What if we could align our use of money closer to the rest of our values? Part 1

The arbitrary nature by which we apply fiscal value forces us to be at odds with all that we value

I have a dream, but it’s much better if it is our dream. It’s an impossibility to realize for one lonely, little person, but there’s a world full of amazing people, including you. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream and it’s real! We are still in the process of realizing it, but why not celebrate that legacy and keep running with it — evolving it to carry the challenges of our current time.

And so this is where it starts — the challenge to make a dream tangible. But we need something actionable, something to build on.

The dream relies heavily on the concept of value or the regard to how we apply worth, importance or usefulness to things. So the natural questions to ask are:

• Are values in the dream different that values we hold now?
• What might be the cause of that difference?
• What affect could be applied to align the values of now with then?

In short, my starting hypothesis is that the prevalent status of money, combined with its use by arbitrary value application through a binary framework, has created a systematic disharmony with the physical world forcing a majority of humanity into a perpetual mental state of survival that deters the global society’s ability to evolve to sustainable self-actualization.

Over time I will examine this statement through a more formal lens, but while I am still working out just how to engage with it, I will do so casually.

Recap

I began sharing this exploration in a previous post with a simple thought experiment that illustrated how the word “value” could be mentally connected with the concept of money. I then generalized this connection between the two words making “value” and “money” synonymous.

Example:

• How much money would you give for a candy bar?
• How much value would you give for a candy bar?

then asked The Real Question:

• How much much money would you give for a person you love and care about?

We may be tempted to point out that we value people and things on a different system. But is that really be true?

I ended the experiment with a parting question by asking which of the candy bar questions would be easier or more convenient to answer.

• How much money would you give for a candy bar ? — $$
• How much value would you give for a candy bar? — ?!?

It’s all about money, or is it?

Take a step back and re-examine what money is. Accomplished easiest by how it’s used: as a medium for exchange.

Before money, we had to use the barter system which was about directly exchanging items for one another. For smaller transactions, it worked well especially if the items for exchange were desired by each party. Things would become difficult quickly as the quantity of types of things increased and varying desirability was added to the equation. Fortunes could be made or completely lost if you brought the wrong color widgets to market.

One day, we all found that pretty, shiny objects were to our liking and we began to agree that our items could be exchanged for a set number of those shiny objects. And we also found that exchanging for other things we wanted was so much easier because we just had to decide if we wanted to give up that many shiny objects.

Time passed, and shiny objects were still awesome for exchange, but they were cumbersome and heavy and sometimes bigger, meaner and faster people could catch up to us and take them away. So we thought, what if we wrote that this paper stuff was worth this much shiny stuff and we kept that shiny stuff in a very safe place. And so we could exchange with the much lighter and easier-to-hide paper stuff and even could go back to exchange it for shiny stuff.

Then one day, we decided we were too lazy to go exchange paper stuff for the shiny stuff and anyways, there wasn’t exactly enough shiny stuff to exchange for the amount of paper stuff that we needed. We had some problems on an off with this for a while, but exchanging the paper stuff was so much easier that it became just a part of the daily routine.

Finally more time passed and we found that the paper stuff could be exchanged and displayed on these nifty little devices with glass screens. A number would increase if we got paid or decrease if we bought something. And then we lived happily ever after.

Or not.

And through this whole process, we have established a concept of applying value to nothing while still believing that it has value. This is the other side of money called a social construct. Money works as a medium of exchange because, as a social collective, we trust that it will do whatever its supposed to do.

And our trust is well placed because as a construct it works really well:

• From a holistic/integrated systems perspective, it is successfully being used for exchange throughout the whole world and despite the clash of cultural and societal differences, has tied all of us in this world together.
• Especially enviable from a theological perspective, its prevalence is, more or less, globally accepted and trusted.
• And a construct of such strength, that it‘s enabled 10% of the worlds adults to control 85% of the worlds wealth and we only grumble a little and may be living in the most peaceable era of human history.

This is a good thing if we want the world to stay the way it is. And it’s also a good thing if we want to change the world. Because the very nature of money being a social construct means that we all have a role and the power to adjust the values applied to money.

I should make it clear at this point that money is a critical part of our society and will continue to play a critical role in the stability and longevity of our future. I will not be tearing it down and replacing it with something better. In fact, there is nothing to change about the tool that money is. The only thing to change is how we view, value and use it.

The global prevalence of money as a social construct or for that matter as a conceptual tool highlights it as a crowning human achievement. A lot of use may not have the best relationship with in at the moment, but the truth is that’s all on us.

What makes money so pure and strong then?

