16. What If Money Was No Object?

Chapter Sixteen of How to Dismantle an Empire, Section Four

From my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I read Chapter 16 “What If Money Was No Object?” I compare the eco-nomos to the eco-logos, show a puzzled space alien who doesn't grok money, compare to neo-feudalism, and ask about money's cosmovision.

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Money is a dream. It is a piece of paper on which is imprinted in invisible ink
the dream of all the things it will buy, all the trinkets and all the power over others.

—DAVID T. BAZELON

The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth
if you lost all your money.

—SOURCE UNKNOWN

Having money isn’t everything. Not having it is.

—KANYE WEST

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What If Money Was No Object?

Is money a noun or a verb? An objective reality or a collective delusion? Does it represent an action or a tangible thing? Is it security or just a reprieve from insecurity, as Kanye West implies? Perhaps money can’t be described without its absence, like the dirt that’s removed to dig a hole. Or maybe it’s the sum of all the actions that came about to bring the money into a person’s hands, and all the actions it performs after it leaves them. Money could be a trajectory or a slippery slope.

Perhaps, as an older generation used to say about beauty, money is as money does. Maybe, like a virus, it’s one name for many things with a myriad of symptoms and cures. Or it could be like software, where it seems like anything is possible but all choices lead to the same function designed into the operating system.

Is it pre-existing, independent of its interpretation, or man-made and changeable? Natural and right as rain, or unnatural and wrong as geoengineering? Who is the author of the idea of money and what gives it authority? Is the distribution of goods that it ordains divine or humanly contrived? What is the cosmology of money?

In Debt: the First 5000 Years, David Graeber writes,

All that I have said so far merely serves to underline a reality that has come up constantly over the course of this book: that money has no essence. It’s not “really” anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political contention.

Global money directs the actions of nearly all the people on the planet. Money, as American Express advertises, is welcome everywhere you want to be. But it also dominates life in the places you’d rather die than have been born. It’s the basis for deciding who gets the goods and who gets the shaft. Money makes the world go ‘round, goes the song, a notion to which nature surely takes exception. So let’s look at money purely as a concept and try to make sense of this cryptic, enigmatic symbol that rules over land, air, and sea.

in the beginning was the word and the word was made money

In Another World Is Possible, If..., British economist Susan George looks at the origins of the words economy and ecology:

The ‘eco’ in economy and ecology refers to the same Greek root, oikos, the household, estate or domain. The eco-nomos is the rule, or the set of rules, for managing the domain. The eco-logos is the underlying principle, the spirit, the reason for it all—in the sense that Saint John affirms at the outset of his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos,” usually translated as the “Word.”

... Given the Greek root, you would think that the Logos would be seen as the greater of the two and supersede the Nomos. Normally the spirit and underlying principle should override and define the rules and regulations, so that the eco-logos would be the guiding force behind the economy. Not so with the globalised capitalist economy which dictates the rules to society.

In the world that money hath wrought, there is no underlying principle or purpose to the oikos or global household. The meaning of life has become no more than the lead-up to a joke or as a way to ridicule someone as asking questions to which there can be no answer. Money, as Susan George sees it, is a means to an end. But what is the end to our means, the logos behind our eco-nomos?

in money we trust

The word credit, like credibility, derives from credere, which means trust. Cash is the opposite of credit and requires no faith in the recipient of the goods. In Graeber’s primordial gift-circle, every exchange was built on a relationship, whether it was one of future reciprocity, gratitude, or need. But cash has made exchanges anonymous so that it doesn’t matter who the person is or what their circumstances are. Money supplanted the need to know with whom one is dealing.

The dollar bill reads “In God We Trust,” and wits have appended, “all others pay cash.” As evident in this quip, people—unlike God—are inherently untrustworthy. The dollar might as well read, “In God We Trust. In People We Don’t.” The God in mention is conveniently absent, so the trust can never be tested. If God walked into the grocery store, perhaps flanked by some thuggish archangels, God could take whatever he wanted. But no one else deserves credere.

Like cash, the modern form of credit is an anonymous transaction between strangers, who receive an all-important credit rating based on their willingness to take on and pay down debt with interest. The character of the person and what they stand for or their reputation in the community is for naught. If they're always in debt they rank higher than someone who's only spent what they first earned. There's no social credit rating in which friends vouch for another person’s honor. The credere has been extracted from the credit.

Is Graeber right that money has no essence and therefore doesn’t exist? The existence of God is a topic debated with heat and passion. But, with no more evidence to prove it, the existence of money is accepted as a given. Let’s turn off the soundtrack and watch the action, to see what the word symbolizes based on the function it serves.

the puzzled space alien

Money is represented by pieces of paper, metal disks, or electronic pulses to a screen; it gives a person the ability to go into a store and take anything they want without giving anything back. The taker of the goods has provided a sign that they are deserving of the product and no further questions are asked. But, looking at it from the perspective of a space alien who isn’t privy to our language or conventions, it would seem puzzling. Those who get the best sit in chairs making nothing, while those who make and grow things often have hardly anything.

