IOZ, on the reality of money:
...any claims that it even approaches the status of universal convention are bogus. I mean, if you're poor, it's real enough, but at the level of a trillion-dollar annual deficit it is basically a totally self-referential metafictive device.
This is exactly what I've always said. Money rules every single aspect of our lives, no matter how hard we try to separate it at least from certain spheres, but in the end it's entirely fictional. It only has any signficance because we all agree, every day, that it does. If we stopped doing that, money would cease to matter. And it wouldn't take very many immensely wealthy people calling off the drama to end the pretense once and for all.
Unfortunately, for the vast majority of us who do not have much money, the only way we could be successful in ending the fiction is if we all did it simultaneously, which will most likely never happen. The personal risks to each of us if we're the only ones who show up are just too high. This is the same reason why a lot of things that should theoretically be easily achievable will never actually happen; for example, it's why they'll never give a war that nobody comes to.
3 comments:
Actually it's even simpler than that.
Even if you're in a hand-built log cabin growing your own veggies somewhere and using solar or what have you, somebody at some point owes some TAXES on the land (if nothing else) and that debt is payable only in Federal Reserve Notes.
It ultimately boils down to the fact that everyone is FORCED at some point to "owe" taxes and those can only be paid in FRN. Therefore you can't just "stop" using money, you're actually required to commit a crime in order to opt out of the system.
As Daniel Quinn noted, once you create the ownership of property (things, animals, plants, land) then you cannot escape the ownership of people (albeit via a proxy such as money in modern USAmerica case).
Ah, the veritable dilemma of us capital prisoners!
The prisoner's dilemma of us veritable capitalists! Um.
Soj--I wasn't thinking in exactly those terms, which are very useful, but the general idea is one of the things I meant by "the personal risks to each of us if we're the only ones who show up."
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