Money

Money is whatever you want it to be. Facebook currency, the money in your bank, it can be anywhere and everywhere. Currency and modern capitalist economics is the current foundation of our structural political societies. Now in this piece I will not go in the aspects of money which other better economists and writers can delve in, nor the subjects I have touched upon in other writings. I want to write about a disturbing trend I have seen in the modern society and especially during this global recession. I feel as if the need for capital and the desire to “accumulate” wealth is an as high as it ever was. I see more and more people pursue jobs/careers for money. What is important is having objects, flashy cloths, and to be so called “alpha”. It is important to understand that in an era where consumerism is highly praised and associate happiness with the symbol of wealth which is money. Yet if you study money itself you see that at any point in history it could be worthless and can change. So why do we place such value on something that easily be blow away like a piece of dust?

Still our culture does this, it pushes this and it drives this to the ultimate extreme. I describe the modern economy as a matrix, we seem to want to believe we live in an alternate reality where when the dream bubble pops we will not crash and burn like no other. If people can easily discard communism and many of its other forms as trash and state elitism or anarchy as a childhood idealist dream that is not truly possible. Yet humanity can openly accept the concept of the “growth economy” with limited resources, the financial “tools” which we invented, and other various risk factors which shape our world. People accept the crappy boom and bust model which is totally insane. How can it be that the society we strive for is a society with so much waste and excess. It is yet another theory which believes that we can forever expand and consume all in our path. Marx, Keyes, Hayek, and whoever helped developed our modern economic society did not consider the fact that our human population would grow in desire to such extremes. Those theories should be inspirations for future theory, but not the bases of what we should be constructing now. In the present we need to look outside the box a little bit and envision a future and build one that will help to support our species both rich and poor as a whole. Yes this sounds a bit socialist but different in the sense that where socialism is about creating equal opportunity and taking wealth to create a more fair society. No the basis of this new society should be common survival of our entire species. Let’s not kid ourselves the ideal world may not happen the future could be a place where the privileged live comfortably like they always have historically and the rest of us are left to scrap by and make due with the resources that are left to us. We should be careful not to make our nightmares our own realities.

A good book on the history of money I recommend: Ascent Of Money
If you don’t like to read the documentary can be found here (could be broken by the time you read this).