Blog #13
(Part 5 of 5) Most people believe money is real: 72

Written by
Lory Kaufman

E) Most people believe money is real:

I personally believe that money is among the greatest of human inventions. As opposed to barter, it allows people to engage in complex trading, large or small, and include knowledge and service to be part of economies.

Of course, money isn’t absolutely necessary to run a sophisticated economy. Some great civilizations, like the Incas, didn’t have money, yet built great societies. Apparently the Incas had central storehouses in neighborhoods where all citizens could get what they needed. How they did their accounting of who got what and when they got it has been lost to history. They did have a knotted string system for keeping records, called quipu or khipu, but Europeans did what they did here what they did to the Library of Alexandria. That is, they destroyed all the records they could of the civilizations they conquered.

Continue Reading: 12min Read

Some science-fiction writers show in their stories how money won’t be used in the future, and maybe it won’t. But for now, and into the beginnings of the Steady-state future I hope we head, since almost the whole world is conditioned to use money, I believe re-envisioned money, as well as banks and the economic system as a whole, can have an important and positive transitional role toward SSE.

And money, like all inventions, can be used for the common good or it can be used for ill. Guns make hunting easier, so food more plentiful, or they can kill people. It’s the same with airplanes. You can move quickly about the world, or drop bombs on people you call your enemies.

In fact, the speedy development of both these inventions happened because of their utility as weapons. Computers can usher in a free exchange of ideas or an age when governments and big business spy on the citizens of their own and other nations.

Money is the same. It has the potential to distribute the wealth of the Earth in some kind of equitable fashion, whereas, throughout the centuries, it was put to work centralizing power into fewer and fewer hands. This was done by clever individuals developing what became international banking systems. And they’ve been very successful. So, while the most common phrase about money goes, “Money is the root of all evil,” I would suggest it actually should read, “The way money is being used is the root of most evil.” Not quite as snappy, but perhaps more accurate.

I guess what it all comes down to is the question, is money the world’s greatest agreement or a mass delusion?

Today’s reality is money is needed for almost everything, and it’s a good parent who teaches their child the value of money early. We make sure our offspring get part-time jobs and make them pay for things with the money they earned with their own hands.

However, the truth is… money doesn’t exist.

It’s a social contract, a belief system, that our loving parents initiate us into accepting without question. But the reality is most people, including our parents, don’t know it’s a social contract or that the social contract even exists.

“You say money isn’t real?
Try living without it,”

some are muttering or shouting at these words right now.

 

 

My answer is that what is real is the social contract, and it is only embodied in the coins, bank notes, the cheques that we write, and now the digital numbers we transfer when we use our credit and debit cards, and pay our debts online.
The first principle of developing any civilization is to get more and more people going in the same direction, getting them to pla y a part in some plan, either voluntarily or by coercion. For the majority of human existence, 200,000 to 10,000 years ago, that was accomplished by feeding people from childhood and allowing them to be part of a tribe or group.

It could be said that the social contract of, “you help hunt and gather, birth and look after the children, protect us from predators, etc,” is actually an evolutionary cooperation that, if it didn’t exist, neither would we. But as we humans began to outstrip our biology and formed larger groups, making members of a tribe do what a leader wanted became more difficult. There had to be something else, other than food, shelter and relative safety, to coerce people.

Organized religion? Bingo. And to speed up this very brief history, some thousands of years later money was added.

Did some evil genius sit down and think money up? No. It evolved over time and probably had a positive origin. But like any tool, it was then corrupted by clever people and used for their personal objectives.

Fast forward to today and without money you don’t get food, shelter, safety… or anything without it. So, as opposed to the 190,000 years we spent in our Paleolithic past, where our parents taught us to gather, hunt and be wary of lions, else we’d die, today everything around us teaches we must earn money or not have a good life. In short, we’re conditioned by this concept of money.

And as for that social contract, besides the fact that most people aren’t even aware that there is one, and possibly because they don’t know about it, the contract over the years has been rewritten by people behind the scenes. Tribal leaders, kings and then bureaucrats, bankers, industrialists and their lobbyists, rejigged the way money is created, how the majority of us get it, and the way it flows. And now that governments must borrow money from private sources, leaving the general population to service this ever-growing public debt with their diminishing incomes, it even makes it harder for governments to do what governments are idealistically supposed to do, or must do if human civilization is to last ten-thousand years or more. And that is, make sure its citizens are looked after.
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