The End of Money and the Future of Civilization Part II

I just started reading The End of Money and the Future of Civilization on my brand new kindle. In the first chapter, the author quotes Elizabet Sahtouris' butterfly metaphor. (I think there's a way to share passages I highlight on the kindle, but I don't know how to do it yet, so here is something more or less the same, from another source...)

"My favorite metaphor for the current world transition, first pointed out to me by Norie Huddle (Butterfly, 1990), is that of a butterfly in metamorphosis. It goes like this: A caterpillar crunches its way through its ecosystem, cutting a swath of destruction by eating as much as hundreds of times its weight in a day, until it is too bloated to continue and hangs itself up, its skin then hardening into a chrysalis. Inside this chrysalis, deep in the caterpillar’s body, tiny things biologists call ‘imaginal disks’ begin to form. Not recognizing the newcomers, the caterpillar’s immune system snuffs them as they arise. But they keep coming faster and faster, then linking up with each other. Eventually the caterpillar’s immune system fails from the stress and the disks become imaginal cells that build the butterfly by feeding on the soupy meltdown of the caterpillar’s body. It took a long time for biologists to understand the reason for the immune system attack on the incipient butterfly cells, but eventually they discovered that the butterfly has its own unique genome, carried by the caterpillar, inherited from long ago in evolution, yet not part of it as such (Margulis & Sagan, Acquiring Genomes 2002).

If we see ourselves as imaginal discs working to build the butterfly of a better world, we will understand that we are launching a new ‘genome’ of values and practices to replace that of the current unsustainable system. We will also see how important it is to link with each other in the effort, to recognize how many different kinds of imaginal cells it will take to build a butterfly with all its capabilities and colors.

As I understand it (after having read only a few pages...) the author finds a structural linkage between the current monetary system and the caterpillar's goals (consume!, grow!, more!, faster!) and the proposed alternatives (e.g. LETS) as an integral part of the metamorphosis to a new emerging paradigm.

A couple of other thoughts:

1. The caterpillar is not "bad". In fact it provides the "nutrient soup" for the emergent butterfly.
   
2. It doesn't go quietly. It's immune system tries to fight off the invader until it is overwhelmed. Competition, struggle and death are involved--and part of the natural order.