will

or honey (that “bees of minds secrete and feed upon”): the topmost fraction of civilization’s fuel — the only one still available; understood as the latest, and final, universal equivalent: “the last money,” not merely immaterial but unquantifiable by design. Condensed from one’s precious air, the fundamental “I will” is worth something in a translucent world of immunized-out coercion and impractically difficult deceit; it is, in a sense, the only true equivalent: money is useless if B won’t sell whatever A wants to buy — but when A’s capital is B’s honest “I will” there’s some guarantee. “Unsuppressably natural,” willflow economy requires no legislated trustholders, works just as well without anyone even realizing — but resists speculation when conscious; abstract but not formalizable, immune to the semantic erosion of a technical term, will betrays a characteristic aversion to ratings: diversity defies ordering, the world “is no longer prone to statistics,” understanding starts where numerifying ends.  ■    Willing has aspects of reciprocity (I do this, among other reasons, to affect your willingness to do that) and third-party accountability (an ownable is won by outwilling others as demonstrated by knowledge, resources, supporters); it is weakly transitive (may be redirected but with a loss) and can be negative (“will cancels out unwill”). A project’s will capital is its capacity to excite, its uncompromisedness, its potential and realized gains in beauty and understanding, its backers' enthusiasm — and their summary net worth; like a quantum parameter that doesn’t exist until measured, the fuzzy, inhomogeneous stock of goodwill someone “has” is not appraisable except by trying to spend it. As with money, investing in a well-chosen enterprise yields a return: out of its founder’s lone will, a project may grow into a massive public stock that radiates to other causes, gets spent and accrued in campaigning, arbitration, wizarding — or evaporates if unused.  ■    There’s no unit of will but various methodologies chart will clusterings in society; the results are debatable (“barely correlate with one another”) but a composite of independent estimates is useful with a fractured willstock. A quick will gauge for a project is its attractiveness for those naturally mobile — road youth, Minds; the latter are called “living money” for their liquidity: freer of communicative inhibitions, unconstrained by materiality, Minds with their halos of docile feeleries have more concurrent interests and switch easier than humans. ■    Throughout modernity, economies were being eroded on several fronts: first direct credit, then layers upon layers of credit ratings displaced cash — with rating agencies multiplying, diversifying, distributing (another anti-unification trend that came as a surprise at the time); past “pecunia non olet,” it was getting more important to whom you’re paying than for what (explosively so during sparsening). Most directly, self-sufficiency technologies — computers, compilers — pushed goods and services off the traditional markets; you could no longer buy unattractive work, last bidders had quit: only those already invested into a project were willing to do menial work for it. ■    Will markets are stabilized by the opposing forces: there’s both inflation (oversupply of will, literally “as rich as we are generous” — once you realize how lifeblood-y your appreciation and token help can be, you give it without second thought) and deflation (a natural reaction of seeking quality over quantity, squirming at the equanimous agreeability to whatever — or simple greediness: “the more you give the less you have left” still applies). Diversity motivates evangelism — a primary resource of will; most popularity-stoking techniques died with spam (what remains is strictly person-to-person, wrapped in layers of strangening) but there’s no principal limit to how much will you may raise by being passionate about a cause — or destroy by passionately opposing it. Inequality creates vertical structuring: the will-rich at the top attract “whatever I can” volunteers who, in turn, may grow big enough to hire volunteers of their own.  ■    Inner self-will is as central to an individual mind as will commerce to society; however wide your stream cone of engageable others, your self-will is your ultimate capacity to act — your ammunition for the perennial battle of be vs. seem. Health means constantly replenishing one’s willstock; what lifemaking is all about is provably, if rarely explicitly, stoking the fire — safeguarding against existential will depletion. Even with unlimited deep sleep refills, though, the war on emptiness can’t be won forever: enough to know that someone will be there after you leave.

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