money

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.”. . Cree Prophecy

Money is promises. Notes are paper promises. What we are owed for what we have done or who we are. The world owes us. So money is status and power. A measure of entitlement and worth.

where did money come from?
The more complex the chatter and murmur of a monkey species the larger the tribe that can coexist together. Gibbons have the largest tribes reaching hundreds or even thousands. Their communities resound with the loud hum of continuous communication maintaining networks of family and tribal obligations.

The human chatter crystallized into drawings, writing and money. Our transactions and the value we placed on them were recorded with shells, clay tablets and knotted ropes so they were not dispersed in the wind.

We used to know where we stood in relation to each other and our community by the subtle and complex feelings we had about each other and our community. Feelings of entitlement, gratitude, affection, anxiety, hope (the list is endless) recorded our transactions, our status and how we were obligated to each other. Remembered by each member of our community in their emotional accounts. Now these records are externalised as money which has taken on a life of its own outside of us.

Human society has moved beyond tribe and village where everyone knows everyone. Money frees us from having to remember our transactions and remember where we stand in relation to each other. What we do for each other and the objects we exchange are now recorded by our possession of money. Money allows jobs and roles to become infinitely specialised. Huge complex and wonderful cooperative activities are now possible.

loss of awareness
But money displaces emotional awareness as a measure of relationships, community status and the value of objects and activities. It sidelines the inbuilt capacity to evaluate and remember relationships.. Money lacks the subtlety and flexibility of memory, voice and emotion. Is it up to the task? Where will it take us?

What was done for love is now done for for money. Feelings about money displace feelings about each other. Our awareness of ourselves diminishes as our community which gives us a sense of who we are is being replaced by money.

For instance, full time monetarised child care estranges children from their extended families. Socialisation is less intimate with less opportunity to experience being loved and to develop empathy and understand who we are.

monetarization
We increasingly measure the value of objects and activities in money instead of well-being. So our values are less and less grounded in ourselves or the real world.

Globalised monetarised societies (both capitalist and socialist) search for more and more resources and human activities to turn into capital that can be exchanged for money. Common land, forests, wildlife, water and pollution are increasingly added to the list of global assets. They become part of individual and national wealth and can be traded. Growth industries count and defend these newly minted rights. More and more and more money (continuous economic growth) is needed to pay interest bills.

Things we used to do for each other are now branded, packaged and sold for profit. Instead of sharing an idea we are increasingly likely to copy write or make a religion of it and sell it. Wage slavery driven by mortgage repayments and other living costs displace allegiances to family and tribe.

These services may initially be attractive or even exciting and may even revolutionize our lives. However their quality is never quite as good and it often gradually degrades further as the money becomes more important than the service. If they deteriorate or collapse we may no longer have the skills or opportunity to go back to doing them ourselves.

There are generations of us who have not had the experience of being parented, growing food or cooking and are uncertain how to relate to neighbours. Will we be able to look after ourselves when the power goes off after our skills and knowledge have been surrendered to specialists?

a monetocracy
The power to make decisions has passed out of the hands of families and tribes to a monetary system. A monetocracy. Money prioritizes social and industrial activities, determines what is built and what we do.

Money enabled us to create civilisations. Now it is essential for our survival and it can move against us when failure pays better` than success. Money turbocharges war, poverty and disease when they become profitable.

Charities with polished media profiles mine the public purse while the problems they are solving get worse and worse. Health Services profit from the diseases caused by food, chemical, military and drug industries. Cancer fund-raising and research industries ignore effective but unprofitable diet and life style changes that have been known for decades to reduce or prevent cancers. International aid agencies feed the starving but also erode subsistence culture and family.

Multinational corporations run prisons and detention centers for profit to house criminals and refugees produced by poverty and trauma. Security companies protect property as the gap between the rich and poor widens.

Most jobs for environmental scientists are as regulators or advocates for polluters to rubber stamp pollution.

These activities add to Gross Domestic Product but don't benefit most citizens. Nor most of the other activities that deal with the damage caused by affluence. Nor do the unused luxury cars, houses and yachts. Nor do other components of GDP like war, espionage, subversion, bombing third world countries, the war on drugs or the diplomatic trappings of power.

Money is corrupting. It can dissolve commonsense and the evidence of our senses and corrode or over-ride law and custom. Lobbyists extract massive benefits for their clients from governments for comparatively small political donations. Light bends around large sums of money.

If you believe in the commons or private property then money is theft. A way to alienate individual access to clean air, water, health life and liberty. Money can buy the right to poison and pollute and get paid for it. Community interests are usually ignored if survival of a business is at stake or there are prospects of lots of money. CEOs have destroyed enterprises for short term personal gain. Monetized nations subvert and destroy tribal political systems to gain control and extract resources – by force if necessary.

In a monetocracy government looks almost solely for financial solutions to problems as most of their power and decision making is financial. But money is often the problem and spending it often makes things worse. While we focus on money, the wider picture including simple solutions to problems become invisible.

consumerism
Like religion, shopping supplies meaning, satisfaction and personal encounters to maintain a sense of self - a personal reality. The awareness therapy pages show ways to uncover what is really important and satisfying.

Too much prosperity increases misery more than poverty. Enough money to get by seems to work best. Just enough - not too much and not too little.

trust
Money is worthless without public confidence. So far most of us are utterly emotionally entangled in its web of buying power and indebtedness and strive to collect it beyond our immediate needs and even beyond what we would ever need. But that can change in an eye blink when the stories are no longer believable and trust vanishes.

It has been estimated that the 2008 financial crisis was precipitated by an investigation that temporarily interrupted drug money laundering (one of the main-stays of international big finance) in a major bank which in turn disrupted interbank daily settlements and exposed a precarious and infinitely complex card castle of debts backed by misrepresented derivatives. Banks were reluctant to lend to each other overnight or settle what they owed in case they were not going to get paid themselves at settlement.

There is no way of knowing exactly what is going on or how much is fraud. All sorts of real estate, hedges, insurance contracts now appear precariously on balance sheets as money. Commodities have become money and money has become a commodity. This is complicated by unofficial or semi-official activities like black markets, money market manipulation and theft by governments, corporations and individuals.

whats next?
Each currency is a collection of laws and customs. At first glance it seems to be a stable part of the scenery. But it changes. Not only its value but also its nature changes as governments and regulators vary the rules that channel its generation, storage and distribution.

Each change redistributes wealth and power. Because the richest can manipulate the game, inevitably the rich get richer and the poor are impoverished to the point of social and financial collapse. Then the industrial machine runs short of consumers and the starving have nothing left to lose. Violence, police and armies replace money if alternative ways to interact and share resources don't emerge.

Money is a card-castle of lies. Tribal economies will have a head start when it collapses. Cooperation will rest on emotions, understanding and connecting. Friendship and kinship will count. Awareness and compassion.

copyright (C) John Brasted 2008
updated 18. Dec. 2011

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