Money is purely symbolic stuff. It consists of paper, round metal discs and digital numbers in a database which can be passed back and forth between people and organizations. It does not have any intrinsic value and, in fact, derives it’s value completely from implicit social agreements between parties exchanging it.
Value is the stuff of human experience. Value can be said to have been exchanged anytime one party helps another party satisfy a subjective need state. The more urgent and important the need being satisfied, the more value has been exchanged.
The idea of using money as a symbol for the exchange of value between humans was a very creative and liberating invention! It allowed humans to satisfy needs in previously unimaginable ways. Eventually, it allowed value to flow around the globe instantly, and for heartfelt alliances to form among people who wouldn’t normally have one kind word to say.
But–hypothetically speaking–what would happen if the sacred, ancient connection between money (the symbol) and value (the experience) were to get damaged or severed? What if money were to become seen not a symbol of something (ie ‘value’) — but as the thing itself?
That would be a real mess, now wouldn’t it?
On one hand, we’d probably have untold billions of folks around the world chasing money for it’s own sake, without concern for the amount of human value that they were generating in so doing. Imagine that! A whole generation of highly clever ’symbol-lovers’ figuring out ingenious ways to amass larger and larger numbers of these symbolic pieces of paper without regard for the social, environmental or planetary impact of their actions.
On the other hand, if this happened, there would probably also be a pretty big backlash! We’d probably also see a growing class of angry and ambivalent ’symbol-haters’ unfairly judging this little human symbol for robbing the world of all true intrinsic value (while also secretly wishing they had more of it, of course). If things got bad enough, we might even find these angry symbol-haters protesting in the streets major cities around the world–acting as if people with money were the source of all human evil. (Burning their bras and playing bongo drum too, perhaps. Who knows? It could happen.)
What a dramatic saga! The shallow evil symbol-lovers vs. the irate symbol-haters. (Sounds a bit like all religious wars in human history, doesn’t it?)
Anyway, if that war were to happen, hypothetically speaking, where would you stand? Would you stand with the unsatisfied symbol-lovers or the unsatisfied symbol-haters?
Seems to me that –should such an absurd situation unfold– the smartest move would actually be to avoid joining either party. Instead, I’d probably to try to heal the split where it originally began: the msiguided mental separation between money (symbol) and value (experience).
Call me crazy, but I still believe that money (the symbol) when connected to the exchange of genuine value can still a very powerful force for good. But to make this happen we first, perhaps, will each have to forgive the symbol (money) for what we did to it in the name of our much-too-clever human stupidity.