It’s also clear to the space alien that the ability to take is not based on need—quite the contrary. Those who have the fewest needs receive so many things they throw the biggest part away (the box) as soon as they get it, and the rest is trashed not long after. It’s also not based on reciprocity. The more goods that a person makes for others, the less they get in return. Entire continents of hungry, hardworking people send their food away to places where obesity is rampant.

Those who get the most congregate in steel and glass temples, to meditate in solitude before individual rectangles of glowing light. They seem unaware of the people outside the temple, across the oceans, whose gifts sustain them. Not only is there no reciprocity, there’s also a gaping vacuum of gratitude. It makes no sense to the befuddled alien, who doesn’t grok the existence of money.

the castle and the moat

In the feudal society of the Middle Ages, a freeman, coerced by force or ill fortune, became a serf in a ceremony of bondage where he placed his head in the hands of the lord and swore an oath of fealty to:

... love all which he loves and shun all which he shuns, according to the laws of God and the order of the world. Nor will I ever with will or action, through word or deed, do anything which is unpleasing to him, on condition that he will hold to me as I shall deserve it, and that he will perform everything as it was in our agreement when I submitted myself to him and chose his will.

In return he received protection from marauders and a strip of land to farm for his family’s subsistence. Yet he owed the lord labor in the manor’s fields, the best portion of the serf’s own wheat in taxes, and service as a foot soldier in times of war. The serf’s children and their progeny were tied to the land as well in perpetuity—before a daughter could marry outside the manor the price of her lost labor had to be paid.

The only escape from the inherited oath of bondage was to live in another manor’s town or borough and evade capture for a year and a day. From the Domesday Book of 1086, 65% of England was comprised of serfs with another 9% as slaves. Even the 12% who were freemen rented their land as tenant farmers who owed no service but still paid the tribute. Together this added up to 86% of English people with no land ownership and 74% who had no ownership of themselves, their families, their labor, or even their thoughts.

The castle walls enclosed the town for protection against attack but also to repel defectors from another fiefdom looking to hide out for over a year. The most privileged form of serf was a villein, who had a full-share of land. Half-villeins held half the land in exchange for a full share of labor while bordars and cottagers had been deprived of any land by the Enclosures Acts that began in 1604.

For the rare woman who risked it, the price of escape was likely to include selling her body. But even prostitution and the threat of prison or death by starvation seemed to be, for some, worth slipping past the moat and into the castle walls where another life was possible.

the moat of the rio grande

In today’s world, the immigration policies of consumer countries might be seen as the castle walls, keeping the producers on the other side where money is tight and labor is cheap. There’s an inverse relationship between the freedom of money and goods to jump borders and the freedom of people to follow. If people could accompany the money and goods to the countries where they migrate, it would defeat the purpose. There would be actual free trade rather than trade con- trolled by the corporations, who are the lords of the global manor.

Likewise, if money actually equaled an IOU for future trade, over time there would be the same amount of goods going into a country as coming out. There would be no reason for men to leave their homes and for families to swim the moat of the Rio Grande and trek through Texas or the Arizona desert just to look for work. It would seem that no work exists in Latin America. But, of course, it's the money, food and goods that's been siphoned off to the US and not the work.

Is the same dynamic of land loss and perpetual serfdom going on today? It’s taken for granted that people can’t be allowed to travel freely and live where they want, but why? There’s nothing inherently more desirable about a northern climate, when millions fly in the opposite direction to take vacations. The advantage of developed countries, which leads to the desperate risks taken by immigrants, is that money is easier to access.

The same amount of work done by the same person is paid at a different rate on one side of the border or another. And if the person was born on the side where money flows freely, the rate is higher still but so is the cost of living. Why should this be? A person’s life consists of the sum of their hours. Therefore, to value a person’s time based on their country of origin is an arbitrary class system, like lords, knights, freemen, villeins, bordars, and cottagers. It’s a form of neo-feudalism.

In order for feudalism to function, laborers need to be tied to the land, whether through medieval tradition or immigration policies. Instead of taking fealty oaths and paying tribute, the modern serf is subjected to currency manipulation, debt, land monopoly, and free trade agreements. Many make the perilous journey to break away from bondage and get into the castle walls. But in the new form, they never lose the status of villeins or criminals, after a year or several decades. They have no rights and can be expelled at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.

Illegal immigration could be solved in a day by imposing a $10,000 fine on employers for every worker found to lack documentation. In California agribusiness alone, that would result in $4-6 billion in fines, after which the country would lose one-third of their vegetables and nearly half of all fruits and nuts. Those working in homes taking care of children and the elderly would be out of jobs and those who depend on them out of luck. While the Federal government requires a city's teachers, nurses, librarians, and officers of the peace to turn in undocumented children and wives, or risk loss of funding, most illegal immigrants are hiding in plain sunlight laboring in the fields.

Evidently the goal isn't to send the workers back but to keep them as slaves who feel lucky to be here.

money's cosmovision

Cosmovision is a term used by indigenous Latin Americans to convey a culture’s worldview, their portal on reality. The ancient Greeks called this metanoia, which gets translated in the Bible as repentance but really means a whole new way of seeing—not just what one thinks one knows, but the underlying basis of how one knows.

