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My five year old son has got this way of coming out with unexpected, profound statements out of the blue. Today he stopped what he was doing to come up to me and say very seriously...
'You shouldn't let money consume you. It turns you into a monster.'
I said, 'What?! Where did you hear that?
He said, 'It just is. Don't let money consume you. It turns you into a monster.'
Then he turned around and carried on playing, like a regular five year old.
We were talking the other day, me and my friend, about cryptomoney.
My friend says, 'It's not real money anyway.'
And I said, 'Don't ever speak those words out loud. You'll bring the whole thing crashing down.'
But it got me thinking. What is real money anyway? Is there even such a thing, or is it one big confidence trick? So long as we all agree it has value, it has value. So long as we all buy into the idea that it's real, then it's real. Like the emperor's new clothes.
There was a time before money. In those days people traded actual stuff of value, or services, for actual stuff of value, or services. Sometimes it was gold or silver, or even aluminium, which at one time was as precious as gold. Other times it may have been stones or shells, or wool, or food.
When the first explorers arrived in Haiti, some centuries ago, the native people who lived there lived in a kind of paradise. They wore no clothes, because they had no need for them in that tropical climate and they ate the fruit and other wild food that grew abundantly there in the forest. They had no money and no weapons, because they had no need of those either. Most of the time they just hung out on their tropical island paradise.
Things changed when the explorers arrived from over the horizon in their sailing ships. They had clothes, weapons, money and all manner of other exotic things. It wasn't long before the people of the island were completely corrupted, abused and ultimately almost wiped out by foreign viruses the sailors carried, for which the natives had no natural immunity.
One of the most valued commodities at the time was the nails from the ships. The islanders had not discovered metal and so it gave them a great technological leap of progress in the sorts of tools, weapons and jewelry they could make. The result of this was that the sailors' ships all fell apart and could not be repaired so the explorers were left stranded on the paradise island, which was not such a paradise any more.
Most people don't know this about probably the greatest thinker of the last 500 years - Sir Isaac Newton...
He's most famous for his laws of motion, thermodynamics, optics and gravity - the laws which basically govern the whole Physical Universe (unless you are looking at it on a quantum level or travelling close to the speed of light). He figured all of those out while he was still a fairly young man.
He spent the later part of his life dedicating his studies to Alchemy - The transmutation of matter and spirit. The search for the Philosopher's Stone. Very deep, esoteric stuff which ultimately drove him quite insane. This may have been largely due to the quantities of mercury he was handling in his experiments into transmuting lead into gold and other such alchemy.
In between his discovering and describing the complete laws of physics (still the bedrock of all physics, even today) and going insane (read his later papers and you'll see what I mean) he served as one of the heads of the Bank of England. It was during this time that he played an important part in the creation of the very first paper money. Maybe he even invented it.
Before that, money was made of different types of metal in different shapes and sizes. Sovereigns, Shillings, Farthings, Crowns, Pieces of Eight... You could sink a ship loaded with coins and if you managed to salvage some of the treasure it would still be worth about the same, even a hundred years later. Not so with the new paper money. That would not survive the bottom of the sea, or a fire, or even mould. But somehow the idea caught on. Maybe that was the real alchemy.
Now, you could go to a jewelry shop, hand the jeweler a piece of paper money and he'd give you a gold ring. Anybody could now turn paper into gold.
If you're a Hare Krishna devotee, or if you've read any of their literature, you'll have heard all about 'The Material Mire.' As I understand it, the material world is really a kind of illusion - a sort of trap. The only way out of the trap is to transcend the material mire - to see and live beyond the illusion of it - and that way the soul may leave the endless Earthly cycle of birth, death and rebirth - and move on to more worthwhile pursuits of a transcended soul. Maybe it's true.
Lastly on this train of thought (I could probably go on, but it's getting long now and getting late and time is money, after all - or is it?)...
If you're wondering about the picture at the top of this story. It's a photo I took just now of two bits of paper and a die. One piece of paper is a One Dollar Bill. No doubt you recognise it. The other one is a Paper Teddy Bear my daughter made. She makes all sorts of paper people and leaves them all over the place. I can't bear to throw them away any more that I'd throw away the dollar bill.
Which is worth more? Who can say?
The value of the dollar bill depends largely on the roll of a dice. The paper bear keeps it's value - at least to me.
I'll leave you with a Woody Guthrie song, from the time of the Great Depression in America. Following a massive crash on the Wall Street stock exchange, inflation skyrocketed. It would have taken a suitcase full of dollars just to buy a loaf of bread. Drought and dust storms ravaged the farms of the midwest and many thousands of people left their homes and headed west in search of work, money and a better life. Better than starving on their farms - it wasn't really much of a choice. They became America's own 'economic migrants'.
The song is called Do Re Mi. The 'Do Re Mi', of course being the 'dough' - the Money.
Curiously enough, when the second world war came along there was suddenly plenty of money available to build factories to make the weapons needed to fight the war. I suppose they just decided to print a load more, and somehow it worked. People bought it.
(click on the picture to see the video and hear the song - Do Re Mi, by Woody Guthrie)
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