and by worse I mean this in a good sense. Hemp grows very well, if planted densely it will suffocate a lot of other weeds and as hemp grows quite tall, usually 1-2 m, it is very easy to harvest by snatching it off the ground, the other weeds won't really have space to grow very tall. Furthermore hemp is easy to snatch, unlike trees. Various varieties of hemp grow all year long in all sorts of climates, it can grow about 3-4 times a year because it has a cycle of growth of 3-4 months, this is another very useful aspect of hemp. Since hemp behaves also like some sort of superweed, insecticides are barely needed and neither is maintenance. We could just sow the seeds, irrigate a bit and wait until it is ready for harvest. Hemp can grow in dry areas easily too, another great aspect that goes together with another great aspect of that plant, they crush the soil, by that I mean that their roots can go quite deep and the roots are very dense and as such, if planted between the harvests of other types of crops, hemp will aerate the soil, making the process of returning the soil almost useless and this is also a process that is time-consuming and not that effective in fact. We do not have to return the soil to make it fertile, just have a look at any natural forest, do we ever return the soil there? Never, and yet the soil remains mushy, soft/wet, very good for water absorption and as thus remains very fertile almost forever. Our cultivated lands are nowhere close the fertility of a forest's soil and this is a big problem which requires fertilizers nowadays, which in fact makes the problem worse and worse as years go by because the soil hardens all the time and its ability to absorb water is impeded more and more as time goes by. So we should find ways to turn our cultivated soils into soils as fertile as a forest's soil.

Hemp will already help a great deal, because the effects the roots have on the soil makes the soil better and better at absorbing water every single time hemp is planted.

Hemp can be sown everywhere, it improves soil quality by making it more permeable and lets the natural ecosystem somehow grow freely unimpeded by insecticides or chemical weed killers, because hemp is a superweed, the best known ever and it can be cultivated! What else can we ask for.

Well the hemp fibres, the leafs can all be used for many purposes too, ropes, paper, plastic, press-plated conglomerates are some uses that hemp is perfectly good for. Hemp should be integrated in our agriculture heavily, when soils are not used for growing edible crops, hemp can be sown and will make the soil better. Even more, I did not even mention hemp seeds, are loaded with proteins as meat, with a perfect ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fat content, hemp seeds are very nutritive, they can be used to make flour, to make oil. Have you ever crushed hemp seeds and used the flour to make bread, it tastes heavenly and it is good for our health, what else can we ask from a plant that grows like a weed.

Then let me go back to what I said just earlier, if sown densely, hemp will prevent other weeds from becoming very big, thus hemp will actually force small plants to abound on the soil; this is also very good for water retention, like moss in forests; moss is great in preventing too much water from evaporating even if in direct sunlight. And that is something we have to understand for the future of agriculture too, we cannot let naked soil in the sun all year long without having consequences on the soil. The soil in a forest is mushy because it stays in the shadow most of the time. It is not exposed to direct sunlight very often and this is great for the soil. Whereas actually if you look at our industrial farmlands, there are no trees, the soil is completely void of plants when not in use, this in the long run will dry out the soil more and more and irrigation is needed more and more nowadays.

Making artificial ponds to retain rainwater is not bad, but we should make agricultural lands much more efficient by making sure that the water does not evaporate all the time. Planting trees between fields is already a good thing, but it should go much further, the soil should always be covered with some sort of dense vegetation and unfortunately this is hardly ever the case nowadays.

I am not talking about 2 m tall weeds all over the soil, but moss, small weeds, small flowers, clover. These types of plants never grow very tall and they serve a very important purpose! One might say that clovers are a very invasive plant, if left alone they will take over a whole field in some years. And rightly so, this is very good, a layer of plant that does not grow tall and helps keep moisture in the soil. Has anyone tried to plant vegetables in a field blanketed with clover or moss? The vegetables will grow very well, except that one has to take care of insects that are now present and eager to eat these growing vegetables, here again this is not a doomed cause, these insects are useful and can be controlled, they are not pests.

But first let’s talk about ants and worms, the most abundant underground insects, they make holes in the soil all the time, they are most certainly needed, in a forest if you dig into the ground, you are bound to find them either 10 cm or 50 cm deep depending on the region, they will be there and they have a very important purpose, they make water absorption much more efficient, thanks to all the holes they form wherever they go. If you dig into industrial farmland, you will not find them because the earth is too compact, too dry, and the pesticides laid over the soil throughout the years have made the soil deadly for these important insects. Other insects also fulfill similar purposes and there are many varieties of worms, but you get my point, without them the soil becomes bad for plant life, adding chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides does not help to make the soil better for them and over the years it becomes more and more hostile towards all sorts of beneficial insects, like spiders and ladybugs that also require healthy soils to remain healthy. Nature is a vast system of interconnected plant life, insect life, animal life and bacterial life. Monocultures with chemical pesticides and chemical fertilizers are anything but good for all this interconnected world. This is why industrial farmlands become more and more barren every year and more fertilizers and pesticides are needed. The so-dreaded pests appear because of a deep imbalance, if all the bacteria, insects, plants were there, they would take care of these so-called pests. It is not exactly that simple, one has to know a lot about all these interconnections to figure out how to avoid some pests, but nature has all that is needed to prevent the birth of certain so-called pests, one just has to understand what insect and plant life has to be promoted in order to bring natural predators for these pests and how to balance the rest to create the needed environment for the prosperous growth of the wanted crop. Adding chemical fertilizers and pesticides is only a short-term answer, if the ground was left ten years on its own after one chemically-enhanced plantation, it would be fine because the soil would be able to rebalance itself, clear up the chemical compounds and reform all the needed bacteria, insects, plants needed for a good soil, but if we plant crops after crops, we have to work with nature to keep the whole system in a balanced state, abusive/yearly chemically-enhanced crop growth is not balanced! This is why soils are becoming less and less productive every single year, there is no end to that except until the soil becomes completely barren and dried up, incapable of absorbing and producing/converting minerals by itself; at that point the field will be left to rebalance on its own but it will probably take 50 years to happen and it might probably not happen at all and just worsen if it is too incapacitated in its ability to absorb water.

The soil should be protected by a layer of small plants to keep moisture and not let all the water evaporate when exposed to the sunlight for months, this will ensure also insects and bacteria are able to thrive in the soil and make it better all the time by making it more mushy and absorbent, this then allows other plants to grow and die which provides even more compost and by the way convert some minerals to other minerals. This is a fact barely known because science cannot accept that it is possible; transmutation of minerals, which means plants can convert magnesium to sodium or potassium to magnesium or zinc to manganese, etc. Science believes that very high energies are needed to make that possible, actually science never figured out how to transmute any element, as it was called in the past: alchemy. Nowadays scientist cannot conceive of ways that transmutation of elements could occur without requiring very high energies, hence believing that a plant can do it is considered completely ludicrous. Nonetheless experiments have been done where it was clearly demonstrated, for example with corn which requires more and more artificial potassium every year in standard farming because no one believes corn is able to produce what it needs on its own. This is where bacteria, insects and small plants come into life, it is a very complex system! I don't believe plants transmute elements by themselves, but for the example of potassium, potassium is available in groundwater, is on rocks and other minerals within the soil, hence corn fertilized with natural compost, whatever the exact composition of the compost is; corn will be stimulated by the natural compost to establish a proper system of bacteria, insects, plants, roots in the soil, that will actually extract the needed minerals from the rocks underground and other materials underground which can provide plenty of different minerals. It has been shown in experimental trials with corn, that if sown with good compost on a soil almost devoid of potassium originally, the potassium content of the soil will increase by amounts of many hundreds of percent over some years. I am not an expert, should I mention again, I am not an expert in any fields I am talking about in this book, I just gather ideas and results from a lot of books I have read.

I believe the way corn was able to increase the potassium content of the soil by itself was due to a good underground balance, in which bacteria, insects, plants and their roots just figure out what do best on their own.

Chemical fertilizers do not provide the necessary basis to promote a healthy underground ecosystem, neither adding the needed materials artificially by truckloads; this way of growing crops kills the whole underground ecosystem.

A balance has to establish itself on its own and the underground ecosystem does everything by itself, gathering all the required materials from underground and changing the mineral content of the soil as needed by the plants above ground. For the underground ecosystem to thrive, chemical products must not be put on the soil, layers of plants or compost or some sort of dead biological matter must cover the soil to allow the soil to keep moisture so that the underground ecosystem can form, and keep itself alive on its own.

Nature is very efficient, we have to learn how to work with it and not against it.

Well, I believe I have said enough about crop growth to give ideas to the specialists reading this book to do their own researches on the subject and prove what I explain. I will now go on to farming of animals, poultry, cows, cattle, pigs etc.

First of all intensive production - and I don't like that word - is to be halted, it is not sustainable and not good for the planet. Animals have a purpose as important as insects, bacteria and plants; again putting thousands of them in a sort of sanitized environment goes against what I just explained above, it is equivalent to monocultures of crops. Animals need to mix with the environment, again to be in balance with everything around them, else their faecal matter for example will become a polluting compound instead of a beneficial compost. Just take a small example, if you go to a field where cows are grazing, it doesn't smell that bad, you have to go right next to their crap to smell it, because if they make their excrements on the soil, the excrement will solidify on the top and will prevent methane production it seems, the fermentation will be a good process of fermentation/decomposition in my opinion. The excrement dries up very quickly, this increasing lack of water prevents hot fermentation from what I have observed, whereas when you look at where cow excrements are sent by the ton into cow sheds, they are kept on cement! Cement prevents the water from going into the soil, sure, water evaporates, but on the soil water evaporates and goes in the soil, water hence is evacuated more quickly, whereas on cement it stays wet for much longer than it is supposed to happen, I don't know the process exactly but it seems that over-abundance of water promotes methane production which is what gives the intense bad smell we all have smelt at least once in our lives when all these dejections are put on crop lands as compost. This method of doing things is completely wrong, instead if things were done as I described earlier and crop lands were kept mushy and lush with plant life, some cows could graze directly off the fields. This is a complicated topic, again I cannot explain all the details because I don't know them, but what I observed and smelt is that a farm emanates very bad odours due to the methane, whereas if you go to a field covered by excrements of hundreds of cows, the smell is barely noticeable even though you are surrounded by the excrements. Same on fields with sheep, usually you see their tiny excrements all over the place but there is no really bad smell in the air. I am sure the excrements decompose completely differently if straight onto the soil than if amassed into a collecting system that piles tons of excrements together.

I must also admit, some excrements smell stronger than others, for example horse excrements. But nonetheless I believe excrements done straight onto natural soil are many times better for nature than if they are all kept together in some sort of open container and then laid on the soil all at once. The smell is completely different and much weaker, there is no doubt about that. Even our own human excrements follow the same rules; have you ever tried to keep your excrementss in an open plastic container just for a test? After some days the smell will still be present and actually worse! Because I believe the water is not allowed to leave quickly enough and that results in a different fermentation process than if you were to leave it in an open field. But not only that, insects, plants and bacteria also have their role to play. In an open field, flies will come straight away, other insects will join the party if you will and water will be able to go away into the soil etc. and after one day the smell will be almost gone, this is not what happens in the plastic container even though it is left open. Once again there is a process and interconnectedness between insects, plants, soil bacteria in nature that doesn't happen when we keep dejections stacked up in non-natural places, by non-natural I just mean not directly on natural soil.

Well... People don't like to talk about crap and excrements, but we must talk about it, it's dead or decaying matter that promotes sustenance/food for the growth of new plant life and surely insects and bacteria. So the process of natural fermentation and decomposition must be understood if we are to use it! I cannot talk that much about this subject because once again I am not an expert, but I am definitely convinced that piling up excrements by the ton on a relatively small area which is not directly on the soil is not the way to go.

