The Money Trap

When it as time to sow the fields, or harvest, or roof repairs — imagine all your neighbours turning up for helping with your work. And all of you then heading to theirs to get theirs done.

The musician at the temple got paid in cash and kind, but also got praise and respect. Beyond the food and the money their work provided, farmers exchanged notes and information and the skilled ones were values. Schoolteachers were not just respected, but provided for by the community. Professionals across fields regularly go to conferences and events for interaction, networking, recognition and non monetary value related to their work or skill.

We earn many things. We pay in those too. The non monetary stuff we all have in abundance collectively, and can pay forever. Money, well, that’s a trap we fall into more and more as more such currencies are substituted with that.

The farmer today needs to hire labour and pay them from the earnings of the effort — and with the market pricing it a certain way we know how much that pay can be.

Every such interaction getting replaced with a currency transaction leads to a loss in how much we can pay — and every person in every part of the chain now becomes miserly and tries to pay the minimum possible, because you’re left with just one currency, eventually.

We feel worse both as the payee and the payer. Increasingly so as we do more and more. Only when we’re able to “command a premium” which in turn often allows for hoarding and pricing control over everyone and everything else do we feel abundant — and it doesn’t usually last.

Reducing everything to a monetary transaction is plain and simple a huge trap into which civilisation has fallen.

As we think of redistribution of wealth and the reversal of the massive inequity all this has allowed, we need to redistribute value of all kinds. That needs the spread (as opposed to concentration) of ideation, innovation, knowledge, networking alongside economic and monetary value as well. The inequity has happened along all those dimensions and many have lost much.