Hope—The Economy of Humanity:
Throughout human evolution, people have always exerted their work energy toward whatever goal they perceived to most greatly benefit their evolutionary interests. “The perception of the greatest benefit to one’s interests” can be paraphrased with one word: Hope.
In the modern world, money is the medium through which people convert their work energy into resources they need to serve their evolutionary interests. People always exert their work energy in the direction of their perception of the greatest benefit to their interests, so it is clear to see that the value of money depends on hope.
An example of the loss of hope devaluing money can be seen in the economic situation of Germany in the aftermath of World War I. Due to the war debts the Allied Powers were forcing the Germans to pay, the Germans could perceive that in spite of all their hard work their material resources and the products of the expenditure of their work energy was continually siphoned out of their economy. They lost hope of their work advancing their evolutionary interests, and with it they lost hope that their currency could adequately convert their work energy into resources they needed for their evolutionary survival.
Darwin’s theory of the value of progressive money shows the opposite of this situation. When people donate their work energy (whether in the form of literal money or not) to the benefit of their communities, they build hope in their communities by helping to provide for the needs of others.
The world economy is a function of the interaction between human evolution and the environment. Throughout human evolution, humans have served their evolutionary interests by making use of material resources to help them convert energy among various forms. Prior to the 1800s, the world’s resources were effectively infinite compared to the number of people living in the world at the time and the technological level they’d reached. As a result, the economic system of the world was based on the reasonably valid tradition of perceiving the world’s resources as an infinite supply of materials that could be used to convert work energy among forms as efficiently as possible.
Today it is clear to see that this founding premise of the world economy is false. As the finite amounts of the world’s resources become apparent to the people of the world, and as those people begin to perceive that their own economic system is the greatest threat to their survival, they will lose hope, and their existing economic systems will be replaced by new economic systems.
Carried to its furthest logical conclusion, on its present course the world economy can only lead humanity into World War III, and some might say it is doing that already. If the world’s resources are depleted to the point that they will no longer sustain the survival of all the people of the world, the people will have no other choice than to fight against each other over what resources remain. This will continue at least until the population of the world is reduced to the point that the world’s resources are once again sufficient to maintain the survival of the remaining humans.
This very catastrophe occurred on Easter Island when its population devastated its environment. At the height of its civilization, the population of Easter Island numbered roughly 10,000 people. Once they ate all the animals living on the island, cut down all the trees on the island, lost topsoil from erosion due to the loss of the trees, were no longer able to build canoes to fish off the island due to the loss of the trees, and were unable to escape the island in canoes due to the loss of the trees, they began fighting amongst themselves over what material resources remained. They resorted to widespread cannibalism, and the population of the island plummeted to 2,000. Due to the destruction of their material resource base, they had no way to rebuild their former civilization.
Clearly, progressive money is the only type of money that has real long-term value. Unfortunately, the economic systems of the world today don’t measure the true value of progressive money, which makes regressive money more valuable as a means to advance one’s own survival and reproduction in competition with other people who use their money regressively.
If a functional worldwide economic community is going to be built, it is going to be built through the use of evolutionary and environmental science to discover a sustainable interaction between human evolution and the environment, and the people of the world must be taught what they need to know to perceive environmental sustainability to offer the greatest benefits of any course of action.