For example, we also have to think a bit further about animals forced to live in an indoor overpopulated place where they poop everywhere right under their feet on a floor that is not a natural outdoor soil. If we think about all the sources of average large salmonella infections, they always arise in farms where animals are kept in an intensive/industrial fashion, usually these animals spend a lot of their time inside. Salmonella infection most often arises due to animals eating their own faecal matter! This I believe should not happen or hardly ever if animals were raised in a natural fashion, i.e. wild animals usually roam around fields, forests etc. Animals should never be forced to lie around their own excrements, they never do that in nature. In forests and in nature in general, animals have space, their excrements are scattered all around the soil, animals are not forced to walk on soil covered by their own dejections; there are excrements scattered everywhere at different stages of decomposition but there is always space everywhere to walk in between. The excrements rot faster unlike when they are piled up in an artificial way as is the case in industrial farming. As I stated earlier, tons of faecal matter are kept in a single place, or lying on concrete everywhere where the animals are kept inside. Then once in a while the excrements from the floor are cleaned up and taken outside to be laid over the fields; or if the excrements are collected in rigs that send them to a place where they pile up, the mountain of tons of piled up matter is taken away all at once, once or twice a year to be disseminated on the soil of crop fields. I seriously think that excrements should not be piled up, they should be pooped by the animals directly onto the soil, thus rotting/decomposing faster due to more rapid water absorption by the soil and water evaporation and also thanks to all the insects and bacteria present everywhere on soils, these bacteria and insects are not present in indoor environments. Indoor I believe it is very bad for fermentation/decomposition because the whole variety of bacteria/insects is not present. For example if I think about cows, if excrements lie inside, there will be huge amounts of flies and various small flying insects, but the excrements lie on concrete floors, hence the ecosystem that should also be under the dejections is almost completely absent. On natural soil, the excrements have flies and various flying insects hovering around, but there are also bacteria and insects from the soil that come and take care of the excrements, not mentioning plants that grow in the excrements; these plants are also completely absent in indoor environments. Thus considering all that ecosystem from the air and soil, there are many different living bodies taking care of the excrements, whereas indoors there is only a part of that ecosystem present. Now I cannot talk about specific aspects, but let’s assume that for example inside, the flies and flying insects transform some parts of the excrements into very acidic matter, it will stay acidic, because there is nothing else around to take care of that acidity. Whereas on outdoor soil, the flying insects might render the dejections acidic, but at the same time there should be bacteria forming thanks to the soil to transform that acidity somehow and rampant insects and plants also will do something to balance out the decomposition process; maybe ground insects come and consume the excrements and lay their own excrements inside the larger dejection which changes the bacteria balance which hence changes the decomposition process entirely. This rather incomplete and imagined example should still clearly prove the point I want to prove about the importance of proper decomposition/fermentation of animal excrements. There is a balance with what is in the air, on the soil and in the soil, whereas when excrements lie on concrete, that balance cannot form itself since there is no ecosystem inside cement.

Thus we have to understand that process properly and stop gathering excrements in ways that are not natural, I am convinced that this is why the excrements create way too much methane gas for example, there is something missing; bacteria/insects/worms? I can't know exactly since I am not an expert, but if that missing something was not missing, the fermentation process would be different and the process in which materials inside the excrements are decomposed would be different and thus probably emitting almost no toxic gases or too acidic liquids and other compounds that make the air so unbearable in industrial animal-farming farms.

This is enough for people interested in that domain to research further, I am just giving ideas. As I said already, nature is a whole interconnected system, we cannot expect the decomposition of biological material to happen properly if we make it happen in a place where the whole natural interconnectedness is absent.

I do not even want to talk about raising pigs, it is completely wrong to force them to wallow in their own filth/excrements on a cement floor where the underground ecosystem is completely missing, obviously the decomposition/fermentation process is not going to work as it should. Furthermore people assume pigs like to wallow in filth, this is wrong! From what I observed in nature with wild pigs, they like to wallow in very wet dirt and hence end up often covered with dirt, but they surely don't wallow in filth and excrements. Being covered with wet dirt is not like being covered from excrements at all, it might surely look a bit similar for those who like cleanliness, not many humans like to be covered from wet dirt. But believe me if you could choose between wet dirt and wet faecal matter you would surely opt for wet dirt! Some animals hence like being covered with wet dirt and there is nothing wrong with that, dirt is not toxic, it does not really carry any diseases or bad bacteria either; all our vegetables when we take them out of the soil are covered with dirt. That's just how it is, dirt is present everywhere, and some animals like to roll in dirt to get rid of small insects they have on their skins or for other purposes I have no clue about, but they surely don't wallow in faecal matter, except if they are forced to!

This applies to poultry as well, in intensive farming sheds, the poultry is always walking on a cement floor (if they even have that liberty) where their excrements pile up without being decomposed as they should in nature, if they pooped on natural outdoor soil, they wouldn't be walking on their own excrements all the time, the excrements are decomposed quite quickly when they lay outdoor on soil.

Anyway I've gone on long enough about this subject, here is what must be remembered.

Humans wouldn't walk on a cement floor covered with their own excrements except if forced; animals behave exactly in the same way. And decomposition of faecal matter is not the same at all if it happens on a cement floor or non-natural floor, than if it happens on natural outdoor soil. I am sure that properly decomposed faecal matter is much better for the soils natural enrichment, than wrongly decomposed faecal matter; I actually have no doubts about that.

Let’s recap the most important: intensive farming - whether it's crops or animals - is undoubtedly bad for the planet. It destroys the natural ecosystem present on top and inside the soil, whether it is because of wrongly decomposed faecal matter or due to toxic non-natural compounds. Farming should be done in ways that respect the way nature works on its own, this way the soils would become more fertile over time, no doubt about that. I'm almost positive that there is no need to return the soil every year on crop land, maybe once in a decade or so is useful (or burning above ground vegetation), because the soil is filled with bacteria, insects, molds, mushrooms, minerals etc. When you return the soil, all these constituents will still all be there and reform their stable ecosystem quite quickly, but returning dead/toxic soil every year is completely pointless, the soil is dead and polluted, returning the earth won't change anything, there is nothing in the soil in the first place, so it cannot reform its natural ecosystem.

For farmers who want to transition from dead/toxic/polluted soil to a natural way of farming, the soil should not be returned for probably a decade at least; because the soil has been polluted over the years, the natural ecosystem was killed and so on. So what should be done is let the soil be, and let it recover itself from a natural cover of vegetation, which will already protect the soil from direct sunlight, thus retaining moisture more and more as time goes by; as moisture and wetness return, so will insects and bacteria, and most surely bacteria that eat toxic compounds will form and these will convert polluting materials over time to natural materials, thus de-polluting the soil slowly but surely. The soil might not cover itself by itself, so human intervention is surely needed to return a soil to a good standing. Animals should be left to graze on these fields as well, their faecal matter will provide good compost and one must notice that sheep, cows etc. always eat 'taller' grass, if there is moss and plenty of clover, they won't eat much of that layer! It will remain to keep the moisture; e.g. animals will convert the tall vegetation into natural compost, which will provide sustenance form the underground ecosystem to reform. Then to accelerate the healing of the toxic soils and moisture-retaining attributes, whenever possible, farmers should cover the soil with layers of unneeded decomposing biological matter, like cut wheat, cut grass, leaves from trees etc., anything natural will do. This is a key principle here, the dead soil should be covered as quickly as possible with layers of biological matter to help the moisture to remain underground and not evaporate as soon as the sunlight is over the field, water is key to the well-being of soil, this is evident for anyone, so everything should be done to help water remain in the soil in the beginning. Except some very specific biological matter; like walnut tree leaves which must be balanced out with other matter, else just these leaves will actually prevent many types of plants from growing; any natural biological matter as a whole is always good compost. One thing I must add is also the usefulness of hemp, the superweed! It grows very well without any help and pierces the soil quite strongly with the roots, hence promoting water absorption, which is also very important.

What I describe here is good in the regions I'm used to, with temperate climate. I guess for example in very arid regions one should use layers of biological matter covered with sand to protect the soil and prevent the layers of biological matter from drying up too quickly.

There are plenty of methods, for all the different climates and it's up to the people there to figure out what is the most appropriate for the region they live in. Protection from direct sunlight is essential! This is a key element and nowadays I do not really see anyone using methods of farming going in that direction.

Why? Just look at forests, natural forests I must emphasise; old trees there provide shadow for young trees to grow in a rather humid environment, grown trees also block part of the evaporating water from the soil; the water accumulates on their leaves and falls back to the soil, which keeps the environment more humid. This humid environment protects the various plants on the soil from direct sunlight and thus they grow much better than if there were no trees available; then as I explained for the crop fields, the layer of plants and accumulating biological matter on the ground keeps the moisture even more inside the soil, this provides a good habitat for all insects to thrive in, and bacteria and worms etc. you can think of. The underground insects ever so present dig the soil constantly, making holes everywhere, making the water absorption of forest soil the best we can ever think of, and the roots of trees and plants also help to bore holes everywhere in the soil. This is why the soil in a forest in always so fertile, it is very spongy due to all the holes bored by the roots of all plants and all the underground insects, it is covered with many layers of leaves and small dead plants which prevent quite a lot of water from evaporating, and on top of that grown trees provide shadow for plants to grow without being dried up quickly by direct sunlight as they sprout above ground.

Obviously we cannot grow forests on crop lands, but still, it provides the template that should be used to make crop lands very fertile; promoting water absorption and preventing water evaporation are the most important aspects, if these two aspects are fulfilled permanently, life will return on almost any soil and the soil will become more and more fertile! Nature does not make agriculture very hard, we made it hard because not many understand how it works! Leaving fields half of the year in plain sunlight with almost no vegetation on them is never going to work...

Now let me ask a stupid question; is the soil ever returned in a forest to remain fertile? The answer is evidently no! So we should figure out why that is so. What I explained throughout this chapter gives most of the clues in a broad manner. The soil does not need to be returned to be kept fertile, this is such a limited understanding of nature. Nowadays we return the soil because we think it will bring more minerals to the top and ventilate the soil! Well this is completely wrong; if the ecosystem inside the soil is abundant with insects/bacteria/roots living well thanks to moisture retention; these living organisms will take care of bringing the materials from deeper underground all the time, worms and other underground insects will take care of boring holes in the soil all the time ventilating it very well, the above ground insects and animals will recycle the above ground vegetation into compost from faecal matter and dead biological matter. Thus there is almost no need to return the soil except once in a decade or so, because in forests biological matter constantly falls on the ground, if there are no trees on crop fields, this does not happen, hence returning the soil once in a while is probably good to provide material to decompose on the top of the soil. We have to understand how nature works! Nature is very efficient and soils don't require much work to remain fertile once they fulfill all the 'rules' I described above; just some maintenance. No need to cut many weeds either if one plants tall crops like corn, natural wheat, etc. By the way, many of these crops nowadays are kept smaller in size by spraying hormones. Why? Because they don't grow well, they are weak, and weak plants tend to fall down and not grow well and fall even more the taller they get; if they have a very fertile soil on which to grow, they will grow taller and stronger with much wider stems and produce much more yields than any industrial farming methods used nowadays. One must add that weak plants are much more likely to be affected by pests, precisely because they are weak, if the plants are healthy they will be much more resilient to some pests that are actually plaguing some crops. Furthermore, if there is abundant vegetation on the soil itself, many of these so-called pests will have plenty of food to eat without having to eat the crops. This is so obvious and yet no one thinks of that, it's normal that pests ravage plantations, there is nothing else for them to feed on... On a naturally evolving soil, there will be flowers inside the crops, all sorts of small plants, this will promote the growth of spiders, ladybugs and all sorts of other insects which actually just feed on other insects, so they will take care of a lot of the pests; not all insects eat plants, many insects just feed on other insects, but if they have no ecosystem in which to live in, they will not be present and hence insects which do eat plants will be the only ones that are present.

Then I should also add that a natural soil which retains water will be much less prone to drought. Because nowadays as soon as expected rain is missing for a couple of months, it becomes a calamity for agriculture, if soils were properly maintained in accordance with how nature does it; rain missing for some months would not be much of an issue since soils would retain the water from previous rains much longer than on actual dead soils in which water is barely retained or absorbed.

Then as a closing note I must also emphasise that when I spoke about forests, I was speaking about natural forests; because cultivated forests are anything but natural! Younger trees are not allowed to grow in the shadow of older trees, instead they grow in plain sunlight, growing faster maybe, but growing weaker, prone to break when faced with strong winds for example; they grow in a non-natural fashion, the wood coming from trees of such forests rots very quickly, this is why for example wood instruments are only carved from wood coming from trees in natural forests, such wood has grown naturally in a balanced environment and is known for its ability to last for many centuries without ever rotting. I can not explain exactly why cultivated wood rots faster, but it is due to an imbalanced growing, this is for sure; some bacteria, plants and insects must be missing, which in turn do not take care of other bacteria that lie inside the trunk of trees and thus end up consuming the wood from within itself once the tree is abated, hence making it rot much faster than trees that grow in a fully balanced environment.

One last point about returning soils, if we think about it, nature returns it by itself. Plants grow taking out matter or the underground soil, actually the soil looses matter a tiny bit in the process. So then when we use these plants as matter to put on top of the soil it is kind of like extracting matter from underground, that's what the plant did. In nature it's such much slower than using machines to excavate, nature does what it needs by itself to place underground materials above ground all the time.

I have talked enough about this subject for now, the last thing I want to say is that there are also many methods available to grow many staples on a very reduced surface in complete harmony with the planet. This should be at least partly in everyone's garden.

Health

Let us talk about health for a very short while, what is happening nowadays is completely upside down too! Doctors should not be providing cures for diseases, researchers in labs should not be searching for cures to diseases. Instead all of them should be trying to understand why we get diseases and how to prevent them in the first place. Once again the society is taking care of the effect of a problem, not its cause! If we take care of the cause, social security will stop being such a financial burden for many nations on this planet.

