What is 'Real Money?'
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My five year old son has got this way of coming out with unexpected, profound statements out of the blue. Today he stopped what he was doing to come up to me and say very seriously...
'You shouldn't let money consume you. It turns you into a monster.'
I said, 'What?! Where did you hear that?
He said, 'It just is. Don't let money consume you. It turns you into a monster.'
Then he turned around and carried on playing, like a regular five year old.
We were talking the other day, me and my friend, about cryptomoney.
My friend says, 'It's not real money anyway.'
And I said, 'Don't ever speak those words out loud. You'll bring the whole thing crashing down.'
But it got me thinking. What is real money anyway? Is there even such a thing, or is it one big confidence trick? So long as we all agree it has value, it has value. So long as we all buy into the idea that it's real, then it's real. Like the emperor's new clothes.
There was a time before money. In those days people traded actual stuff of value, or services, for actual stuff of value, or services. Sometimes it was gold or silver, or even aluminium, which at one time was as precious as gold. Other times it may have been stones or shells, or wool, or food.
When the first explorers arrived in Haiti, some centuries ago, the native people who lived there lived in a kind of paradise. They wore no clothes, because they had no need for them in that tropical climate and they ate the fruit and other wild food that grew abundantly there in the forest. They had no money and no weapons, because they had no need of those either. Most of the time they just hung out on their tropical island paradise.
Things changed when the explorers arrived from over the horizon in their sailing ships. They had clothes, weapons, money and all manner of other exotic things. It wasn't long before the people of the island were completely corrupted, abused and ultimately almost wiped out by foreign viruses the sailors carried, for which the natives had no natural immunity.
One of the most valued commodities at the time was the nails from the ships. The islanders had not discovered metal and so it gave them a great technological leap of progress in the sorts of tools, weapons and jewelry they could make. The result of this was that the sailors' ships all fell apart and could not be repaired so the explorers were left stranded on the paradise island, which was not such a paradise any more.
Most people don't know this about probably the greatest thinker of the last 500 years - Sir Isaac Newton...
He's most famous for his laws of motion, thermodynamics, optics and gravity - the laws which basically govern the whole Physical Universe (unless you are looking at it on a quantum level or travelling close to the speed of light). He figured all of those out while he was still a fairly young man.
He spent the later part of his life dedicating his studies to Alchemy - The transmutation of matter and spirit. The search for the Philosopher's Stone. Very deep, esoteric stuff which ultimately drove him quite insane. This may have been largely due to the quantities of mercury he was handling in his experiments into transmuting lead into gold and other such alchemy.
In between his discovering and describing the complete laws of physics (still the bedrock of all physics, even today) and going insane (read his later papers and you'll see what I mean) he served as one of the heads of the Bank of England. It was during this time that he played an important part in the creation of the very first paper money. Maybe he even invented it.
Before that, money was made of different types of metal in different shapes and sizes. Sovereigns, Shillings, Farthings, Crowns, Pieces of Eight... You could sink a ship loaded with coins and if you managed to salvage some of the treasure it would still be worth about the same, even a hundred years later. Not so with the new paper money. That would not survive the bottom of the sea, or a fire, or even mould. But somehow the idea caught on. Maybe that was the real alchemy.
Now, you could go to a jewelry shop, hand the jeweler a piece of paper money and he'd give you a gold ring. Anybody could now turn paper into gold.
If you're a Hare Krishna devotee, or if you've read any of their literature, you'll have heard all about 'The Material Mire.' As I understand it, the material world is really a kind of illusion - a sort of trap. The only way out of the trap is to transcend the material mire - to see and live beyond the illusion of it - and that way the soul may leave the endless Earthly cycle of birth, death and rebirth - and move on to more worthwhile pursuits of a transcended soul. Maybe it's true.
Lastly on this train of thought (I could probably go on, but it's getting long now and getting late and time is money, after all - or is it?)...
If you're wondering about the picture at the top of this story. It's a photo I took just now of two bits of paper and a die. One piece of paper is a One Dollar Bill. No doubt you recognise it. The other one is a Paper Teddy Bear my daughter made. She makes all sorts of paper people and leaves them all over the place. I can't bear to throw them away any more that I'd throw away the dollar bill.
