Colin Turner
Originally started out life as a musician, then verrrry slowly discovered that maybe I wasn’t going to make a living doing that � a fact which, to this day, still sticks in my craw. (That’s an Irish way of saying hard to swallow!)
Born in Dublin, Ireland in the sixties, I spent my entire childhood immersed in music, playing, listening, composing. I thought I was pretty good at it too! After many attempts to break into a fickle music business in the eighties, I eventually settled for another reasonably convenient way to make money through music: recording, where I worked at as a professional music producer for many years.
Still scoring no major success in that area, I had to settle for other ways to make money � which, while successful, were perpetually dragging me further and further from what I wanted to do. Being quite the thinker and problem solver, it didn’t take much for my inquisitive mind to start seeing how absurd the whole business of ‘making a living� was. It comes down to this: whatever you’re interested in, if no-one wants that, then you starve � unless you submit to doing something you’re not interested in.
A few years ago, I dropped out of life for a while and began to explore. The banking crash of 2008 had brought to public awareness just how fragile and wobbly the financial system is �  a system upon which we placed so much trust. I think many people, like me, began to question things then: How can banks lose billions and then get bailed out? Why don’t banks just fail like any other business? Where did all the money go? What is money anyway?
Of course, it didn’t take long for all those questions to converge on the one spot: Money. Do we actually need it? All things considered, do the benefits of using money outweigh the shortcomings? On the face of it, you could be forgiven for thinking that the benefits do outweigh the shortcomings. Yes, we have lots of poverty, but we have great prosperity too � and much less abject poverty than before. But when you start to factor into that mental calculation the forgotten dreams of millions like me, the immeasurable financial stress visited on billions of struggling families, the crazed destruction of the environment for profit’s sake, the inefficiencies and waste caused by maintaining monopolistic empires, climate change, the dwindling of biodiversity, the drug industry incentivized to cure symptoms rather than find cures, the dead rivers, the destruction of forests, it starts to look like a very different equation. Also, technological advances that created prosperity somehow got mixed up with capitalism � to the point that we attribute progress to capitalism and not just getting smarter.
I, for one, refuse to tolerate a society that is blind to the ill-effects of the way it operates. I know now that human society really has just one implicit modus operandi: �do as we did before.� This is both good and bad. Good, in that it shows our strength as a social species in the deep desire to be accepted and copy one another, and bad in that we tend to continue the same mistakes uncorrected too. We copy each other even when it is no longer beneficial to us. So some of us have to start breaking that cycle and introducing new behaviour patterns.
I hope to be one of those. What seems impossible now � a world without any money or exchange � will seem absolutely normal once everyone else is doing it. It’s really that simple. Looking forward to interacting with you on this site.