First of all, food! Here we go again; to avoid health problems, we should be eating naturally grown food, without pesticides, without insecticides, without any non-natural products. Nowadays the vegetables and fruits we eat are all covered and loaded with compounds that should never be there in the first place! Thankfully organic food is becoming more and more mainstream nowadays and it should be so until all food is organic and non-genetically-modified, this is how all edible things grow in nature, why modify it? The vegetables and fruits we eat nowadays are void of minerals and traces of minerals that should be there, by not growing in a natural way, by growing on dead soils, trees can not fill their fruits with all the nutrients that should be there, vegetables can not accumulate all the nutrients and minerals they would accumulate in a naturally fertile soil. I'm not even mentioning all the processed foods that have many ingredients that should not even exist in the first place. The imbalance in nature obviously results in an imbalance in the ones eating these staples: humans and animals. Even more, instead of eating good minerals and nutrients, these nutrients and minerals are partly replaced by compounds which are quite toxic for our bodies. How could that not lead to more diseases! Then we take medications to cure these diseases! If we prevented these diseases, we wouldn't need to produce medicaments in the first place. This is again a vicious circle with no end and very bad side effects, because to produce the medications that are used to 'cure' our diseases, we are polluting the planet in the process of making these artificial medications. Industrialized medications are all based on artificial formulas; we create something that is not natural to cure diseases that occur due to the fact that we are eating non-natural foods which are produced in non-natural ways. This is extremely bad, it will not get better if we continue like that. Granted, it seems people live older nowadays than in past centuries but we have to question why this is the case. First of all we have more comfortable dwellings, we have access to drinkable water and no matter where we live on Earth, we can get staples coming from anywhere in the world. This is why we grow older, medications do not have much to do with the fact that we have a longer lifespan.

In the past, cancers were almost unheard of; some say it's because there was no technology to detect them; this is probably correct for some cases, but then explain to me; since we started to have the technology to detect them, we detect more and more cancers every single year! Because the technology to detect them evolves? No, not at all; we detect more cancers at early stages now, but we detect more and more cancers because the human species as a whole is becoming weaker. It's exactly like crops grown in non-natural ways, they become weaker and weaker as time goes by and thus more susceptible to diseases and parasites that would have no effect on them had the crops been resilient and healthy.

Humans have more and more problems and it's getting worse as time goes by: obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, circulation problems, muscle problems, digestive problems of all sorts, sleep problems etc.

Imagine now that you were a single human being somehow living on a virgin territory with your house and surrounded by unspoiled nature. What would you eat, vegetables and fruits that can grow where you live. Maybe you would have a cow providing you with milk once in a while and some poultry providing eggs while eating generated organic waste. What would you do when you wake up? Go in the garden and take some vegetables from the soil or gather some fruits. Instead nowadays people wake up and eat bread, drink coffee or tea, drink milk with cereals, eat bacon, eat fried potatoes etc. None of this is natural, maybe if you were living in a particular part of the planet where coffee grows, you would get coffee, but then you wouldn't be able to get other staples that we mix together. Nowadays we mix many staples together which are not all naturally growing in the same place, this in imbalanced. Furthermore if you were living alone, in the morning to go and get your food you would be exercising, nowadays this is not the case very often; some people go run, but once again this is not the same type of physical activity as gathering fruits and vegetables. I'm not saying running is not good, but I'm saying if we were forced to live in a natural environment all alone by ourselves, a lot of things would be different. I'm not saying that I want anyone to return to such a way of living either, obviously we have commodities nowadays and it's good to have them, but we still have to understand how to eat healthy and keep ourselves healthy, because this is not the case for most of the western population.

In a natural environment, none of us would have the means to make processed meals, it requires too much time just for a single meal and there is nothing good about processed meals. None of us would have access to palm oil, avocado oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, olive oil, rapeseed oil etc. all at once, we would probably have olive oil, or maybe just corn oil or maybe another type of oil, but never all of them at our disposal! Making oil requires time, seeds have to be crushed, by ourselves we would barely have time to make one single type of oil while taking care of other daily activities.

I could go on and on about things we would not be able to have or not be able to produce if we were all each of us living in isolation, so I won't continue making examples like that, it is pretty obvious we would not have a tenth of all the products of a supermarket readily available in front of our house.

We would live on vegetables and fruits most of the time; sometimes with oil and some spices, sometimes milk, sometimes eggs, sometimes meat from hunted animals etc. But never all at once.

The basic staples available daily would mainly be vegetables and fruits.

And this is what we should be eating most of the time in our actual society, at least half of our daily food should be vegetables and fruits, preferably raw, so as to avoid fried foods or over-boiled foods. Now let me go into more scientific details for why this is the case.

Remaining healthy is all about pH, a naturally healthy human should always have global body pH slightly alkaline, around 7.1-7.2, which can be measured from the saliva; naturally it depends a bit for each human, but the general pH of our body should always be slightly alkaline. Without any food our body would be slightly acidic, thus we need to eat alkaline foods to keep our pH slightly alkaline. Now think about what I just described above. Most humans in the western world wake up and drink coffee or tea; these are very acidic drinks; then we get a bowl of cereal and milk, both again are quite acidic food our bodies. Others would eat bread, which is once again acidic, with butter and chocolate paste or marmalade, all of which have an acidic pH once again. Some others would wake up and eat bread, bacon, sausages and other fried things, all of which are once again? You guessed it? Acidic. I am not saying we should avoid all acidic foods, but there should be a balance, we should eat at least 50 to 70 percent of alkaline foods every day. Yet our breakfasts all start mostly with just acidic foods! What a great way to start a journey by making yourself sick straight away. Instead if we would eat carrot, peas, apples, oranges, peaches, etc. in the morning with a small cup or coffee or a small slice of bread and marmalade or a little bacon for example, we would mostly eat alkaline foods with a tiny bit of acidic food, this is perfectly fine. But usually we gorge on almost entirely acidic foods. I always remember the old French citation; eat your soup, to become big and strong. There is so much wisdom in that citation, because the soup that is referred to is a soup filled with tons of vegetables and this is the correct way to go! Almost all vegetables are alkaline, some lightly, some very alkaline; almost all fruits are alkaline as well. Instead let us go further into a typical lunch for busy individuals; a sandwich (acidic bread) with cheese (acidic), meat (acidic) and a tiny amount of crudity (alkaline); or chips and a steak and a tiny amount of side salad which most people don't eat; or pasta (acidic) with a processed sauce (acidic); or just crisps nowadays loaded with artificial flavours (all of which are very acidic) with an energy drink (loaded with sugar; or if zero-calories; loaded with artificial sweeteners, both of which are acidic anyway). I can think of many different types of meals which are more acidic than alkaline. I know not everyone eats like that, but this is what the majority does and there is not doubt in my mind why this majority is the majority that has health problems. I do not even want to mention fast foods, everything there is highly acidic and overloaded with conservatives and compounds that should not even exist. Instead of that, our lunches and meals should be a big pile of vegetables with a small amount of meat or pasta or anything else that is acidic; most of the meal should be alkaline. Drinking mostly water is also the most helpful thing to do since water has a neutral pH, drinking zero-calorie drinks does not help anything since sugar is replaced by highly acidic artificial sweeteners that in the end have even worse effects on our bodies than sugar itself. Even packaged juices are not so great, only fresh juice is good.

I must correctly state, that by alkaline, I mean the end result, once it is digested; because, for example oranges and lemons taste acidic, but once digested, the end product is alkaline, whereas meat for example is somewhat alkaline, but once digested, it leaves acidic end products in the stomach.

Now let us go back to cancer, do you know what cancerous cells like? Foods with an acidic pH, they actually need acidic food to survive. No wonder that more and more people are getting some sort of cancer nowadays, with all the acidic content in their bodies there is plenty of sustenance for a cancerous tumour to prosper and grown 'healthy'. You know what cancerous cells cannot tolerate? Alkaline pH, no surprises there...

There is a simple way to be sure to almost be free of cancer for a whole life, keep the body pH alkaline. It's that simple.

When I was at university and looked at the timetable of the classes some of my medical student friends had to attend, there was not even a single lesson about nutrition. No wonder they have no idea how to prevent diseases, they don't even know what promotes the growth of diseases or what a human being has to do to remain healthy, apart from physical activity.

They never study anything as a whole and connected to everything else, instead they specialise! They specialise so much that they will never look at the causes of diseases! Instead they get test tubes with bacteria or viruses and create artificial molecules that destroy these pathogens in vitro. Not much of a focus on the whole interconnectedness between humans, their food and their environment.

By doing so, they will never be able to prevent diseases, they will just learn how to cure diseases which become more and more prevalent since the cause of these diseases goes right under their nose without them noticing anything. Furthermore, most medications leave acidic by-products in our bodies! What a great way to 'cure' illnesses, they make the body even more ill because they don't understand the link between our body acidity and how it is the cause for most illnesses.

Hence, as a society we spend more and more money in research, trying to find cures for this and that, while never even noticing the cause in the first place. We have to eat differently and people who eat like me understand that quite well; since I started paying attention to what I eat, I've never been to a doctor, seven years in a row, I've never been sick except the occasional cold which is mainly my own fault because I sleep in non-heated rooms, so sometimes it gets too cold in winter. I've never caught a flu or any other disease even though I was often surrounded by hundreds of sick students at university from many different parts of the world. A healthy body is not very susceptible to illness, same as a healthy plant is not very susceptible to parasites or diseases.

Where was I? As a society we spend more and more money on trying to figure out 'cures' for many different types of diseases, when I looked at many research papers, I barely ever found the mention of body pH, no academics seem to even bother about the pH of our bodies. I long for the day there will be a statistical study which compares the average pH of a person with the amount of diseases that person gets over a period of many years. That research will undoubtedly prove what I am explaining here, I have no doubts about that.

I remember a news article I read about scientists baffled by the fact that Amish communities do not seem to be affected by cancers, diabetes, obesity or all sorts of degenerative illnesses linked to ageing. Do you really wonder why, after what I've explained here? Amish communities grow their own food, in natural ways without any chemical compounds, they eat in ways compatible with what nature intended. Amish communities do not require health care or doctors, they are communities almost free of diseases because they all have very strong immune systems, thanks to their way of eating. They have alkaline body pH this is a for sure.

So, maybe Amish people live in ways that seem very basic compared to our modern western ways, but they probably understand more about health than any western doctor, medical scientist or most of the civilised population.

I am not saying hospitals or doctors are useless; obviously if you are deeply burned or have fractures, hospitals are very useful. But that fight we fight against diseases is doomed to fail if it continues in the direction it is heading. Creating more chemical molecules will create more polluting by-products for nature in the first place, hindering natural ways of farming first of all. But also medications do not cure anything, they kill the pathogen, they do not make the body any stronger. It's exactly like industrial farming, get rid of the pests in unnatural ways and thus the pest will become stronger! In fact the pest will not become stronger, it is the plant/host that is becoming weaker all the time; and as the plant becomes weaker, it will require more and more pesticides to eradicate pests, making the plants weaker and weaker since the cause of their weakness is completely ignored.

Back to medications, the medications kill the pathogens, but it doesn't make our bodies any stronger, in fact it loads our bodies with more and more toxic by-products that should not be in our bodies, like toxic by-products that should not be in the soil. Then as we have more toxic by-products in our bodies and cannot sustain our bodies correctly, since we eat too acidic, our body weakens more and more, pathogens become stronger... Nope, humans become weaker, because not only do we eat more and more processed food void of any beneficial nutrients, but even the source of the processed foods is based on staples void of minerals/nutrients and loaded with toxic compounds. How could any human being become healthier that way? We can only become weaker and weaker, more susceptible to diseases that would not have affected us had we been healthier and more robust. Thus scientist will try to figure 'cures' for new illnesses; by the way probably engendering more virulent types of diseases because the diseases are not dealt with by natural methods, but by artificial methods... Who knows where that will lead?

One thing is for sure, it won't lead to humans becoming healthier!

Let me talk about some simple cures for example, for cancer, since it is so prevalent nowadays. A way to prevent cancers is as you probably understood, to have an alkaline body pH, but here is more to it. The seeds of fruits, for example apples, pears, grapes and the kernels of apricots, peaches, cherries etc. all contain the vitamin B17 which is cyanide. People are afraid of that because it sounds like cyanuric acid and they are right, cyanide is composed of cyanuric acid linked to something else. I am sorry I don't remember all the details, you can go look it up for yourself and be careful of the fake stories about cyanide being deadly; basically, cyanide in the body is harmless, it will just go through our system without doing anything. Except if it encounters cancerous cells, in that case it will react exactly in a fashion that will release the cyanuric acid right inside the cancerous cell and leave the body in a completely safe way with the destroyed bit of the cancerous cell with the cyanuric acid inside it.