Which is worth more? Who can say?
The value of the dollar bill depends largely on the roll of a dice. The paper bear keeps it's value - at least to me.
I'll leave you with a Woody Guthrie song, from the time of the Great Depression in America. Following a massive crash on the Wall Street stock exchange, inflation skyrocketed. It would have taken a suitcase full of dollars just to buy a loaf of bread. Drought and dust storms ravaged the farms of the midwest and many thousands of people left their homes and headed west in search of work, money and a better life. Better than starving on their farms - it wasn't really much of a choice. They became America's own 'economic migrants'.
The song is called Do Re Mi. The 'Do Re Mi', of course being the 'dough' - the Money.
Curiously enough, when the second world war came along there was suddenly plenty of money available to build factories to make the weapons needed to fight the war. I suppose they just decided to print a load more, and somehow it worked. People bought it.
(click on the picture to see the video and hear the song - Do Re Mi, by Woody Guthrie)
For more ecoTrain posts, check out:
I'm just a few-day-old minnow in these parts, and I am constantly reminded of why I came to steemit a few days ago. I'm not looking for an upvote here or anything at all in return from anyone - I just got what I came for in reading this.
There are things I still have from decades ago, a huge 'Welcome Home Daddy' banner my children made with crayons and printer paper they stapled together and hung across the living room, the first simple cards they made and mailed, handprints traced onto construction paper and cut out - a hole in the middle finger of each one (I have the left hands, my ex-wife has the right hands) so they can hang on the tree every Christmas...there are so many more. These things transcend money.
I really enjoyed reading this. Thanks.
That's a really beautiful and heartening comment. Thank you
Welcome to Steemt jon! Lovely comment!
Thanks!
Trust, faith, foolishness, hope in the future? I wonder. Enough of us have to believe in the same thing to make it work. I shared a podcast not too long ago. Not sure if you listened. The theme was exactly that. Trust is what gives the currency value. But some things, very important things, remain priceless like your daughter's paper doll. Your son is amazing and has some wise old soul speaking through him. We would do well to listen. All of us.
A wise old soul indeed. Yes, I listened to that podcast . Exactly the same point.. a common agreement to believe in the same shared illusion. Please post a link to it here if you've got one. Thanks.
I meant to include the link but forgot. Here it is.
https://edge5-audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast17crypto.mp3?listeningSessionID=595a26814be7bcfc_3497047_mptbGQXu__0000000b4Ut
Thanks. It's a good one
Money is a medium.
What do you mean, please?
It is a neutral means of exchange that one can use with any intention.
lovely post.. a great topic to look at.. It seems to be that we place value on things that are scarce and uncommon. The things with the greatest value, such as the sun and our world itself are more or less taken from granted and greatly undervalued.
What we value in life we tend to protect. Money is the be all and end all of life according to our capitalist / democratic societies . This has meant that money has been protected over and above things like the very survival of our world.
what to do!? What is real money? There is no such thing! ;-) Money by its very nature isnt real.. but hey .. it is convenient..
Sorry if this makes no sense.. im still a bit delirious after a bout of illness.
thanks @stillgideon
Glad you read it. Yes, your comment made a lot of sense. I like what you said about the earth and sun. Money is indeed convenient, unless you don’t have any. Then it's inconvenient.
Such a great post @stillgideon. I really get the point you make and your disposition on the subject of 'real money'. Enjoyed your post buddy! Resteemed.
Thanks @mrfunkymonk . I'm glad you read it and it meant something to you. Sometimes I like to explore ideas through writing and am never quite sure if it makes sense, so the positive feedback is appreciated.
you are right, money only has value if we decide to give it value. Economics as a "science" treats money as a natural phenomenon which it is not, although it is certainly related to the flow of energy. We have all kind of blockages in the flow of energy because a lot of the trust we should be putting in humanity has gotten tangled up in money. I never argue that we should try to get rid of money, only that we find ways to begin extracting the trust from money and putting it back into community and other human beings. But I think we'll find as our trust in money is transformed into trust in humans, we'll see less and less money as we will have less and less need for it.
You should read "Debt: The first 500 years" by David Graeber, it really puts money into perspective and dispels a lot of myths that we learn from our parents and in school.