Money is a high-level abstraction that facilitates interpersonal connection and its simplicity empowers any person with the ability to use it. How it used is a completely different matter. Let me clarify:

As long as the activity money is used for is exchange and, in its current format, is trusted by the engaged users, then the form, social value/purpose, or applied worth are inconsequential. The core principles of money remain decoupled making money an immutable construct.

If money is a generalization of applied value then to compare, gender is a generalization of a person based on perceived biological anatomy and has been used to apply social values to that individual. The purpose of gender has been blurred throughout human history as the perceptions of sex and sexual identity shifted through the spectrum from species survival by propagation to pleasure and identity expression. However, the purpose of money remains aligned to the abstract side of exchange rather than shifting from side-effects generated through intentions like wealth accumulation. In contrast, the gender construct is strongly linked to both societal roles and perception of biological anatomy. When those roles or perceptions change it forces gender to mutate, or as currently, is entering a diminishing phase.

Why the difference? The decoupled principles of money increases its flexibility and therefore increases integrity creating resistance to social value changes. While currencies and therefore applied values have risen and fallen, the core behavior remains untouched. Furthermore, the simple knowledge required for the usage of money allows societal propagation despite any attached values instilling a democratic nature that results in dispersion. A state backing a currency could fall, but a group of individuals could still decide to trust and use that currency for exchange.

If nothing is wrong with money, then what is wrong?

The problem is with how we use money to apply value to all things and in a completely arbitrary fashion.

Well of course, if you connect anything to a high-level abstraction no matter how you boil it down, it can only be done so arbitrarily. But the nature of our value application is so imprecise that it is unrealistic on a level of world destruction.

This is where it gets tricky and messy but let me see if I can illustrate this. Let bring out our old friends the candy bar questions :

• How much money would you give for a candy bar?
• How much value would you give for a candy bar?

And give them some answers:

• How much worth would you give for a candy bar? — $1
• How much value would you give for a candy bar? — Um…

Okay fine, let’s get lateral and rephrase the second question. What value does a candy bar have to you?

• Hmm, still difficult but I know candy bars are tasty and that I like them. In fact, when I eat one it makes me happy. How about 50 cents? You want a dollar? But all I have is 50 cents! (Friend steps in,” I have 50 cents you can have.”) Do I really want to take money from my friend? Will they make me pay them back? Oh well, a little happiness is worth the price of a candy bar, right?

That may have seemed silly, so I’d love to see your take. What it really illustrates though is how hard valuation, or applying value, without money is. So we can relax and move on, right?

No, I apologize because I have tricked you.

The truth is that if we want to live in a more-just and more-fair world, then we need to learn to value things more justly and more fairly.

So let’s look at the candy bar and look at it’s life-cycle backwards from now:

• it was put on the shelf by someone
• someone may be nearby to handle the transaction of the candy bar purchase
• it was brought to this general location from where it was made, so reflect on possible transportation routes and how many hands it passed through
• some form of packaging was designed by somebody and then some other people produced this packaging by converting raw materials
• this candy bar was probably created by a machine that uses energy and requires people to maintain
• this candy bar is made from raw resources that all had their own life-cycle to trace back

Your gut may be protesting that you aren’t responsible for that all of those things or there’s efficiency in quantity, etc, etc, etc, but put those thoughts on hold.

Instead, as you applied value to that candy bar, try applying value to each of those steps.

Realize that you are applying value not only to resources, production and transportation, but to other people and what they do.

Does $1 feel like a fair and just value for that candy bar after that consideration? Throwing all responsibility aside, if you could muster up enough gratitude for that whole system and pay your dollar, would the exchange of values feel equivalent? We can re-insert all of our arguments at this point now — like how we don’t have responsibility for each of those points of the candy life-cycle or candy bars are made in such a quantity that the whole system is efficient.

But now we are back to the point where I hope you can see how the whole situation is completely arbitrary

And just to follow through, apply this to anything the monetary ecosystem has touched. Food, housing, energy, employment, resources, entertainment, art, etc. etc. etc. And imagine everyone in the world doing this.

At the beginning of the exercise I said:

But the nature of our value application is so imprecise that it is unrealistic on a level of world destruction.

Are you able to see where my view of how we apply value really isn’t just hyperbole?

Let me bring this all back together and conclude part one of this exploration:

• Money is a high-level abstraction that is powerful and useful
• And that we do indeed arbitrarily apply value through money and this could have consequences

We apply value arbitrarily not just for mere convenience, rather we really lack the awareness and concepts to make more accurate valuation feasible.

In part 2, I’ll start diving into the effects caused by arbitrary valuation and how it applies to the current state of society.

It may be apparent at this point that I have barely touched my hypothesis. But I’m working my way there, so thank you for your patience!