Nature provides perfectly safe ways to avoid cancer without much hassle, just eat seeds and kernels inside fruits; that's not very difficult!

By the way I wanted to prove to myself that cyanide was harmless so I ate about 50 apricot kernels a day for about a week, nothing happened. The news stories about apricot kernels being deadly are completely bogus; this is propaganda with a very distinct purpose, eating kernels of fruits, apple, pear, peach, apricots etc. all have vitamin B17, it's a natural protection against cancer..

Anyhow, what must be remembered is that vitamin B17 is a perfect way to prevent cancerous cells from ever forming, since they are destroyed as soon as they get in contact with that vitamin.

But now let’s talk about a cure for cancerous tumours that have not yet reached immensely big sizes.

You must heat maple syrup with sodium bicarbonate (baking soda... aluminium-free... don't ask me why, the way to produce baking soda can add aluminium to it, there are methods to not use aluminium!) in a small pan, about one small spoon of sodium bicarbonate for three small spoons of maple syrup. The syrup will bind with the sodium bicarbonate. Then just swallow one or two small spoonfuls of that mixture everyday. The maple syrup is very sweet, hence very acidic, exactly what cancerous cells like, so the cancerous cell will attract the maple syrup for food for its growth. But here, inside the maple syrup resides the highly alkaline sodium bicarbonate, and there is nothing worse to a cancerous cell than an alkaline product! Thus mixing/binding sodium bicarbonate with maple syrup makes sure the sodium bicarbonate is released right inside the cancerous tumours, and the sodium bicarbonate will destroy the parts of the cancerous cell it gets in contact with. Thus eat one or two spoonfuls of that mixture until there is no more cancerous tumour to destroy and that's it, you're done with the cancerous tumour. I will get to this subject later.

I must also explain that this is not a miracle solution; if someone has been doing chemotherapy for years and the cancer has spread through all parts of the body, one cannot expect that person to be fully cured with this method; it will probably kill all cancerous cells, but at that stage the body’s immune system is so infected, that even getting rid of all the cancerous cells won't mean that that person will be healthy once again. It's like trying to repair a car engine which has all cylinders completely broken, you can change the candles, the oil, the filters etc. but it won't repair the cylinders. Thus this method is to kill cancerous cells that are just beginning to grow or haven't reached a critical size or haven't yet compromised the entire immune system.

But! It would still be better if cancer was prevented from ever forming and the best way for that is by eating plenty of alkaline foods as nature intended. Eating plenty of alkaline foods, hence vegetables and fruits, will make your body function at its best and will make the immune system stronger, thus making you less susceptible to all sorts of illnesses. I have said enough about the subject, for those interested, just go find books that talk about pH and health, there are plenty of books on the subject. Another example; an acidic body pH is also the main problem leading to obesity and diabetes.

What is for sure here is that the health industry is going in the wrong direction, we should only concentrate on curing diseases as a last resort, in 99% of the cases the diseases can be prevented just by having a strong immune system. At the risk of repeating myself, it is exactly the same analogy as plants being more resilient if they grow on naturally fertile soil. We have to look at health as a whole and not in a compartmentalised fashion as is done nowadays.

The burden of economic profit

Now that I have talked about the basic needs of our society, energy (electricity/gas), water, food/agriculture and good health, I can go on to economics and this part is not very nice to read if you do not suspect what I am about to write. Basically the world is controlled by greedy mechanisms with only one purpose, economic profits. For who? I don't care, but it surely is not for the good of the whole mankind.

More jobs are good for a better economy, we've all heard that. This is exactly what the western mechanism of living is promoting, more jobs, more sectors to work in. We are told this is good for the economy, since we all need to work to earn money and make a living, everyone must have a job! Or so it seems.

There is the problem of economic speculations that must be understood first, for example as I write this book, there are many supertankers loaded with petrol circling the oceans and never going to any port to unload their cargo. This is convenient for the companies and speculators who are often related or are even the same entity, because by doing so they can lower the apparent supply and increase the prices of commodities, here the price of petrol. There is no shortage at the moment (April 2012), the prices are just inflating for economic profits. This is also happening with food since a long time but I am not an expert so I will not talk too much about the subject. Though one comes to mind in relation to the concepts I explained earlier about everyone needing to have their basic needs met at all times, in this case it's food. I don't remember exactly which country, it all started in many countries in Africa some decades ago. The people in these countries were growing their own food and living of it while selling the little overhead production they had, they could not become rich doing that but at least they had what they needed to meet their own needs and could earn some money. At some point American investors told them to stop growing what they were growing and instead to start growing coffee and by selling it they would earn a lot of money with which they could buy their food and make a very decent living. That worked beautifully in the beginning, but then coffee prices dropped slowly over time. Nowadays many people of this continent are deeply affected by this problem, because the coffee they sell is so cheap now that they cannot buy the food they need to live with the money of their sales! Had they never stopped growing their own food, they would never have been faced with such a problem. The priority should be on self-sustainability first, not economic profits.

Economic profits are a priority in our actual society, they are prioritised over local self-sustainability. This is something that will and needs to change if the world is ever going to be a place where everyone can make a decent living without ever facing the hardship of food deprivation.

But back to the burden of economic profits and a concept I could call immediate retirement. As you remember in the perfect society I described, people wouldn't need more than a couple of hours a day of work to make sure the society is self-sustained, the rest of the time is free time to do whatever anyone wishes to do, as long as they adhere to some rules that make new endeavours somehow self-recyclable, as I explained, anything that will be created or built will also be done with plans for un-building without unnecessary pollution or waste products, so in a hypothetical future when it needs to be un-built, everything has already been planned. How would we get to that perfect society, starting where we are nowadays, people should not work as much as they do nowadays? Well, by looking at unemployment rates worldwide you would see that there is unemployment in almost all countries of the world, from 1 percent to many tens of percent. That means that the world is somehow not running too bad, I know many people are starving and have lots of problems in many countries but let’s ignore that here, the world is let’s say surviving with unemployment being present in all countries. Many countries have no social benefits for unemployed, I am also aware of that, but let’s continue with the immediate retirement concept by looking at civilised countries. In the western world unemployment is growing, yet the society is still not doing too bad, by that I mean that there are no civilised countries were people are dying in mass because of lack of food. So on that aspect there seems to be enough food for everyone, the western society is not doing too bad, and even if we were to remove imported products from non-western countries, there would be enough food. So we have unemployed people, yet the society keeps on working? What does that mean, these unemployed people in the strict sense do not really need to add their workforce to the total of the western society to provide the basic needs of the society. They are already living off immediate pension. Yet no one sees that, they just see unemployment, but what I see more and more happening in the western world is that many young people work, then are unemployed, then work, then are unemployed, etc. If they do that their whole life, they will have spent about half of their life working and half of their life not working, if this keeps going on, by the time they accumulate their 40-45 years of work time to qualify for retirement, they will be too old to enjoy it, they might reach their total of 40-45 years of work when they turn 80 or 90. If only they could realise that the unemployment money they receive while in between jobs is somehow like what they would receive as a pension. By that I mean that in civilised countries, the pension is usually 60% of the last salary, well unemployment benefits are usually something like that too, it's part of the last salary for a certain time span depending on the country, or it starts with the full salary value and then decreases over time.

I know this is too simplistic and a lot of parameters should be taken into account, but I just want to demonstrate that this way of living is potentially perfect for the society and the way it should be headed, meaning that people work, then stop working and live with a bit less money, then start working again, earn a bit more again, then stop working, earn a bit less, etc. It's kind of like alternating work and retirement all the time. It should not be seen as unemployment, because if the society can keep on working fine with a small percentage of the population not working, why should they need to work full time?

Now what should happen is that working hours should be reduced globally to incorporate that permanent free time. Let’s take a rather simplistic example, in a country, everyone works 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and there is 20% unemployment, then, if society is doing approximately fine with 20% unemployment, we should reduce the working time of working people by 20%, so instead of 8 hours a day it will be 6.4 hours and then the other 20% unemployed can fit in and also work 6.4 hours a day.

People would tell me, but less working time means a smaller salary? Not exactly, it has to been seen as a whole, the salary we receive is the net pay, with the taxes deducted from the gross salary. What are these taxes for, well in part they serve to pay the employment benefits of others. If no one is unemployed, then the taxes on the gross salary can be reduced, thus the gross salary doesn't need to be as high to keep the net pay equal. See where I'm going with that? I'm aware that it is always too simplistic, but this is how we have to start thinking to change many things in this society, we have to look at what our gross salary is used for, if less of the gross salary is needed to fulfill the state's financial requirements, the gross salary can be lowered while still not changing the net pay.

What else is deducted from our gross salary? Retirement fund. At the moment these retirement funds are deducted to pay the pensions of retired people, this has to slowly fade away and instead our retirement funds should pay our own pension, I am aware once again that this is not an easy task, I am just giving ideas to work with.

Because nowadays we also have the problem of old people dying at an older age, this is completely breaking up the system because it wasn't planned that they would live that long. Instead if we had direct retirement as I called it, alternating between work and 'retirement' throughout our whole life, we would always pay approximately the right amount for retirement funds, because it would be used straight away and not 50 years later when who knows how long our life expectancy will be? We cannot plan for things we cannot foresee accurately, we should plan for the immediate future, this way at least we can plan more accurately.

Anyway, like it or not, immediate retirement is already happening in our society, it is just seen as on and off unemployment for the moment, but this is the way to go, actually if we consider that unemployment is immediate retirement, part of the gross salary of the employed people is already paying for that immediate retirement, except that it is seen as paying for unemployment benefits. The western system is already changing.

This is enough for the moment, let’s go back to the burden of economic profit, there are many things to say. First of all it is a simple rule, if profit is made, the profiteer is always making profits at the expense of the profitee, I have to invent a word here, I could say the profiteer makes profit at the expense of the abusee, but that word doesn't exist either. We should incorporate such vocabulary in our language to understand that profits are always bad in the long run, there is always someone who will be abused to obtain these profits.

I already said that somewhere, but I'll repeat it. Nowadays, the USA and Europe are enjoying cheap products from China for example, but when Chinese workers will want to earn a decent wage, and they will, where will we get these cheap products? From Africa maybe, but then when the whole African population also decides that it wants a decent wage, maybe they will start to abuse cheap labour in the USA? Who knows, all I can foresee is that this system of profits will never work in the long run, someone will profit and someone will be abused. I always laugh when I see countries talking about their statistics of increase in GDP, we are in a closed environment, called Earth, a country cannot keep increasing production all the time, at some point it will need to reach an equilibrium with the whole around it. The GDP can still increase a lot in many countries that's obvious, but at some point we will need to start talking about equilibrium, how the production of one country is matched with the needs of another and so on, profit is a burden on the global society, it harms some parts of the planet for the profit of other parts.

Another point I have to stress about profits is that if economic profits are possible, it is because of others. Let’s say a big chain of superstores announces record profits, how did they achieve that? Probably by abusing cheap labour somewhere on the planet, then selling these cheap products with a large margin. Who bought these products, the general population! If there are profits, they should not only go to a handful of investors who made the creation of the superstore a reality, sure these investors should be rewarded, they helped in the creation of a superstore that helped the community (and even that can be discussed, I don't think they did a great service to the world..), but some profits should also go to all the other people who helped run that superstore, all the people who created the products for that superstore etc. Else it's again just a profiteer/profitee process, this is hurting the global economy. Let’s make an example of how stupid this system is, let’s say a million people bought a product for 10€, the product itself with shipping, charges etc. cost 1€ to produce/sell, the margin of profit is thus 9€, that makes 9 million Euros of profit, now this profit is divided into 9 investors, one million each. Then instead of rewarding everyone who helped in the process, maybe by giving a bonus salary to all the employees who were part of the process, or helping the state to pay health insurance, or helping the state to pay for unemployment, etc.; basically instead of re-injecting that money into the society for something useful, because that's where the money came from in the first place, instead these investors decide to buy 5 million Euros of petrol and then leave this petrol on supertankers around the world to play with the supply/demand system and then invest 4 million in petrol stocks knowing that the price will go up and they resell to earn let’s say 2 millions more. Profit is a plague! People who keep making profits, just keep draining money out of the society, for what? To make more profits and leave that money on a bank account, where it just stays there and does absolutely nothing except display a nice set of numbers on a screen. It is obvious that such a process ends up making most of the population poorer and poorer, because the general population uses money to pay for goods and services and then that money is not reinserted into the economy but kept on useless bank accounts, which are then used to speculate or create other companies that will once again make profits and drain some more money out of the system. I don't believe all the rich people are doing this to harm the planet, maybe some are, but most of them are just doing it for security, more money means more security nowadays. Remember the unnecessary concept of ownership, this is the root of that problem, the security of us all is not guaranteed at the moment, so people who are able to be more secure, by securing more money, will do it over and over again to ensure their security. It's not their fault... Well it is somehow, because they are doing it, but they are doing it because of how the society works, without basic needs freely available to anyone this will never stop, the burden of economic profits will continue.

