The end of debt.The beginning of flow.

Life is a game of rules. All games are games of rules. The rules by which we are allowed to make our livelihoods, and the livelihoods we are prevented from because of those rules, create the game of life we play together and determine how we treat life. That game is The Human Project writ both large and small; the overarching cultural project of human being at scale constraining every human act to the overriding purpose of the game.

The tokens we use within that game are symbols of the rules. They're made of the rules and issued by them. We, in part, advance, fall behind, or gain strategic advantage according to our ability to understand, acquire, use, and manipulate those tokens, and the rules behind them. But do we play the board, each other, or play with a team against another? It depends on the game.

Debt is "I owe you." In a game of livelihood that defines you and I as individuals of no natural communion on a game board of resource conflict I issue my debt to you under my condition of need or want paired with your condition of 'have'. My debt is a simple statement and request, "If you will give me credit, I will owe you."

In games of communion with common cause we play the board too. The board consists of the circumstances we are in together and the common conditions we share. The rules we develop align individual desires and proclivities under common purpose given the game board we play on, because common cause arises out of shared circumstances.

Credit is, "We need you." In our different game of livelihood that defines civilization as made up of societies, cultures, communities, and creative individuals, on the game board of a Planet in a Universe, the game rules issue us our sacred tokens (credit) so that we can play together. Civilization's credit then is a simple statement and request, "You matter. We need you. Will you play with us?"

For balancing.

Credit does and must have its counterpart as debit — but it isn't a catch; every 'this way' has a 'that,' as south has a north. Debit isn't debt. On the game board of a Common Planet with a rule-set like Creditism our balance point is different. The game gives credit to people because our ancestors gave credit to us. We create together so we don't squander our cultural inheritance so we can give credit to our children. Because we can't pay it back we pay it forward instead.

Rather than you owing me or some institution, we balance our consumptive natures with our creative natures, both inside and outside in a self-determined way, and everybody’s consumption depends on every one's creativity. That’s how it is anyway, only hidden and captured, isn’t it?

Who owes what to whom in Creditism? All of us owe a Common Planet to the Universe, Gaia, our Ancestors, and our Children.

How do we pay for (balance) it? Through prices that internalize all costs overall and reflect the purposes that something is built for.

Rather than trying to balance growth with regeneration, we balance luxury and necessity. Rather than our current moment competing with the future, we balance our pasts and futures on the fulcrum of now.

For healing.

Given the game-board of a Common Planet with a rule-set like Creditism we can all clearly see the healing work that humanity needs and wants to do together. People that know something about degradation and regeneration will be proposing notions, jobs, projects, plans, and sweat lodges for cleaning those things up. They will be credited for that work. Then anybody that wants to and is in a position to contribute can do so and be paid for their participation.

We won’t have to talk about the cost of cleaning stuff up anymore. We will correctly see that the cost of not cleaning it up is an increasingly diminishing future in terms of all of our real wealth. We will be paid for it, and will know transparently that the immediate cost is an increase in the price of luxuries that are currently scarce and inefficient to produce, providing incentive for enterprising groups. The cost of everything cannot go to zero, because the human activity required to produce and maintain things cannot go to zero. Would we even want it to?

“I had an overwhelming feeling with all those eyes on me. I didn’t say it, but I was thinking, not of the technical and philosophical questions I was raising, but about fulfillment. That it was better, having a world where we had to work to build our own communities, to help our neighbors and their children, to feel valuable, not just because of our humanity, but because we were valuable to humanity. I didn’t ever want to live in a society where we’d just handed off our responsibility to our tools, to let the hammers construct the future for us. What would we be then? What would the renaissance masters have thought of that? The future had to be ours.” - P.E Rowe ‘Singular’

That isn’t to say that drudgerous work cannot become rare, or that automation should not make working hours more efficient, fun, diverse, or optional. Of course some of us want a good dose of that, and communities will deliberate over those considerations, but neither do we want to not need each other. It’s fun to raise a barn together. It’s human. Too, every reduction in costs increases and decreases other things whether or not we are aware of it. Negative externalities always cost something to someone somewhere.

On a Common Planet we know at the end of the day that there’s nobody else somewhere else that can heal us. There’s just us.

For growing closer.

Because there's just us and we know it, we rediscover tribe, we enact a story of humanity together that moves us and rejoin The Tree of Life as responsible Children and Grandparents; relatives in The Tree of Life.

When we can see who we depend upon because our communities are our own, and its infrastructure is there for us to use for one another, and our commons are ours to take care of together, we begin to value each other again and reclaim our sense of place. Our appreciation of each other brings us closer together in fellow-feeling, what in German is called Gemeinschaft and in Arabic is called ʿaṣabiyya, while at the same time expanding the sphere of that feeling and waking the dormant animist eyes of our ancestors within us. The atomism of individuals out for individual gain, conditioned by the nightmare of money gaining mastery over us, is unwound, and our tokens of Credit become but a beautiful reflection of our real participation as we dance, sing, call, and respond, and contribute our sweat and laughter in A Play for Life.