My American father has lived in the Netherlands for 50 years. After the first election in which Trump won, he and his wife went through the naturalisation process and became Dutch citizens. Yet conversations at their house are still about politics, especially US politics. Fear dominates, and conversations consist of statements and predictions: ‘Who will win?’, ‘They won't be that crazy, will they?’... And especially now that Trump has won: ‘We are going down.’

At 38, I started seriously examining for myself where I stand in the world and what this means for my political choices. In the process, I discovered two things. One: ‘I am not crazy, the world is just upside down!’ And two: the global political game is all about power and ownership.

In this context, I did not feel at home in right-wing liberalism, but neither in left-wing moralism. I am in favour of a free market, but against shareholder capitalism. And I am in favour of fair wealth distribution, but not if it is determined from above.

Between these extremes, you see an ongoing interaction, in which people and nature are being squeezed out. Just open any newspaper: healthcare, the housing shortage, trees that have to make way for solar panels - everything is increasingly caught up in the madness of the state/market combination. Actually, it has long since ceased to be about healthcare, housing shortage or nature, but about the powers behind the property behind it.

Imagine if property (money, businesses, land, real estate) were truly ‘its own’, free from the grip of those in power... Then a basis for a truly fruitful new society could emerge.

‘Of itself’ means: removed from market speculation and state interference. This goes beyond the polarisation of left and right. It works as a reversal of all: from the ground up, we look for new forms of living together and allocating money, land, property and businesses. The nice thing is: money then only flows to people, who themselves add value to society.

I still don't feel at home on the left or the right, but I have now spent 10 years looking for how this ‘being of oneself’ can work. What does such a society look like? Freedom is expressed through development (rather than materialism and ownership). Living together becomes a process of shared enquiry (rather than imposed norms and values). ‘Equality’ emerges from an open, shared allocation of property (instead of imposed rules from the supposedly free market), with the health of the Earth as a self-evident condition. We call this: Free, Equal, Living Together.

‘Isn't this just the Rhineland model?’ people sometimes ask. Although Rhineland thinking takes the welfare of the whole as its starting point, I see elaborations of it that lead to a fragmentation of power and ownership for each stakeholder. What I think is missing is the fundamental reversal that we are part of a whole. And within that whole, every person should be able to have a dignified existence. That requires a neutralisation of power and ownership relations. As I see it, the Free, Equal, Society is a further perfection in itself, of what was once pursued with Rhineland thinking.

The result of the presidential election took my breath away for a moment... Until I thought of all those entrepreneurs, initiators and seekers who are trying to make their ideas, land or businesses really ‘their own’... As I quietly blew out my breath again, I thought back to the beginning of November, when we were working with a group of them to set up a capital body. With this, free from power structures and free from private ownership, we want to practice how money can flow in such a way that it benefits society as a whole. This does not require politics, just the willingness, openness and willpower of people to want to look for their own place in the world and really meet the other in it. 

Admittedly; taking ownership of that reality is super exciting and comes with waves of fear, doubt and issues of self-worth. But now we've outsourced our self-worth, fear and doubt to politics and the market... You could almost say: ‘nice and easy, to keep getting worked up about it’ when in fact you already know for sure that they're definitely not going to solve it for you there! 

I see it this way:

• Society is too important to be left to politics.
• Society is also too important to be left to the current free market. 

And you, as a co-creator of this society, can start exploring for yourself how you want to live together.

There is hope.

Jennifer Benson