To change our actual society to something that is good for everyone requires in-depth changes of how we view the society, how it functions as a whole, how people live, how we relate to each other etc.

Once again I am aware that many things I say here are over-simplistic, I cannot go into details, else this book would be infinitely long, I am just concentrating on the concepts from a broad perspective. And believe me, we have to turn everything upside down, I've never encountered anyone who sees things as I do up to today, this is why I am sharing my ideas. The details are for the ones who are into the details, once they understand the whole system differently they will be able to figure out the practical solutions, I cannot know the details of every single aspect of this world, this is not a task that one person alone can achieve, it requires everyone, but everyone must first understand the global functioning to be able to help in their respective areas without hindering the whole.

Back to economic profits, now let us look at how our worldwide society is structured, anything that exists in this society has to be economically profitable, else it cannot keep on existing, the fact that the basic needs (energy, water, food) are not free is what imposes these conditions of required profitability. Let us look at what any well-developed European state has to take care of for example, they need to take care of public roads, public buildings, public health care, retirement benefits, social security, etc.

They need to make profits while doing these things, else debts will pile up. Debts will pile up, it cannot go any other way in such a state because of that principle of profits. Taking care of a state should not require any profitability, yet it does. Only a few countries, which are lucky enough to be very large exporters of natural resources, are able to make profits and not pile up any debt, but this is because of their exports of natural resources, not because their state system is profitable, that is economically speaking never profitable and never will be. I know about the public banks lending to private banks which then lend with higher interest rates too states, this is also one of the root of the problem, but solving that won't solve everything, we have to dig further. Imagine if! I know it's not true yet, just imagine for a while, if each state would be self-sufficient for the basic needs of each individual in that state, things would be very different on a global scale. Let’s assume a state has found some way to fulfill the energetic needs of everyone, the water needs of everyone, the food needs of everyone and the housing needs of everyone. Based on that backbone, this state will be able to ask the citizens to focus on areas of need, for example health care, without needing to make any economic profits, they are not needed, if it is not profitable it doesn't even matter, the people engaged in that endeavour know that even if they don't progress in their work, they can go back home and still have their basic needs met. Nowadays instead of that, we have patents! If we stay on the subject of health care and medications, doctors, dentists etc. they all need to make profits somehow to be able to come home and buy food, buy energy, buy water and pay for their house. If these needs were free, they would not need to make any profits while doing this job, remember that each of us will be working everyday for about an hour a day to keep the basic needs free, this is a compulsory prerequisite, this work doesn't need to be paid, because it's what allows everyone to have their basic needs at all times. But back to health, pharmaceutical companies have to make patents, so that they can earn money from each medication they sell, because? Because they have huge research facilities to maintain, they have research staff to pay, they have a lot of things that need money. If that research staff could go home and have free food, free energy, free water, free housing, would they really need to have some sort of salary? For the moment let’s assume people in the society do not want anything else than just go home and be able to eat, drink, be in a cosy place and sleep, let’s ignore for the moment that they would want cars, computers, books, TVs etc. Once you'll get the whole picture, these commodities will be somewhat free. For the moment, back to the subject; the pharmaceutical companies have no salaries to pay in such a system, they don't need to pay for the water and energy that their research facilities use either, neither do they have to pay for the food that their employees eat at lunch. There are not many costs left, except for the maintenance of their buildings and construction of new research facilities, but wait! This does not require any money, people have the time to do that, then assuming they do not need to pay for construction materials (that are also free in the society I have in mind), basically there are no more costs to the endeavour of doing research for new medications. This pharmaceutical company would not need to earn money from every single medication they sell, the patent could still remain, because it is an intellectual property that defines who invented/created the product/idea, but the patent would not mean that everyone has to pay for the product so that the pharmaceutical company can be profitable. The need for economic profits is gone, all that is left are the needs of the society, if there is a disease, qualified people will surely be glad to help in curing that disease (because they have the time to help) or finding out how to avoid it, no one needs any money, everyone just needs good health, so finding a cure as quickly as possible is the priority, not economic profits. As I discussed in a previous chapter, concerning health we should focus on understanding how to prevent diseases, not on how to cure.

Anyhow, this view can apply to a lot of other sectors, let’s say the music industry. Some people like to play music all the time and it's great. Provided they work their needed time a day to keep the basic needs for the whole society free, the rest of the time they can enjoy their instruments and then if they want to release an album to the whole world, they can do it, there can be producers involved too. Neither the producer nor the artist needs any money out of that music album, they have all their basic needs met at all times.

We can apply it to computer scientists who like to develop programs, they too can develop great programs in teams without needing to make any profits out of the end product, they already have what they need to be able to live fine in their house.

I could go on and on with such examples on a large scale or on a small scale, the end result is always the same, if basic needs are met, no one ever needs to make economic profits.

This gets me thinking about something I heard many times and that is still considered as true and effective: competition fosters innovation. Seriously? This is such a bogus way of understanding what is at hand. In the actual society, this concept is considered to be the main pillar of innovation, competing companies in the same sector will compete against each other to come out with new ideas, new products to better fulfill some needs. This promotes innovation? I must come from another world, because I don't understand how anyone can accept that competition fosters innovation. Cooperation fosters innovation, there is no need for tens of different companies working on the same subject to compete against each other, this actually hinders innovation, because more often than not, two competing companies will come up with somehow similar products at the same time. This is wasted energy, instead of each of them doing basically the same thing in their own corner, they could have cooperated and shared their ideas, this would have sped up the process of creating the final product for sure. The one final product designed cooperatively would have been better than two different somewhat similar products being released at the same time.

Once again this stupid way of thinking is due to economic profits, nothing else, if neither of these companies had any profits to make, they would just cooperate, two brains are better than one, two thousand brains working together are better than a thousand brains working together. Innovation is happening faster because of all the facilities we have nowadays, but not because of competition. If the burden of economic profits was gone, innovation would happen at a much faster pace.

Take mobile phone companies for example, there is a bunch of them in each and every country competing against each other all the time, meaning each company has to set up their own phone network, each having to set up their own infrastructure, their own building, their own customer services, their own... Nowadays this is deemed good, because competition also prevents a company from having a monopoly and hence enforcing prices that no one can change, nowadays another company can be more competitive and this will force other companies to reduce their rates too. But this again comes back to economic profits, if none of these companies had any profits to make, why would they compete over the price of any service they provide. One company that has a monopoly but has no profits to make is enough, if there are no economic profits to make, that company can happily accept new ideas to improve their service, they do not need another competitor to force that improvement. Neither will anyone complain about that monopoly, the company provides the service that it provides and asks nothing in return except the help of people who have free time and new ideas to improve the service that this company provides.

Anyway, competition does not foster innovation, this is wrongly believed to be true because of the way the actual society works, if society was built in a way like I describe, cooperation would foster even better innovation than what we have today. This is not only true for phone companies, it is true for absolutely anything.

However to get to that state, the world as a whole has to understand that our society could be structured in a radically different way than it is today. Is it so hard to believe? So many people tell me I am a utopian, I have communist ideas, well to me that means people are not able to see a global society structured in a completely different way, they refer to old concepts to understand new concepts that do not yet exist. There is a serious lack of flexibility in the way of thinking of most civilised humans, most of us are so accustomed to a system or an old system that we cannot perceive or understand something new which is completely different. This brings me nicely to the next topic.

Change

Now that you started to grasp that in a world where basic needs are met, the burden of economic profits vanishes, and the concept of ownership vanishes too, we can start talking about something else. Change! This is of utmost priority too, from my point of view our society is not dynamic at all. Many people disagree with me and keep trying to change my standpoint, they tell me that our society is very dynamic, it evolves all the time, things change very quickly all the time.

Well for me it's rather static and this is because people are afraid of change and everyone would agree now that change is complicated, so complicated that there are many seminars in a lot of companies for employees to learn how to cope with change. Well if we have to learn to cope with change, coping means that we somehow resist it.

We have to embrace change, I know, easier said than done.

Thinking outside of the box? We have to go much further, we have to be able to first understand the box, then remodel the box or even create a new box. Thinking outside of the box is not enough.

As I write this book, I keep thinking about the actual society which is changing and needs to change, yet most people cling to the old ways like chewing gum to a boot sole. Yet when it is the chewing gum on a boot, everyone wants to remove it, or wishes that the chewing gum was not there on the pavement in the first place. Why do we avoid so much the evident need for change that is required in our society? Security, financial security, the need to survive, this is why. If our basic needs were freely met, change would already be much easier, being laid off would not mean the end of one’s life. Being laid off would not even be understood the same way, it just means that job becomes unnecessary for some indefinite amount of time.

An example that keeps popping up in the news is about the car industry, sales go down, people must be fired and they refuse that and protest. Sometimes people are fired even though the company is making huge profits, but it doesn't change the core problem. With car production, the sales are not steady, sometimes there is more demand, sometimes less, it's dynamic and depends on the needs of all of us. If 20% less cars are needed worldwide at some point, why should we need to keep producing as many cars as before? They are not needed, it's obvious that the car manufacturers will need to close factories or reduce production and hence lay off people, even if they are making profits, because the companies know that if they overproduce something that is not needed, in the end they'll suffer economical losses. Yet people always protest when such changes happen. I know, it is not nice to lose a job, but we have to see the problem from a much broader point of view. First of all in the society I describe, even if workers are laid off, they will know that they can go home and still keep their house, have food, water and energy, provided they work a bit every day. There are no lay-offs to speak of, participation in an activity depends just on the needs and wants of the society and its people. Nowadays this is not the case, but we have to think ahead about these problems.

Change is very important, we humans as a whole must understand that the world is very dynamic, demands for products and services change all the time, we should be willing to learn new jobs all the time. And we will, there is no other way around it.

Learning new jobs, this is a key point for a new society to work. We obviously do not need to become experts in all the new jobs we should learn, but we need to understand that we cannot cling to one single task our whole life, this has to stop. Probably some people will still do the same job most of their life, but it does not mean that at some point for some temporary lapse of time they cannot switch to something else. What I want to describe is quite hard to explain, because not many people are used to it. When you learn more and more, you become more efficient at learning more and faster and faster. Links start to build up in you mind, even between two seemingly unrelated subjects. I don't know what example to use, would you think that history and sports have nothing in common? I don't think so, by learning about how people in historic times did this and that, it might actually improve your own understanding of some specific movements in some sports. The skills we acquire when we learn to assemble one machine, whatever it is, are transferable skills that can surely be useful for something else. To be flexible and embrace change as a way of life, I have to come back to the first thing I talked about in this book: education. Education should first of all teach us basic skills that allow us to learn more, a language or two, maths, and that's mostly it, then education should be made to teach how to learn well! Then let us choose freely what we want to be interested in, if we look at kids who have freedom in early childhood to go around wherever they want and do whatever they want; obviously with someone to watch them when they are very young; these kids will keep on switching from subject to subject, learning is the way of life. But as we get older, that thirst for knowledge slowly fades away for most of us and we are proud of what we know and kind of satisfied. I personally am not, I always want to learn more, the more I learn and do things, the more I enjoy life. Nowadays this is not the case for many of us.

All the previous topics start to come together now! Why are we not avid of knowledge any more as we grow older? Because most of us are stuck in a survival mode, we are not enjoying life, we are mostly surviving, many of us doing some work we might not particularly enjoy, some do but in general how many of us are waiting eagerly for the weekend to start and do not want the weekend to end because it means going back to work on Monday. Sounds familiar?

We do not have enough free time, too much work! It doesn't need to be that way, the way I see society, it's even more than what I started describing at the beginning of this book, it's not half work, half holiday... No, it's 2-3 hours a day maximum, to keep the basic needs for all of us free. 2-3 hours a day, that's less than one tenth of a day and even I'm counting very large, as I said many times one hour should be enough. Let’s count large and calculate: 10 hours a day are reserved for sleep, then that leaves 14 hours of active time each day. 3 hours out of 14 hours available, that's still barely 20% of the time of a day. Would you like such a world, where only one fifth of your day is needed to keep the world running, then the rest 80% of the day are to do whatever you want with it, spend time with friends, spend time with family, do nothing, go on ballads or learn new things and actually enjoy some new job! Basic needs are met for all of us at all times, never forget that point, because this is the basis that allows us to enjoy change all the time. But we have to think more in depth, some people will say that if the world was so, everyone would be lazy and nothing would ever get done. No, not at all, because the little amount of daily work is just to provide the basic needs for society, if you want to play an instrument for example, you might have to first build it! If you want to play video games, you might first need to build the console and program the game, if you want to go on a trip with some motorised vehicle, you might first need to build that vehicle! Everyone is different, some people like to paint, some people like mechanics, some people like music, some people like programming softwares, some people like gardening... Let's take the example much further, some people like drugs! They will need to make their drugs, in the process they might actually get into chemistry or go into gardening and farming, they might discover new uses for the materials used to make these drugs. Maybe they'll like chemistry so much that they'll skip the drugs and start on a new path they never thought of. Who knows, if you are free to do whatever you want, you behave like a kid, curiosity comes out again! And even if they just like taking drugs all day long, what is the problem, as long as they have one hour to work every day they'll help maintain the community for the basic needs, that's all that is needed.

