When the power of love becomes greater than the love of power, only then will humanity understand what peace really means.
Jimi Hendrix
It is best to take a moment and realise how much of your day, your week, your year, your life is spent earning the money you need to make a living. Most readers will spend a lot of their lives doing this. For our own sake, we should all understand what money is all about. However, most people are concerned about how to get money rather than how and if it works.
I could continue the list without finding anything - nature knows no money. She feeds everyone unconditionally, without payment. No creature, except us humans, uses money for exchange. So with money we are dealing with something that only has meaning between people, and only as long as they accept it in their dealings with each other. That is why I call money a social practice. And as such, it is a quantified and numerical way of dealing with each other - how crazy! It is not a thing, but a doing.
If one becomes deeply aware of this, it has far-reaching effects. The coins and banknotes we hold in our hands have no value of their own. We ourselves give them their value through their use. It is a circular process. And, since money is a social practice, anything can become money.
Some examples of types of money are:
Each of these types of money follows its own laws.
As you can see from the above list, many things can become money - from plant seeds to computer software. This is once again proof that money is a social practice and therefore as flexible as we are. We could shape it however we want.
Everything in this world is subject to coming into being, existing and passing away. Only with money do we desire the preservation of value, want to prevent the passing away, and give in to the illusion that this is so because the numbers on the coins and banknotes remain the same. Since our money ostensibly does not decay, we pay homage to greed, each and every one of us who uses it. But we cannot override natural laws, and so inflation eats away at our conservation of value.
What does the use of money do to us? It is like Bertolt Brecht writes in his poem "Alfabet": "Rich man and poor man stood there and looked at each other. And the poor man said pale: If I were not poor, you would not be rich." Money forces us all into mutual competition, the fight of everyone against everyone else. Those who do not want to compete are defeated. And whoever goes into competition has to fight - and only a few can win. It is a slow cut-throat competition.
Do you really want to live in a fight against your fellow human beings, or would you rather live in cooperation and love for each other? It is cooperation with fellow human beings that enables us to survive on the planet. Not the fight against them.
We could make money what we want it to be. Let's start with that and see if a turn towards better economics emerges.
What we should strive for would be:
And if it turns out that we cannot escape greed, unequal distribution and growth constraints with the use of differently constructed money, we abolish it altogether and introduce other distribution structures. Because if we carry on as before, rewarding the greediest and most ruthless with wealth, it can't end well.
I pray that as many people as possible read this homepage and get involved in and bring about changes in the social practice of money.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Author: © Manfred Rosental