THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

egenerate and restructure at the next level of complexity, according
to Nobel Prize-winners Ilya Prigogine.
I believe we have now started to 'surf at the edge of chaos', that the
current crisis of the dominant institutions of modern society is the
sign that humanity has started to reorganise at the next level of
complexity (see sidebar on the butterfly metaphor). This is why we
are now in the transition period, the period 'in between stories' of the
Time-Compacting Machine of Chapter 1.
The major danger in the monetary field is that some of the
spontaneously emerging new monetary levels will be blocked off
(historically the most likely one is the local one, because it is the
easiest to stamp out), while others will be left to thrive (e.g. private
corporate currencies, because they are beyond the control capacity of
individual central banks). Such an outcome would perpetuate the
imbalance towards Yang currencies and values in our economic
system, just when a Yin influx is needed. Traditional command and
control structures may not be able to avoid the chaos in the existing
old order, but one should not underestimate their power to choke off
embryonic attempts at a new order.
Beyond 2020?
In the long run some time after 2020 - I expect that new economic
and governance structures will emerge at the next order of
complexity, and that a new era of predictable patterns will return.
Other monetary systems than the ones described in this book will
most likely be necessary at that point. Maybe at some time in the
future we will not need money at all. If we believe Jean-Luc Godard
of Star Trek fame, 'money does not exist in the 24th century'.
Meanwhile, I think we will need transitional money systems, which
can be used as crutches to re-educate atrophied collective behaviour
patterns.