A Meditation On International Economic Woes
If you were a little green creature orbiting the earth for the last few hundred years in your natty little flying saucer, you might have noticed that one group of animals in particular has started behaving mighty strangely. Scurrying about the place at great speed, reproducing incredibly rapidly, twiddling about frantically with all sorts of materials found here and there, causing a mass extinction and setting fire to pretty much anything we can get our hands on.
This is a peculiar story for lots of reasons. But one thing is really peculiar about it: a huge proportion of the creatures responsible for this strange story appear to be acting way against their best interests by cooperating in this grand, unfathomable, mysterious endeavour. What on earth could account for this selfless, nay, foolish, behaviour?
One factor is quite obvious and very closely correlated with the increases in humanity’s collective activity: MONEY.
Money isn’t an intrinsically useful thing, like food, water, clothing, shelter, etc. (ie, money has no use-value), it is merely a social convention, a system of agreement. What is the purpose of this social convention? Simply, it’s to elevate the possibilities for human cooperation. Every advance in financial technology has brought with it some sort of an increase in some aspect of human cooperation of some kind (be it for good or bad, for increased equality or inequality). For a really interesting look at financial technology, check out Salman Khan’s money videos over at the Khan Academy. They are very interesting videos indeed.
So, it seems that all humanity has been acting increasingly vigorously based on faith in what is one of the MOST complicated (and corrupt) systems ever devised in the history of mankind (this is a great video summarising what corruption is). What happens when we start to (rightly) question our faith in those systems? The grounds for our vigorous activity and cooperation based in those systems gives way and you start to see the economic breakdown that we’re seeing now.
Can we rebase our economic stability in something less fragile without a transition period of greatly increased suffering? I suspect we are going to find out over the coming decade…
