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Let’s talk about money
Money is a subject of interest to us all. But it can be difficult to discuss. It’s one’s of those semi taboo topics that is rarely raised “in polite company”, expect perhaps in the context of price inflation.
On some level, we must know that money really doesn’t really exist. It’s a symbolic medium of exchange, a representation of value, more in the form of figures on a banking app these days, than physical notes and coins.
Money is effective as a global symbol, provided that everybody agrees that it has a value and agrees to use it for exchange. In his wonderful book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari makes the point that money is a universal belief system.
We know our world is full of people with different political, religious, and cultural beliefs. Often these beliefs are in contradiction or conflict with each other. But virtually every single person and every culture in our world believes in the money system. And governments pull out all the stops to keep the system going when faced with a crisis such as the one in 2008.
Money is undoubtedly useful, and I‘m not sure how we would manage our sophisticated society and economies without it. However, the danger comes when we start to deify it.
If at its core, money is a belief system, then there is surely a risk of money being worshipped as if it were a god. If…
