There is no such thing as "the market." Everything is A market.

When you say something has "a market price," what you're saying is that "it has been priced by a market."

A market is a set of people, and it is the collection of who they are: they subjectivity, how they see.

This world is in the thrall of a "hegemonic culture": if you grab a random set of people and consider that your market that's going to price something, odds are the resulting "market" is going to use the hegemonic (i.e. utterly dominant, common) values to price it.

Literally, the problem here is in us, the people who are trying to create something new: *our* mental weakness is interfering with our ability to create new things because we cannot see how our minds betray us when they look at how "markets" price the things we create.

When anything new is created, we cannot do what the people who live comfortably among a hegemonic system do. We cannot just allow a random bag of people to start buying and selling our stuff and consider that what it is *worth*.

The expected result of creating something that radically violates the hegemonic value system is that the hegemonic system is going to try to devalue and erase it.

That is a general principle and it applies to everything.

Example: gender variance. When you violate the hegemonic "cishet" system by being trans, nonbinary, gay, etc. you are "valued at zero", or even as a liability to be actively eliminated.

But the error, the illusion, the lack of self-preservation or the inability to defend your own interests, is being carried out by the person that controls the artifact that is being put out to be valued.

By assuming there's such a thing as "the market," or "the society," or whatever, you are refusing to see that a random set of humans is culturally located in spacetime ("What Time Is It?", etc.) and that it is not a neutral God entity that "knows the value of all things."

This is why a dominant culture will try to erase the self-awareness of a culture that it is trying to dominate and destroy, to enslave its members. Because when you do that, the targets lose the awareness that they are their own market, their own appraisers with their own values

We often discuss this process by which cultures are destroyed, but we never discuss the process by which cultures are created.

A culture is created by the creation and the sharing of a self-story, by the creation of a valuation system for a market.

We think of this process as "natural," -- cultures "happen" -- but we must learn to create culture, to intentionally create our value systems.

It worked for me personally. When I stopped valuing myself by what cishet people think, I could finally find my own value, and then I was free from feeling automatically bad and worthless, as a trans person.

But this thread is about economics and finance. If we want to truly create a new economic and monetary system, that has radically different properties than the current one, namely that it is entirely decentralized and deeply democratic, based on Universal Basic Income, ...

... then we must learn, mentally, to see our own market, and to *mentally ignore the value system of other markets*. Or, better put, not confuse the value that other cultures give to our creations with the value that our creations have to *us*.

That is the side-effect, the dark side of empathy and of feeling universally connected: we trust God, but forget to tie our camels.

That alligator WILL devour you if you are hypnotized by the fact that "all creatures are brothers and sisters."

We *wish* for people to adopt this cool new value system that changed us and that made us feel better. Upon wishing that, and upon jumping on the need for universal communion, we refuse to see that others are not yet where we are, but we start pretending we are.

We have, for irrelevant reasons, this childish need to fit in, and we also have this need for the world to not be in this utterly "polarized" (warring) state, with culture clashes. We want to wish divisions away. We want to take our minds out of ourselves and gift them to all.

But this is not how it works. And forgetting that when we create a new culture we are now different and distant from others -- that hurts, because the whole point of creating new cultures is trying to create value systems that bring people close together.

To defy a miserable culture with the creation of a less miserable one is not seen as a gift to the people who are identified with the more miserable culture. It is seen as an attack. This is unfortunate, but it is part of the essential difficulty of making culture less bad.

This is not about creating a "defensive" mindset. You're not supposed to get identified with the less bad culture that you're creating. That's not the point.

The point is to see it as a *different, new artifice*. If you don't see it as *another artifice* that is different from the *old artifice that you're trying to replace and improve upon*, you will make the mistake of asking the people in the old about the value of the new.

So when we create our new "moneys", which is the entire point of this thread, and put them in "open markets," it is obvious that the "open markets" will value our UBI moneys poorly. That is expected.

We can try to sort of bribe the people in the old story by creating "reserves" or "business cases" to "back" our UBI moneys. Those may improve the communication and reduce the gap, but they do not address the fundamental problem, which is that the old culture is not democratic.

This took me a LONG time to see, because seeing this is inherently hard, at least for me.

The value of UBI money is the value we give to it. The value of any money is such.

Previously, I said Basic Income was a school of economics. I was wrong.

Basic Income is a culture. It is a literal new nation.

The school of Basic Income teaches a cultural practice. It teaches a value system that you can adopt if you like it.