But as adults understanding how the whole functions, great responsibilities come with that freedom. Everyone would be free to do whatever they want but in order to fulfill that new need/desire, they would first need to do something. If basic needs are met and all sorts of people want to do all sorts of things, other people can join in the fun, there are no limits and I am myself having a hard time imagining how such a society would work, because it would be so greatly flexible and prone to change that there is nothing in this world to compare it to! Maybe nature, nature is the only 'thing' that is that flexible, nature changes, nature adapts, the climate changes, nature adapts, animals and insects adapt, it's in perpetual change. Our society should become like that, but with some basic rules that I described in the 'new society' chapter. What we create should always be ready to be un-created without any harmful by products. Notice now, I'm not using the words build and un-build any more, I'm using create and un-create, there is a big difference! When we are free, the imagination is the limit and when we are able to be free in our thoughts, needs and wants, we start enjoying what we do and it becomes creation! I am maybe going to sound like a religious person now, but who cares, that's for another book in which I will explain that if properly understood, all religions lead to the same outcome as I describe here! God or no god is not even an issue any more, humans are meant to create and be free, that's how we function best, exactly like young children. Let the inner child free, that's also something that is the outcome in lots of self-help books, in psychology and spiritual teachings!

But let's not get into that, to let our childlike nature express itself, we first need to think of the global society that will allow that! Freedom and inherent security for us all are the basic requirements.

In fact, we already have all the infrastructure we need, but not the correct way of using it!

Our society is way too rigid and built on wrong foundations. Using the analogy of buildings and foundations, if we have a building with week foundation, we can always try to patch it up and add some things to make it more resistant, but in the long run it will be a lot of work, because the foundation keeps on becoming weaker and weaker, needing more patch work. The problem will only solve itself once the building crumbles and is built on a proper foundation! We can decide to waste time doing patch work over and over again, or put a bit work in it and rebuild the building, temporarily it will require much more work, but once the foundation is good, no more patch work is needed.

Let us take an example to describe that patch work in society! It happened when microwave ovens came out in mass. An old woman put a wet cat in it thinking that the oven would dry the cat, then the cat died. The woman made a lawsuit against the oven company and won millions of dollars because of the prejudices. I'm not sure if that event started it all; what I'm about to describe; but let’s assume. From then on many companies started to make longer notices for their equipments, explaining this and that to reduce their liabilities in case of errors. New laws were made around the world to protect the consumer, then the companies also fought back to protect themselves. So on and so forth, a lot of paperwork for nothing if you ask me; it's just because the foundations of the system are completely useless. Imagine that event happened in a world were basic needs are free for all of us, what would that woman have gained by having some more money, not much, she already had all she ever wanted. I agree a cat died and it sure can be a hard event to lose a pet, or even to lose a family member due to bad medical decisions, but errors happen! We will never avoid all errors, it's by making mistakes that we learn. Thus, yes, the company would have needed to apologize for the dead cat and could have tried to help the woman in some way; the company in our society actually did apologize; and they could then have put the new information of use for the microwave, but that useless process of making new laws to protect the consumer, which then wasted more time because these companies had to protect themselves. In a world where profits are useless, what do they need to protect themselves from, what do consumers need to protect themselves? Errors must simply be accounted for and used to make things better in the future, there is no money to lose anywhere.

Laws, millions and billions of laws throughout the world are one of the patchwork I am talking about, they plague society, each year thousands of new laws are voted around the world, so on and so forth to seemingly make things better, protect people, protect investments, protect companies, protect nature, etc. So much useless work is put into these, if the world was built on foundations I describe here, these would not be needed.

If things go on like that, more and more patchwork will be needed as the years go by, because no entity has any security in this world. Freedom and basic needs free is all that is required to change everything.

Let’s talk about the supposed human nature, humans are selfish, humans are lazy, humans are violent and will fight to death for their independent needs.

Yes, this is true nowadays because we have no security as a base of our global society, no common ground to work upon. But, it's not human nature. When kids are really small, below 3 years old, before they start behind heavily influence by our society, are they lazy? Are they violent? Are they selfish? Not at all, do you understand why, because they have security! Their parents are always there to protect them, well not always, but again parents who are not there to help their kids are parents who themselves were victims of the society in some way or another. I'll let you think about that one, it requires a lot of thought to understand. For the moment, back to change, very young kids like change, they do all sorts of things, why, because they don't have to worry about anything else, they are in a secure environment.

But how do we adapt that to adults, it's quite simple, just one rule has to be applied worldwide. Either you work everyday a tiny bit to help everyone else, or you will have to go live on your own and provide yourself with your own needs. In the actual society some would tell me this goes against laws, every human has a right to have a decent life! Yes, I am not cruel, because in this rule I still imply that that person has a right to have some terrain to live on, no one owns the Earth so we all have the right to have our own place on this planet. But no water system, no energy, no food. With a large terrain someone can make his/her own food, the energy is not really needed for that and well-used/stored rain provides the water.

Trust me when a person in such a position sees that he/she struggles to provide food for him/herself, they will want to join in the benefits that everyone else can have by just working 2-3 hours a day for the common good. Because on her/his own that person will probably work more than ten hours a day to obtain what others obtain for a couple of hours a day of common work... This has an aspect I didn't even think of before, it forces cooperation and the recognition that cooperation is good for oneself. Nowadays this is not often the case, we work in a company but that does not necessarily mean that this cooperation with others benefits us, apart from the salary.

Moreover when that reluctant person decides to join the system, sees that the 2-3 hours a day gives him/her freedom to do anything else much more easily, how could it be bad?

I've shifted from the topic of change and it doesn't really matter, I told you in the beginning that this book wouldn't have well-defined chapters, I have to go in so many directions to kind of get you to grasp a little of what is in my head. I think it's time for conclusions, else I could go on and on for many thousands of pages. First I'll let all these ideas do their work in your head, everyone will have things to say on the subject, good and bad, I don't mind, as long as you start understanding that things could be very, very different than what we have today.

Conclusions

What could I say? A lot of things! Things have to change, our way of thinking must change, our way of viewing the society must change. Do you believe that in a society like the one I describe some people would steal, what good would it bring them, they already have access to anything they would want to steal. There is the hot topic of religion and this is the one I'll cover in my next book, I'm not afraid to talk about these subjects, because I hope that everyone understands that I am trying to help the whole of humanity with these ideas, not harm. How bad could it be, no matter what your beliefs are, or even if you have beliefs, wouldn't you like to have a lot of free time and no need to worry about having a house, or having water, or having electricity and gas? All for free, just for about 10-15 hours of work a week, because when I say 2-3 hours a day, that still includes weekends, except that all weekends should not be at the same time, there should be shifts were people have their weekends Monday/Tuesday, others Tuesday/Wednesday, others Wednesday/Thursday etc., so that there is always someone working. And I believe in fact one hour a day is enough... We the weekends on shifts we can also include long holidays, but for that we have to be flexible and think of ways where someone could pile up some weekends and then use them all at once, while others do the same at different times. Also work some more days to free other days. I don't know exactly how that would work as a whole, it's such a flexible system that I cannot grasp how it will all fit together. But one could decide to work 30 hours of community work a week for 4 weeks and that would mean at least one month of cumulated free holiday time.

There are so many details we can put into such a system, no matter the religion, everyone would love it I'm sure. Religion has no importance here.

There are still so many things to discuss, I cannot describe the whole society in one book! To talk quickly about the hot topic of religious beliefs, I love every single human on this planet, whatever the religion, whatever the background, because I understand that we're all on the same planet, if we are ever to all live happy, even by staying in our own corners most of the time, we will need to cooperate for our basic needs. We are all different because the planet is different everywhere, someone living in a very hot climate will not have the same skin as someone who lives in a cold country, the activities will be different also, meaning we have different ways of understanding the world. But we can all agree that it's better to all have free food, shelter, energy, water; it doesn't matter where we live, how we look, what we believe in. No two humans are the same, no two trees are the same, no two animals are the same, no place on Earth looks exactly like another place on Earth, we live in a world of differences and that's what creates the beauty of this planet. But, our basic needs are the same, for all of us, water is something that we all need, food is something that we all need, we all want a place we can call home, be it in a nomad or sedentary lifestyle, energy is not a need in itself but it's a convenience that greatly helps to fulfill the other needs. We are all different, but we all have the same basic needs, this already is a point we can all agree on and start to work on, the rest is not so important. I know in some countries people say women are abused, in others people say kids are abused. Fine, let it be that way for the moment, to slowly come to common agreements on what is right and what is not, we first need to focus on what links us all together, this will get cooperation going, once we all start cooperating and somehow depending on each other for our basic needs, other forms of cooperation will spring up. Everyone needs to accept atheism, Christians, Buddhism, Moslems, Jews, Bahaism, Jainism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, paganism, Gnosticism, nihilism etc. Sorry if I missed a religion, I cannot know all of them, there are as many beliefs as there are types of trees, or types of flowers, I don't know all of those either. Differences! It's beautiful, many people think that each belief system has something wrong compared to another one, fine, there are probably many things wrong, it doesn't only apply to religion, there are many things wrong in societies, in countries, in whatever else. Mistakes and errors are part of life, no one is perfect. I'm personally for Unitism which doesn't really exist, I like unity, because we are all the same, all different from each other, this is what makes us equal, we are equal because we're all different. It's always nice to get along with someone else even if we cannot agree on everything, we will never agree on everything. But once again we can all agree on something else, babies in good health are all the same, anywhere in the world, all full of energy, all full of curiosity, all eager to learn, hence when we are born we all have the same dormant potential, then our surroundings is the factor that changes what we become. If all babies were allowed to have their basic needs met too and if education would allow them to keep their curiosity the way it is when they are born, that is an education system that helps in learning and allows them to learn whatever they want with guidance, they could still have a part of their education that is specific to the country, society, religion they are, but the basic education must be the same to allow them to become flexible human beings able to understand the intricate beauty and interconnectedness of the whole world around them.

There is another thing we can all agree on, no matter who we are, where we live, what we believe in, what we like etc. It's nature, we all depend on it to be able to live, without a healthy non-polluted planet we are all an extinct species, we must all take care of the local nature around where we live, our lives depend on it, there are no ifs and buts about that.

Once again, we are all different, thus we are all equal, we are equal by the fact that we're all different, but we're also equal by the fact that we all depend on a healthy planet to remain alive, we're all equal because when we're born we're all the same when we are babies. These commonly neglected but vital equalities are what we must focus on, the other differences are not so important after all. Imagine a country were human rights are completely ignored, it doesn't matter with regards to what these people in that country need to survive, they still need water, food and a healthy nature around them to be able to sustain themselves, take away their food and water and I believe human right abuses will be the least of their worries. It's the same in any western country, we do not have too many deep human rights issues, but some complain about not having money to go on holidays or enough means to provide a decent life for their family. Fine, I agree, but take away the food and water and these previous complaints will become irrelevant, people might complain about these economical problems, but in our society there is always a way to get water and food. That's the priority for us all, anywhere on the planet!

So this must be the primary focus, economic problems are irrelevant. For our planet to be a decent place for all human beings, we first need to have our basic needs met, primarily food and water. The society I envision is a society were these matters are the first priority to attend to when we wake up, instead of waking up nowadays and thinking “oh, I must go to work to get money to pay my rent and buy food”. We shouldn't be thinking about having to buy food, we should just wake up and think “ok, today there are these plants to take care of, they will sustain us in the coming months”, or “I have to handle these stocks”, or there's some logistics to take care of, or some local infrastructure to update or maintain etc. People think I'm a utopian, fine, it's always people who were thought to be crazy at first, or who had dreams so big that no one ever thought they would succeed, it's these people who changed the world. We all have that potential in us, I think we're all like them if we let go of our mental blocks and follow our dreams, but we must follow our dreams while understanding that we all depend on each other, thus what one of us does influences the others, nowadays many people forget that and rightly so, our society does not put these priorities in our face. Living in large urban cities is a very big problem, take away the food from any of these cities and it's death that awaits them all, or mass exodus to nature. I'm not saying we should get rid of all large urban areas, they are very useful for coordination, but when we live in such a place, we are disconnected from the reality of what our basic needs are and consequences of our acts and consumption, for example garbage... This must change.

