nourishing obscurity

I don’t understand money. Who invented it and why?

Trying to find the answer to that question is a lot more difficult than you might think.

When I was studying Economics (a long time ago) I was baffled by it and kept getting E and F for the papers I submitted until I started to write the opposite of common sense and then it was A+ all the way allowing me to sail through with flying colours which only goes to prove that you can become fully qualified in a subject without ever understanding it.

Remember that whenever you meet an “expert” in any subject, not just economics.

Many of the so-called “classical” economic and political writings, such as Hobbes’ Leviathan or Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, are so full of outmoded concepts and convoluted arguments that the modern-day student finds them almost unintelligible.
Politics and economics are only dismal when presented in a way meant to obfuscate ideas and confuse readers.

Every economics text book I have looked at has been unable to offer a satisfactory explanation for the origin of money and the idea of exchange. No doubt because to tell the truth about it would be too subversive.

Money is not a Christian idea. It is pre-Christian, originating in Mesopotamia, invented by Babylonian Priest-Bankers as a means to allow them to control the populace

These Priest-Bankers were people who were incapable of creating wealth and/or were too idle to do so, preferring to devise a way that would enable them to live off the productive labour of others.

Money is a device to accommodate, to exploit and to perpetuate the worst aspects of human nature thus ensuring that we remain Yahoos, enslaved by greed and fear.

And so we are driven by that greed and fear of scarcity to fight each other instead of Them, the inheritors of the Babylonian desire for power.

I have never understood this fear driven greed and why it drives people crazy.

Alan Watts- from here and here-

We imagine that money is wealth. Here we have fantastic wealth and we have the capability of allowing everyone on earth to be a beneficiary of that wealth but we can’t do it because people say “Where’s the money going to come from?” Because they think money makes prosperity – it’s the other way round. It is physical prosperity which has money as a way of measuring it. But people think money has to come from somewhere like hydro-electric power or lumber or iron and it doesn’t.

Money is something we invent; like inches.

“Do you remember the Great Depression? When we had a slump? And what did we have a slump of? Money. There was no less wealth, no less energy, no less raw materials than before.

But on the morning after the Depression a man came to work building a house, and the foreman said to him “Sorry chum you can’t work today,.there ain’t no inches.” He said “What do you mean there ain’t no inches?” The foreman said, “Yeah, we got inches of lumber, we got inches of metal, we even got tape measures.” There are no inches. We have been using too many of them and not enough to go around.”

Because what happened in the Great Depression was a slump in money. Human beings are so unbelievably stupid, that they confuse money with wealth. They don’t realize that money is a measure of wealth, in exactly the same way that feet and inches are a measure of length. They think it is something that is valuable in and of itself. And as a result of that get into unbelievable trouble.

At the beginning of the Christian era, the Divine Spirit descended to earth. Judas, like all good entrepreneurs, saw a business opportunity and betrayed Jesus in exchange for 30 pieces of silver. Judas reasoned that, having performed miracles for others, Christ would be able to save himself in the same way and so everything would work out just fine; Jesus would survive and Judas would have his profit.

Judas is the first to attach prime importance to money, that is to say, to materialism. In Judas was incarnated the entire materialistic age.

Rudolf Steiner

For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. 1 Timothy 6:10

Because mankind followed the 30 pieces of silver instead of following the example set by Jesus, we are lost in money-worship.
And for what? In the end we all must shuffle off this mortal coil so the desire for money and material wealth is pointless. Better to pay attention to our souls, to store up treasures in heaven.

The poets and philosophers, as always, are better guides to living your life than the money-changers;

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours William Wordsworth

I often wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the goods they sell Omar Khayyam

……I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence…………that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. Dr.R.M.Bucke

Filed under: JD, Politics & economics, Religion & Philosophy