Adam Smith, considered the father of modern economics, wrote:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

The -noia underlying the meta of money is the belief that we all operate according to a self-interest that’s more concerned with advantage than the well-being of others. Without the invention of money, Smith implies, the butcher, brewer, and baker would produce only for their own needs and for those who could be trusted to reciprocate.

Among other things, there’s a masculine slant to Adam Smith’s view: women have been butchering, brewing, baking, cooking, cleaning, and caring for millennia, without the incentive of money. And from Graeber’s research into ancient or indigenous populations, self-interest doesn’t seem to be at the root of human nature. Which is a fortunate thing because otherwise the human species may not be around to talk about it. Smith's analysis may have fallen on deaf and dead ears.

the gravity of monopoly money

Money, perhaps, creates the world in its own image—a hierarchy of privilege in which people can’t be trusted to take care of others without being bribed and forced. Money expects that everyone will take as much as they can get and give as little as they can get away with. In the Darwinian logic of the survival of the richest, money attracts more money, and the bigger the amount of money, the stronger its gravitational field. Once advantage has been concentrated, it’s hard for any to break free from its magnetic force.

The logos, then, behind our economos—the purpose behind the set of rules that govern money—is to create inequality of trade and opportunity based on hierarchy. We’ve been told that inequality always has been and always will be with us; money simply provided a measurement of it. But in fact, money is a system that’s been designed to produce just this outcome.

Money, however, is a means, not an end, and the nomos can be designed to fit any logos we choose. Money generated by commonwealths could fill in the moat between producers and consumers, allowing free movement of people but preventing the mass exodus of currency and goods, and particularly of weapons. The shift may result in a whole new cosmovision showing that people inherently give the best of themselves and human nature is kind. We may find that only money has been stopping them.

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Using examples from the book, or from your own research, logic, and experience, comment on the following and what it means today:

Paradigm Shift #16

Physics has found that the smallest unit is a particle when the viewer expects it to be and a wave when that's what the viewer expects.

Sometimes it's matter and sometimes it's energy. Money is also like that, an action or a thing, depending on what the viewer expects.

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CHAPTER 16 EXERCISES

LEXICON

Explain how the following definitions change the dialogue around social problems. Is this concept used in discussion of the examples to which it applies? If not, how does this affect the potential solutions?

eco-nomos: the rule, or set of rules, for managing a domain.

eco-logos: the underlying principle, the spirit, the reason for it all.

credere: trust.

feudalism: an arbitrary system of land ownership based on inheritance and enforced by violence.

villein: a serf who owes fealty to the lord in labor and loyalty in exchange for a share of land.

cosmovision: the underlying worldview through which individual events are perceived and interpreted.

metanoia: how one knows what one knows; the overarching assumptions that curve the lens through which one sees.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

What is the meaning of life? Does life have an inherent meaning to be discovered or does every person create their own meaning? Is the underlying purpose something that should be discussed as a matter of life and death—since the success of all outcomes depends on their alignment with reality—or a frivilous pursuit of freshman philosophy classes? Why is "the meaning of life" a metaphor for pointlessness while "a matter of life and death" means all-important?

In three sentences, describe your own cosmovision or metanoia, which you might start with "I hold these truths to be self-evident..." If you were to design a monetary system to be consistent with your cosmovision, what are the features it would have? Would it be local or global, small or large? What assumptions would it make about human nature? What would be its purpose?

Imagine an immigration system for weapons. Consider the possibility that every human life was given an equal value of two million dollars. A person who uses a gun to take a life would pay with prison time, but the person who sold the weapon would owe the victim's family a half-million, along with the county or province where the weapon was sold. The company that manufactured the weapon would owe a half-million, along with the county or province where the weapon was made.

Then let's debunk the empire-speak that men living with their families are "combatants using human shields" and acknowledge that all people are civilians within their own countries and all people bringing assault weapons into a foreign country are combatants. An international court could assess the fines and enact trade embargoes (by partner countries) on all countries that didn't enforce the fines. Could it change the impunity for weapons dealers and manufacturers? How would you change war, terrorism, and gun violence?

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For more on the -logos underlying the -nomos, here is Meaning Is All There Is:

A viewer warned his loved ones that he was putting my 'crazy' in his echo chamber. To live up to the warning, I bring on the crazy by talking about ultimate reality with Sufi sayings, Jewish legends, free-will astrologer Rob Brezsny and Terence McKenna. I tell the story of a mole turned hawk, and Russell Brand kissing Yuval Noah Harari's forehead. I cite Kurt Vonnegut's 'karass' in the disorganized religion of Bokonon and quote Caitlin Johnstone on being ineffable. I end with a simpler explanation of Charles Eisenstein's Parallel Timelines and my craziest theory to date, involving the word 'tantric'.

and for the underlying principles, here’s Socio-Spirituality & Small-Scale Sovereignty:

I define socio-spirituality as looking with open-eyes at the reality in the world and questioning with an open mind the reality of the world. I distinguish its purpose, not as giving comfort, but giving the power to change the world. Its one dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else, followed by four beliefs and one suspicion. How these relate to small scale sovereignty is the topic of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire.