You’ll have noticed, I’m sure, that one of the benefits/curses of telling stories and creating art is that you spend A LOT of time thinking. And so I’ll sometimes invite you to join my process and get a glimpse at the inner workings. Fiction is not born in a void. The best fiction needs to be informed, and different subjects at different times will utterly absorb any rigorous creative. It is from these brief, intense obsessions that new tales might spring, and if not, at least we have gained a modicum more knowledge to remind us how little we truly know of anything.
So, to that end - did you ever wonder what money is? I mean, what it ACTUALLY is?
I never did, not really, which is probably part of the reason I've never been terribly money-oriented; not, in my heart, a natural Capitalist. Family, of course, made it vastly more important, but before that it would slip through my fingers like so many grains of sand. And yet, the longer I have lived and taken in the the ever grim cycle of world news, regarded the preposterous and still rampantly growing divide between the mega rich and the poor, observed those that evidently care about the well-being of our shared world and they that patently do not, and witnessed all that springs from the demands of globally powerful corporations - how they absorb and smother whatever tries to grow in their shadow - it seems increasingly like something I really HAVE to understand. It seems existential, a necessary part of grasping what it is to be alive, and human, on this planet at this time. And yet for many of us, our nature is to just go blindly along with the status quo. It’s much too hard to think about, so let’s just focus on low-level survival. Keep it easy. Keep it simple. I realized I was much like that, and as so often is the case, that realization drove me to remedy the fact.
But there's a lot to know! And it's really NOT cut, dried, and laid out in a neat row.
For instance, I had no idea that there are, anthropologically speaking, many human transactions that happen without a like-for-like trade, and sometimes with no trade at all. You'll pass a hammer to somebody banging a nail in the wall to hang a picture or a photograph. You'll help somebody weaker than you carry their big bag across a road, or up some stairs. You might have once, when we still used cash, furnished a beggars paper cup with a paper dollar or pound coin. Not all of these are moral trade-offs. They aren't done to get soul points in the game of life. Often they are altruistic in the truest Darwinian sense - we're helping our fellow human animals survive. We're innately compassionate (at least, some of us are) and these moments are born of that. Or else they are purely practical acts that make logical sense - as in helping with the bags.
I also didn't know that at the heart of western economic theory (and it IS considered a science, with ‘irrefutable’ laws) there lies a pseudo-anthropological genesis story that is only logical in the most basic sense. The story goes like this: One man in a village needs a new shoe. He happens to grow potatoes. Another man has a spare shoe but needs potatoes. Because of this 'double accident of need' they are able to trade. In fact all western monetary theory hinges on this - and wildly, it's in error. Because it turns out that no 'actual' anthropological evidence exists to suggest we naturally create like-for-like trading relationships within villages, towns or tribes - early societies if you like. The examples of barter-based periods (the post-empire Dark Ages) or nations are entirely erroneous.
Many of the once-called 'primitive' societies studied in the 1950’s in Africa, for example, had nothing like the kind of monetary system attributed to like-for-like bartering. Value would be seen in a type of hand-made cloth, or a rare wood, and would be used more as a symbol gift between tribes to facilitate marriages, or put right a wrong - such as an accidental killing. Some tribes had life-debts, with women as a kind of empowered currency. Indeed bondmaids have always been a form of currency - even (shockingly) in recent times, where the very wealthiest businessmen have be offered women for the night. Women are still traded by parents with debts in some cultures, and we see this even on mainstream TV, almost never stopping to think about what is at the heart of such a transaction: Children as currency. Even in so-called progressive Western society, weddings and unions are sometimes still founded on this kind of trading principle.
But what does a coin actually represent?
It turns out that it is a special kind of IOU that can be passed on in faith. And, shockingly, in order to work it needs debt.
A new currency can be created like this:
A king needs an army. To support his army he needs to be able to feed it. To feed it he needs people who farm to provide his army food. He mints coins for his army, then demands tax from the farmers. To get the money to pay the king the farmers sell their stock to the army, who pay for it with the coins given them by the king.
This is, of course, simplistic, but the Bank of England was formed almost exactly so (from wikipedia): "England's crushing defeat by France, the dominant naval power, in naval engagements culminating in the 1690 Battle of Beachy Head, became the catalyst for England's rebuilding itself as a global power. England had no choice but to build a powerful navy. No public funds were available, and the credit of William III's government was so low in London that it was impossible for it to borrow the £1,200,000 (at 8 per cent) that the government wanted.
In order to induce subscription to the loan, the subscribers were to be incorporated by the name of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. The Bank was given exclusive possession of the government's balances, and was the only limited-liability corporation allowed to issue bank notes.[14] The lenders would give the government cash (bullion) and issue notes against the government bonds, which can be lent again. The £1.2m was raised in 12 days; half of this was used to rebuild the navy."
So… what is money?
Throughout all history the two most reviled figures have been most reviled have been the bankers and the debtors. To be a debtor is almost equivalent to sin. Society loathes debt, and pities those who find themselves in debt. Many people revile those that fall into debt through their perceived stupidity, or through gambling, or by living beyond their means. The debtors prison was a hellhole - unless you were rich! We hate the money-lenders - the banks - because we are tied to them from birth to the grave, and their whims can make or ruin us, help us achieve our dreams, or cast us out onto the streets. In France, incredibly, the concept of making interest as a money-lender was once a criminal offense! In biblical stories, Shakespeare, fact and fiction, the money lender is the embodiment of evil. But the debtor is fallen also.
One concept suggests that we are born into debt - a debt to our parents for giving us life. A debt that can only be paid through our children.
And debt has been given spiritual gravitas - we owe our lives to the gods, to be paid with living sacrifices. (Debts, incidentally, that can never be paid because the gods already have everything.)
Only our eventual death somehow clears the debt of life.
But that still doesn’t answer the question regarding what money actually is.
We live in an age where the richest 85 people in the world have as much of this 'money' thing as the poorest 3.6 billion - that’s 85 individual people having as much money as half of the population of the entire world! But if money really IS just an IOU, what does that actually mean? Are they hoarding IOUs, Smaug-like and jealous? And if so, then to what end? How can the economy work if those IOUs aren't actually in circulation? In this instance they have created a kind of meta-layer over humanity, where they are beyond debt, and thereby not subject to the same laws as anybody else. But the knock-on to the rest of us is immense, because the truth may be (hold on to your hats) that their actual understanding of what money is might in fact be flawed, and based - as we saw earlier - on that discredited, pseudo-anthropological notion of a barter system that never in historical reality existed!
The more you look, the more you read, the more you see that things we take for granted are built on a kind of mythology. Different currencies operated across empires, and certain of them remained a spoken currency long after that civilization had ended - in which case it became a symbolic currency only. A donkey is worth 125 denarii, for example, but the term is reduced to an idea of measurement, rather than the 'actual' Roman coin the concept is based up. There is not a tribal culture surviving in its natural state that operates under anything remotely like our global economy, or the fictional barter-based system that supposedly spawned it. Mesopotamian money was not used in the ways we might expect - certainly nothing like we see it today. Often money was the domain of the temple, from which the palace stole the concept - the ruler becoming like a living god who (like the gods) also had everything, and could grant (and often did) freedom of all debts to his or her people. We were, after all, indebted to them from birth too!
And then there are the numerous accounts that exist of lives being saved, and the saved man demanding to be given a gift. The person who saved him might exclaim "but you should give ME a gift! I saved YOU!" These stories confused many a Victorian evangelist or adventurer, but to be saved is a life debt, and unless you are freed of that debt you are a slave to the man who saved you. It was considered honourable, therefore, to give the saved man a gift, rather than demand payment. This was to free him, and is NOT in any way what might be considered traditional barter!
There are isolated societies that exist by having a central store which belongs to everybody. In such tight societies it would be frowned upon to want more than anybody else, and you would be punished if you were caught steeling. Incredibly elaborate systems evolve, but they are built mostly on fair-mindedness and, crucially, need. So currencies tend to evolve around sex, death - and, of course, debt.
I've been trying to understand what I can. I know currency is mostly symbolic, though we elevate it to near god-like status. It rules our global culture, and is one of the languages that cuts across borders. But the closer you look at it, the more fragile and flawed it seems. And I still, I think, have no idea what money really is, not really - other than having a hunch that we have built for ourselves an elaborate trap, a perpetual cycle that keeps us in eternal bondage...
Yo Liam, you want to watch a series on Amazon called 'The Beast that is the Global Economy ' it's totally insane and interesting, the Harold and Kumar actor is the Narrator. It's fascinating. You'll love it. Funny and terrifying, what could be better, right?
A good summary, Doc. The late David Graeber and Thomas Piketty have works that I have found useful. In fact there is an adaptation by r Claire Alet and Benjamin Adam of Piketty's Capital and Ideology as a graphic "novel".