Aboriginal people can live life without money because Providence does not put a price tag on their required resources. They might have to walk some distance to fetch water daily for their living, whereas we have the convenience of piped water that we have to pay for. For energy, they have to go and collect wood, while all we have to do is to turn on a switch. Aboriginal people have to be very careful with their food so they do not waste it since it takes quite a bit effort to collect, hunt or grow it before processing it to something edible; but for us in villages, cities and towns food is all around us even out of season or foreign foods. All we need is money to buy it and we usually buy more than we need. From these simple comparisons one can surmise that money is a conveyor of convenience, that, it is a fruit of progress in the evolution of human civilization. If this is the case we should expect that the quality of civilized city life be much better than living as aboriginal people. Yet this may not be necessarily true. I believe the concept that time-is-money skews the quality of living in communities. It has created a pursuit for wealth that has turned money from a convenient form of barter to something very different–capitalism.
Aboriginal folk and we national people live in two different paradigms. They live in a paradigm where there is no need for money and we, where money is a living and life essential. The effect that money has on time in one paradigm and the lack of it in the other has created two modes of living. The former has created the rat-race for more and more wealth, and the other oblivious living. Pondering these two paradigms makes me wonder if the development of money is actually progress or otherwise.
Two striking differences appear when aboriginal communites are compared with cities. The most obvious is their size. Aboriginal communities are naturally smaller than cities. They are more akin to villages but may be even smaller than that category. Their constraints in population is simply ecology. So much land can only provide so much resources for so many people. If their community grows beyond the capacity of their environment, then a natural split in the community occurs and groups diverge for the sake of equitable distribution of resources. Modern cities emerge by efficient provision of resources to its community by the means of commerce. Thus the more efficient a city, the bigger its community. It is the advent of money that makes commerce efficient, because people and businesses can get paid for their effort and that wealth allows citizens to procure whatever they need or want. In an aboriginal society money can be a choice or even be irrelevant because it does not need to be used to procure basic needs which is free for all, less the effort to acquire. Aboriginal communities are based on cooperation of the entire population working as a team to collect all the necessary resources for everyone.
This brings to mind the second striking difference between these two kinds of community. This difference is the dearth or complete lack of stratification in the aboriginal communities compared to the communities in the cities. Stratification in a community are its hierarchies or classes. The rat-race of modern living driven by time-is-money creates classes and caste, rich and poor and the phenomenon of poverty. How does time-is-money create all these conditions? I will base my reasoning of the answer to this question by first imagining simplistically how an aboriginal society works.
Aboriginal societies are based on cooperative living. All able members of the society work together to gather resources. Men and women have their distinctive chores and all of them work together. This kind of living for them is not a choice but an imperative. By working together and sharing their effort everybody benefits from efficient gathering of resources. Whether it is defending the community or collecting water, all chores are considered equally important for the community. In such societies its members have no need to stand out higher economically from others since they depend on each other to share resources. Even the leaders of these societies fulfill a role out of necessity instead of status and their lifestyle is the same as the other members of the society. Thus apart from age and gender there are generally no other significant stratification in aboriginal societies. Everybody is cared for by others, nobody is richer or poorer than anyone and poverty is a consequence of natural disasters, not the lack of personal wealth.
Modern cities however are a wealth of class and diversity. Glorious opulence and abject poverty can exist side-by-side in the same community. Poverty in cities have nothing to do with the lack of resources, instead it is the lack of wealth to purchase resources. By my observed evaluation class stratification in modern cities is caused by the distribution of money based on the worth of an individual's time. In most national economies every individual's time is valued differently without taking into account the value of the work that they do ( can any economist out there explain this phenomenon?). For instance nobody will deny the important work that janitors do. Their work is as crucial to the functioning of a city as that of the policemen, harbour masters or the mayor, yet janitors are among the least paid workers. In an aboriginal society the janitors work will be considered the same worth as everybody else's, but in most cities in the world they earn so little that they may not be able to afford the most basic standard of living. I believe such situations are the product of capitalism which is the contemporary driver of economy in most countries. In practice capitalism condones this disparity in wealth distribution, though in its ideal capitalism is often touted as the panacea for poverty and breaking class stratification.
Capitalism evaluates worth of time based mainly on intellectual, academic, social and even political acumen. While capitalism gives freedom for any member of a community to accumulate as much wealth (through commerce or business) as they can muster based on their effort and ingenuity, it does not condemn exploitation as a means of generating wealth. If exploitation is present, which it usually is in capitalism, the gap between have and have-nots will be wide enough for class consciousness to perisit. Thus the birth of a disharmonious city where money is controlled by the elite and powerful; and time along with effort is exploited from the lower and middle class of the city.
Poverty and class stratification of society has been the stuff of communities for ages. The effort to create an utopian and truly fair and equitable society is an age old striving. It has been and continues to be the cause for the rise as well as the fall of Empires, Kingdoms and Nations. Capitalism is simply the modern purveyor of greed, which used to infect the Kings and Dictators of the old ages. Yet the struggle continues for fairness and equitability. Whether this can be achieved through capitalism is still an experimental notion. If utopian communal living is to be accomplished through capitalism then someone has to find a way to exorcize greed from it. Otherwise if we wish to enjoy utopian life on Earth the answer may lie with the ways of the aboriginals instead of the academic and financial experts whom the world depend on for solutions, thus the choice of paradigms.
