The Fantasy of Money

I enjoyed our discussion of the objects presented in class on Tuesday, but one of the problems that I had with the examples that we used is that while they all demonstrated interesting kinds of manipulation, they did so in ways that weren't very fundamental to our thought-processes. It certainly is true that many different advertisements subtly (or not so subtly) influence the way we think, but they are manipulations that we can recognize and, more importantly, ignore if we wish to do so.

As such, I've been trying to find some more fundamental forms of manipulative thought, kinds that we do not readily notice or cannot regularly ignore. And to me, the first example that popped into my head was money.

I've talked to several people who are currently taking economics about there experience, and almost invariably, they have all mentioned their surprise at rediscovering how money actually works. After all, it does objectively seem like quite an odd system. The fact that I can take a small piece of paper into any store in the United States and come out with some thing of real value is somewhat strange- the paper, while quite pretty, has no intrinsic value in of itself. It's value lies solely in the value we attach to it as a nation. Which changes almost constantly, in inflationary terms. Even if you shy away from quantitative reasoning (I am certainly not very good at it), one of the most important lessons that can be gleaned from an economics class is that money works because people believe in it. In lots of cases, this kind of systematic self-manipulation that the country embroils itself in works very well, but its easier to highlight the negative examples; the reason that the stock markets crash is because people expect them to crash, and so they sell their stocks, When they do so, those stocks lose value, fueling the belief that there will be a crash, which then causes more people to withdraw their money, and so on.

I am certainly not claiming that this is the only interesting feature of money that even light training in economics can afford, but it is a startling one, and people often make note of it. It is a form of macroscopic self-manipulation. The system arises out of belief in the system, and can only be maintained as long as belief remains.

To end, a quick speech about humans and belief spoken, strangely enough, by Death the anthropomorphic personification. The clip is from a TV-adaption of the Discword-series book Hogfather by Terry Pratchett, whose books I strongly recommend. The clip is definitely cheesy, but strikes at the heart of what I wanted to explore.