Let's recap most of the ideas in this book now, the basic needs should be free for all of us in exchange for a little amount of daily/regular work to ensure that this is so, setting up independent electricity sources all around the planet is also a priority, because by doing so, we will get rid of the maintenance of huge power grids that are actually completely useless if we designed our society in a more efficient manner. We do not even need a power source for every single house, but at least one for a couple of hundred habitations, so that the energy grid around them is kept to a ridiculously small size, look at the power network in a village of some hundred inhabitants, there are maybe 5 streets and houses along these streets, the local energy grid is very easy to maintain, habitants can take care of it themselves, it doesn't require much maintenance.

There are many ways to generate electricity in non-polluting ways, convert gravity to rotational energy, create entirely magnetic motors, I have to reiterate, this is completely plausible, these motors are not in perpetual motion, magnets just have a very long lifespan and we should use that fact and stop thinking that perpetual motion is impossible, this is not perpetual motion! Vertical windmills are also very good, they could be built in ways that they reinforce each other similarly to birds who often fly in flocks with a 'V' shape over long distances, vertical windmills are easy to install, no need to make very tall masts and set up the motor and place the blades so high, a vertical windmill has a motor on the ground, the blades are also completely harmless for birds and could also be used to collect humidity, no need to put a vertical windmill on a base that can change direction to follow the wind direction, it's completely multi-directional in a fixed position. Solar energy is good too, but not good enough yet, we should focus on making photovoltaic panels that have life spans of at least half a century, else they require too much maintenance.

I'll let engineers think about all that, the points to have in mind are, very long lifespan with maintenance reduced as much as possible, nowadays we are far from having efficient electric generators that don’t require much maintenance. And as I already said, get rid of the global power grid, it's useless and requires so much maintenance, not mentioning how it pollutes the visual beauty of our environment, furthermore, almost 50% of the power is lost on the high-voltage power lines during transmission from one point to another over large distances, what a waste! By reducing these grids to a bare minimum of maybe 1-2 km maximum to cover the streets of a couple hundreds of houses, the power losses will be almost non-existent.

We must get rid of fossil fuels for energy production, first of all I have to reiterate what pollution is in the broad sense. Pollution is the misplacement of something where it does not belong! Petrol, natural gases, even radioactive materials are all harmless to us when they are kept underground, that's where they form, that's were they are useful and should remain. By displacing them from where they originally were, they become pollution. Petrochemical compounds are also pollution, because they are produced from petrol, which should not be available above ground, hence petrol-based products should not exist above ground either. We have a perfect plant above ground to replace almost anything that is derived from petrol nowadays, hemp, this universal plant grows everywhere on Earth, with a lot of water or with barely any water, it grows like a wild plant, it does not require much help from us to grow with prosperity. From hemp we could make paper, conglomerates, all sorts of building materials, other types of plastic, clothes, oil/flour with the seeds, even biological petrol, rope, compost. This plant is very useful in so many ways, I am sure I am forgetting many other important aspects. But the point is, this plant belongs above ground, so it cannot be pollution for us. Quickly back to energy before I forget, as I said earlier in the book, once we have electricity, we do not need to extract any natural gas any more, from water and electrolysis we can get what we need to make hydrogen gas, which has the benefit of creating only water as a result of combustion with hydrogen, again completely non-polluting.

As I said earlier, the networks to drill/extract petrol/gas are humongous, very polluting and completely useless, if we were more clever, we would get exactly the same benefits from plants that are available locally anywhere in the world, not forgetting the enormous amount of maintenance that these fossil resources require to be transported around the world.

Reducing maintenance as you already understood is a key aspect of the society I describe, why spend a million hours of work a year to get something, if we could get exactly the same for only a couple thousand hours of work a year! I don't understand the human logic, why work so much if we could work ten times less and still have exactly the same end result? This baffles me and I don't see any politician in the world who understands this, they are all so boxed in the box that they cannot think outside the box for a single minute.

The next aspect was water, every single house should collect part of the rain water, not all of it because rain must also go in the soil, but if we think about the gutters that are present on all buildings, when rain falls, barely a couple percent of the rainwater falling from the sky goes on the roofs, so we just need to connect these gutters to a water collection system and we already collect enough water to be able to water our gardens in times of droughts that can occur once in a while. Thankfully these matters are starting to be understood properly, and more and more new buildings are incorporating this concept.

With that rainwater, we filter it to remove solid particles and we have our gas, using electrolysis for every house. Anyhow I won't dwell much more on these subjects, they are already discussed in enough depth in this book.

Reduce maintenance everywhere, that's the most important thing, so we need less work for the same outcome, though I am aware that setting up all that system will require a lot of work, but once it's done, it will be beautiful!

With water and energy available everywhere, we just need our free house and we can each grow our own food in our garden. Our house should be free, because no one owns the planet, it belongs to all of us, so we all have right to a free piece of land. And as I discussed earlier too, we pay taxes which are usually used to maintain a lot of the infrastructure around us, with not much maintenance we do not need much taxes. But as this all transitions to the new society I envision, at some point maintenance will be so reduced that one hour !maximum! of work a day per inhabitant of a zone will be enough to maintain the local infrastructure and fulfill all basic needs, we won't need to pay our taxes, we will be doing the work that our taxes used to be used for. Talking about growing food, we do not need to all have a vegetable garden in our backyard either, there are many ways to go around that. If we all have free time, there could be a common farm for a block of 50-100 inhabitants, every inhabitant in that block will then help in taking care of the farm by working a bit everyday, knowing that this is the source of their food, you could not have it more local than that! That's a priority too, the place where our food is grown should be reachable by foot in maximum 10 minutes, it should not be further than that. This would also alleviate the burden that farmers have nowadays, they cannot go on holiday ever because they are alone and must attend to their farm every single day, go away for a week and a lot of things fall apart. If the 50-100 close inhabitants can all go there by foot, we can make shifts of work where each one can go away for a while, while others continue to take care of the farm. The farm would not be owned by the farmer any more, in fact everyone would become a small farmer and that's a priority too, it puts us in direct contact with what we need for remaining alive.

Trust me, a farm for 50 people is more than enough to get all the food we need, we will stop having farms with only monocultures, like farms who only raise cattle, or farms who only grow a couple of different staples, that must end. A farm must be a place where a bunch of different animals all live in harmony with each other and where you can find a diversity of local staples, fruit trees, vegetables, various fields of different plants etc.

Cooperative farms that provide the food for all the people living around the farm. This has also many other benefits regarding social insecurities, by having to live and see your local neighbours every once in a while, it establishes trust between all the neighbours, this also allows neighbours to trust their other neighbours for taking care of their own children once in a while.

Actually that local concept must then be expanded on a slightly larger scale, one collective farm for every 50-100 inhabitants, one nursery for every 500-1000 inhabitants, one school for every 500-1000 inhabitants, etc.

One local shop for every 500-1000 inhabitants where the excess production of each smaller individual farm is brought, so that once again, very locally a larger diversity of foods is available. Obviously not every farm will be able to grow all sorts of vegetables, so if 10 farms group together to share their diversity excess production, that small shop will be there for the slightly larger local community.

Trust me, this all can run with people working 2-3 hours a day, we don't really need much work to get all this to function perfectly.

We have to realise how much time we lose every single week, in our actual society, to go somewhere to get our food! If instead that food was all centralised maybe 2-3 km away maximum, we could even get there by bike in 10 minutes, and work there for one hour or so, then leave with our food after we've done our shared work time. Assuming the shop is open from 6 AM to 6 PM, that requires 12 persons to attend to cover the work shift of one day, if that's for a community of a thousand people, this is more than feasible! Flexibility is a key aspect of the society I describe.

Internet is really useful in that aspect, because we could set up websites, where when someone is working at the shop, they can mark it down on a website, so that anyone else around can go have a look at the website and know straight away who and when others have decided to go there and how long each person has decided to work there. If no one has to steal, that 'shop' could just stay open to all at all times, so that even if no one is working at some point, someone could still go there and collect food or work there.

If you remove the threat of insecurity, many things become completely different, local shops can just remain open to all all day long, all year long. This brings me to what I explained about profits and ownership. Because when I said shop, I didn't mean shop in the sense people understand it today, shop just means a place to store merchandise, it has nothing to do with money! That shop I'm describing wouldn't need money to be profitable, because no one in that kind of society needs to make any profits, the ownership is also shared, that is for food. Instead of money, there could just be a logging system where people write down how much food they took out, that's all that's needed to keep accounts on what is needed and what is produced, no need for economical profits of any sort.

I think logging system could be applied to every activity, as I said earlier, for the society I describe, the only prerequisite needed is that someone has to do a bit of community work to be eligible to have access to all these free services, nothing else. So the logging system could just be like in private companies where people mark their time of arrival and departure at the work place, here the work place would be any of the collective buildings, except that instead of nowadays, here no one signs in/out to get money, they sign in/out which gives them access freely to all the facilities of the local community. Furthermore since it's quite a local community where people work each and every day for a small duration of time, over the course of many years everyone would get to know each other, this is good for the 'security' aspects of such a community, humans are usually only afraid of strangers they don't know, we are not so afraid of people we get to see every once in a while, even if the beliefs of each of us are a bit different, we might not like some people, but it doesn't mean we need to be afraid of them. We know our common work is common, but it's also individual, because it provides us all with all we need to live decently every single day.

This society is not a communist society! When I talk about sharing and free access to common things, people tell me it's communism, that it happened in the past and it failed. Obviously, because what people fail to understand is that what happened in the past was communism, what I'm describing is not communism in the strict sense. Communism is defined as a social system/organisation based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the STATE. This is wrong, all sorts of past communism were based on a state-centralised communism, the state provided the money for people to do their activity, and everything belonged to the state. In the society I describe, it's not complete communism, first of all, your house and land belongs to you, it's a given right, then the resources that are shared are not owned by the state, they are owned by the local community as a whole, having local communities scattered all around the planet, each independent from each other for their basic needs. The state if it exists, has no say in what the local community does, each local community owns all its land, including the collective farm, collective shops, collective infrastructure etc., yes, ownership is still shared, but on a much smaller size, I don't like communism, it never worked because it is a flawed concept, people should own their house, own their energy production machine, be it shared between a couple of habitations or individually owned, and the access to food and water is not something provided by the state, it's something provided by all inhabitants of the local community working together a small amount everyday. No one should tell anyone what to do, it's a direct reward system, you work a small amount for the community, you get everything free, you don't want to work for the community, then you have your house and you're on your own. The state as is, should just be there to provide some standardisation protocols to make sure all these self-sustained and independent communities can communicate and have common methods of building, handling the local infrastructure which are all linked together as global infrastructure.

Then back to the society I describe, for schools etc. we should have one for every thousand inhabitants approximately, these have to be calculated more precisely obviously, but details are details, here we talk about the broad picture. Now for every 5000-10000 inhabitants scattered around different local and sub-local communities, there could be more global production factories, knowledge institutions (universities) etc. These are for commodities and secondary services, naturally each of these places will be closer to some local communities than others. And this is fine, these places could be used for research for improvements on anything that exists, the people living the closest could be the ones most interested in these subjects. There could be centralised places for arts, for electronics, for agriculture, for music, for all sorts of disciplines. Each of these could be placed in different places across a country, then people most interested in such and such a subject could decide to live closer to that facility or that facility or that facility etc. Since everyone has a right to a house, the houses could just be exchanged. Let’s say someone in a local community lives 10 minutes away from a conservatory of music, and someone else in another local community lives next to a research centre for new technologies, the one living next to the conservatory is interested in the research in new technologies and the other is interested in music, they can just exchange houses and that's it. Each will be happy to be where they prefer, then at some point the person who liked music wants to study agriculture, that person will look for another person who wants to go away from their local community that is near a research centre for agriculture and that person who is next to the agriculture place wants to go to a building construction research centre and someone next to a building construction centre wants to go somewhere else and someone else somewhere else wants to go somewhere else etc. If we have a global logistic system that is quite flexible, there is most surely a way that all these different persons can exchange houses in a way that will satisfy all of them in bringing them closer to where they want to be. Flexibility is very important, we should be able to go from one local community to another whenever we want to, there is always someone else who will want the same and go somewhere else. But our global logistics must allow such flexibility. Not forgetting that everyone has their right to a house, so no need to buy a new place, just exchange! They know wherever they will go, the house might be different, but they'll have water, food and energy as usual, as long as they do the community work for the local community they end up in.

I know living a life being for a new one is not an easy task, we have to leave friends, family, but if at least the worry of money or not having security is not there it already facilitates the process!

It's a very beautiful society to envision, but complex to set up, because we have to introduce much-much more flexibility in the society and coordinate all that globally all around the world even, while local communities all remain. What is nice with such a system is that people won't choose to go to a certain place just for money, they will choose to go there because of curiosity, they want to learn something new, they are interested in something new. These exchanges promote innovation, because someone coming from a completely different background might bring in completely new ideas, the more we share knowledge and ideas, the more we diversify, the more we mix everything together, the more innovations it can bring.

Then there can be many different research places working on the same topic all around the world, people from a similar domain will be able to switch to different places effortlessly, nowadays this is not the case, changing house, changing country is a very complicated task. It doesn't have to be so.

Some people tell me if such a thing is possible, then everyone will want to live in the south where it's hotter! I don't believe so at all, first of all the common farm work will make people face the reality, maybe living in a hotter climate is nicer, but if a person is used to working in a temperate climate, they might come to the realisation that in a hotter climate the farming work will be harder and more exhausting because of the temperature, not everyone might like it. Same way as not everyone might like working in Scandinavia in winter. But once again what is great with such a system, is that it's kind of like being able to go on holidays whenever you want, instead of just going for a couple of weeks, like people do nowadays, because we work way too much and have no time. In the society I'm describing, we might want to go live 5 years in one place, then live 5 years in another place. Some people like staying where they are and it's fine, but ask others, ask someone in Canada, they might tell you that they would like to visit Europe, they would like to visit Asia, they would like to visit south Africa etc. Ask someone in Africa, they might tell you that they would like to visit the USA, visit Russia, Asia etc. Actually ask anyone on the planet, the majority of people will tell you that they would enjoy visiting some other place on earth, well with such a flexible system that I describe, they can actually go live someplace else for a couple of years! The global logistics must be very well made, because here we are talking about millions of people going from one place to another globally, furthermore the choices won't be based on going somewhere to have a more decent life any more, life will be decent anywhere on Earth, so people won't be amassing in the developed countries, every country will be developed!

Now I have to continue with another example that I see often nowadays! There is a big factory in one place and it shuts down for whichever reason, thousands of people lose their jobs, then the whole city suffers, bars and local commerces suffer from the lack of these customers who are gone. This is a recurrent problem and has to be looked at in depth. First of all, if these cities did not need to make any profits, thousand people more or less would not impact anything, they do not need to make any profits to be able to live, they already are in their self-sustained communities. So this brings me to the dynamic needs of the entire planet, let’s take the example of cars and let’s say there is a factory somewhere on the planet that produces one type of car, there are a thousand people in the nearby community who work in that factory, they work there when they have done their local community work and in total they work much less than 8 hours a day, this must not be forgotten. Suddenly the demand for that type of car drops worldwide, this is good, the people there will need to work less, they can still remain there because they still have their food and everything else, the reduced demand doesn't affect their life, it's actually good, they can start to work on something else, or some of them can just relocate somewhere else on the planet to go learn/do something new. Actually I can go further, let’s say that now a lot of people worldwide want that car again and many of the previous workers left, well the people who want that car or people who like to build cars can just relocate next to that factory and go build the car themselves!

This is what I understand when I think about a dynamic society, what we have today is far from what I imagine.

Basically there are factories and production places a bit everywhere around the world, when one is needed, like we have nowadays, but people can just go there and work in it and learn that job, because the move will be easy, they will go there and end up in a local community (or switch with previous members) where they have their basic needs met anyway, the 'production' is for commodities and that changes all the time depending on what all humans want worldwide. The basis of the society is ready everywhere, self-sustained local communities all around the world, but the manufacturing/production factories do not need to be operational all the time, they just need to be operational when needed and when many people want something, they can decide to go help and do it themselves while learning some new skills at the same time! The same applies to research/education facilities, natural resource mining and a lot of other things. If a lot of production for goods is not needed, then fine, less work for us all!

This way of living globally removes the need for consumerism, actually it's much better!

Because people who do research can do research as they want, with unlimited funding (actually there is no funding), and every now and then when a new breakthrough is made that could benefit everyone on the planet, the idea can be shared worldwide and production factories can be put to work on the new product as needed. No need to produce all the time, we can live fine let’s say with our flat TVs and in ten years when a great leap forward has been made, brand new products can be manufactured all at once, meanwhile if millions of people don't work in these factories, they can do other things!

I think I'm reaching a sort of conclusion, even though I will never be able to conclude such a large subject! The basis of the society I describe is free food, water, energy and a terrain/house for everyone, in self-sustained local communities. On that alone, anyone can live decently by working a tiny amount every day for the community, some can decide to work much more for the community at some point to accumulate free time to go on real long holidays, some can decide to stay there and do other things meanwhile. Then when I talk about work, apart from that community work, I mean work that people can do as they wish, wherever they want, after having done their community duty. They can work 1 hour more a day, or do nothing, or work all day long, the choice is completely free. However, once that person wants a commodity that doesn't exist, that person will not get it for free, well, yes because it won't cost any money, but that person will probably need to work to produce that commodity.

This also nullifies the idea that some people have, that most humans will do nothing apart from the community work; no, not at all, imagine a crackhead playing video games, that person will first have to go help in building the console before being able to play any video game! Basically in such a society we are forced to work to get access to new commodities. But since all basic needs are met, we do not need to consume commodities all year long to keep everyone employed and the economy working, no, if nothing new is needed, people still have their basic needs met.

The worldwide economy runs fine just by people doing a small amount of community work in their local community every day, the rest is free time to invent, create, do nothing, research, work on something, whatever we want!

People could resort to stealing to have access to the commodities of others while being lazy themselves? We can still avoid that by being human, there could be places on Earth where instead of putting people in prison, they are re-educated by being left alone in a remote place with other 'felons' who will learn the hard way to maintain their own local community which has no access to any superfluous production facilities for commodities. Once progress has been made, they can be re-linked into the global society, this is much more human than putting them in prisons, they will have the same opportunities than anyone else, except no access to commodities which are the only things that can be 'stolen', the basic needs are at their disposal like for anyone else on Earth.

There are so many things left to discuss, social relationships which is also a complex issue, what if people in a community don't get along? I don't know, but I'm sure there are solutions much better than the ones available nowadays; instead of punishing, just re-educate.

Also by having much more free time, a lot more people could focus on social work to resolve these conflicts, many people like doing that too! It's a wide world, with a wide variety of people, we won't make such a society perfect in one day, but I believe having the basic needs met for everyone is the key priority to making humans more cooperative with each other and to reduce a lot of the sources of conflicts, because let’s face it, many people who are in prison nowadays are there for completely harmless reasons, using drugs, dealing drugs (to get money), stealing stuff (to get money)... There are not that many dangerous people in the world and a lot of the minor offences can be dealt with very easily I think, without needing to build prisons all over the place.

There are so many other things left, like for example the recycling industry nowadays, since recycling started to become mainstream in western countries, there is much more stuff to recycle, the packaging is becoming more and more complex, why? Because the ones recycling have to make a living, economic profits, so more stuff to recycle ensures that they have work... This is utterly stupid!

For large cities, to transition to a local community system, we could already ensure they travel less to get their food there, by designating a post system who delivers basic foods as well as the post, in a city this would already save a lot of time for every single person who has to spend time to do that every week, the post system is the most efficient because it goes from house to house, thus the cars travel the least possible distance to bring food to the largest number of houses. Then supermarkets can remain for other specific needs that people have. Once again we need to set up a system of logistics that is very flexible, where people could choose what they want delivered to their house, to transition from the actual system to the new one, people who were employed in supermarkets will now be employed to deliver food, supermarket owners could take care of the change. Anyway, the hardest part would be the transition from the actual society to the new society with everyone keeping access to food, water, energy and a house, even while being temporarily unemployed in some cases, I think the best way is to have small villages all around the countries to start becoming self-sustained communities, then this can be a backbone for unemployed people in large cities to fall back too. Because let us not forget that many small villages have many houses empty, because people left to go to big cities to get a 'better' life in terms on money.

There are many other themes to discuss, like advertisement, so much wasted work time for profits that are not needed in the first place; the effect of TV on humans, we know drama/violence is intercepted at a dramatic point to let the advertisements coming afterwards sink into the unconscious, because we are focused on wanting to see the rest of the story that was cut abruptly. The effect of advertisements in general, sexual promotion, bad foods etc. is huge on the children, the problem is lurking and barely anyone notices, 30% of the worldwide internet traffic is generated by porn... There are tons of other problems, like the undeniable effects of violence on TV, every study proves that it has an effect on each of us. The stars of this world are promoted by huge industries that do it for profit, many are stars for one to ten years and then just disappear, it's not talent, it’s advertisement. In short, all the researches in neuroscience are used by advertising industries to affect humans better in order to make more profits; this process is horribly wrong, advances in science should not be used to abuse humans, they should be used to help humans.

Anyhow, the transition from our actual society to the one I talk about is very hard to envision! I will leave it at that, because now many more people are needed to plan that change, I cannot imagine all that by myself! The society I envision will not require money any more, just keeping approximate track of the work done for the local community, the rest will solve itself as people get along. Money needs to disappear, its purpose was to be used as means of exchange, not means for profit or a necessity for life, nowadays we have much more clever ways for keeping the exchanges fair without requiring any need for money, just keep track of the amount of work each of us does, the basic needed work for the community, and then more work (this can mostly be enjoyable activities) will grant us access to more commodities. No need for money, money requires banks, a way to safely store valuables, accountants, traders etc. None of these are needed if our society had a better structure at its core, people who like management in banks could still manage things, but not in relation with money! In relation with global food distribution, health facilities, crisis management in case of climatic calamities, management is required in so many domains that are lacking nowadays, so why manage something like money that does not need to exist, we can do much better! Instead of setting a price for work per hour, we could just set factors to calculate the 'real' work time, by that I mean that normal community work would have a factor of 1, but for example time spent to build useful appliances for the whole world might be multiplied by a larger factor, also maybe because that work is harder on the body than another work. Anyhow, count time but don’t convert that time to money, this is a useless process that once again requires many related jobs that are quite useless!

Just another idea, completely random, you know plants could water themselves if we set up the proper system! Put an electrode on a plant and look at its reaction when you try to burn the plant, the plant will produce visible electric signals, water the plant and different signals will manifest! A plant can be trained gently to understand how to use the electrode as a switch to do all sorts of things, this would revolutionize agriculture!

Anyhow...

I long for the day when all of us will be able to wake up, do some relaxing work for the community; maybe once in a while it will be hard, but most of the time it should be pretty easy work; then go back home if we want and have hours to cook our own food, or go eat food at some restaurant because someone there likes to make food for others, then have some hours to spend with children or/and friends and do some more work for the community with friends in a relaxed manner too, and go home and do what we want in the evening without having to think about money or salary or anything else; this is what I call life, having time to do what we want, without needing to look at a clock all day long or wondering about a bank account with fictitious numbers. Nowadays we don't live, we overwork and this serves the purpose of survival. Imagine such a world as I describe, in such a world I'm sure you wouldn't mind 'working' your whole life, because such a way of living is actually what we do nowadays when we are on some holidays, we enjoy life while taking care of some daily chores. That's what life is all about, it's not about survival.

To recap the main points,

No more fossil fuels or fossil gas.

The least maintenance possible, no global energy or pipeline networks to maintain, they are useless.

The least maintenance possible in all aspects of society, basic work needed to maintain the society should be reduced to the strict minimum.

Basic needs free for a tiny amount of community work, food, water, electricity, gas.

Free house/terrain, everyone has that right, Earth belongs to all of us.

In the end no more profits, so for example the healthcare industry won't need patents or the music industry copyrights; as I said these can still remain to say who created what, but not needed in order to make profits from these creations.

Agriculture that respects the planet, no more polluting petrochemical compounds, we can do much better by understanding how nature works.

Self-recycling products and constructions, we plan for when the product will biodegrade by itself or the construction will be un-built, so that it creates no waste products when that needs to happen.

AND high longevity of goods! Nowadays we are partly stuck in a society where we work so much because of consumerism and the low longevity of goods, this is required for the moment because profits are needed to make money to fill our basic needs, so we need to work a lot to continuously earn that money... This is the most inefficient and useless system one could ever think of, if you want my opinion. And also, consume less, work less; consume more, work more. It's quite simple!

That's it, I think this is already a good beginning. These might not be all the best ideas, but I have to start somewhere! I know of other projects, like the Venus project for example, and these are great initiatives, they have great ideas for designs of cities, though I don't agree with their ideas for agriculture, because they have no idea about how productive agriculture on land could be, we can increase production of crops by ten- or twenty-fold just by respecting nature, examples are available in the world; but as far as the Venus project is concerned, it doesn't talk about the transition from our actual society to what they describe, and that's a problem, we cannot destroy one world and rebuild another in one day, it's a process, we have to think of a transition that will bring us from one society to the other as smoothly as possible, while using what we are in. I hope you enjoyed reading this book.