the cost of mankind’s future
I measure my days according to a Likert scale gradient of Tolerable to progressively Awful, and the first thought that crosses my mind upon waking usually gives me a rough idea of where I would sit for the rest of the day. This morning, I awoke to an email from a friend wishing to discuss a programme he had watched pertaining to the €930 billion bailout package in the European Union. Being an engineering student, he sounded nonplussed while contemplating the exact value, and thought he would run it by someone who may have a vague notion of what it means.
Can you even conceive how much €930 billion is? I don’t think anyone can. The very simple reason for that is this: money is a concept. The value of money is meant to reflect an agreement between all people what their goods are worth, an intermediary so we can do away with barter trading. The problem is, the agreement should be made between producers of goods to be sold, and consumers who are paying for those goods, and that is not happening. Financial institutions are determining the value of money based on concepts. To them, it is a game of math. Then, they take it one step further and trade these promissory notes across different countries, represented by currencies, and calculate it down to the nanosecond. So one minute 1€ may be worth A$1.38, and the next, A$1.85. At the same time, A$1 may be worth US$0.95 and then the next, US$1.00. But at the same time also, US$1 can be worth €0.67 and the next, €0.50. All that going on at the same time, but if you tabulate on spreadsheet, the numbers don’t always look correct. A=2B, B=2C, so A should = 4C but it doesn’t.
In the real world, cacao bean farmers’ children cannot write their own names, Indian boys as young as 9 are sent down to the mines, and the landfills are cumulating with yet another broken toy Made in China. The Chinese get blamed for producing poor goods but that’s because they are producing, full stop. Go into a souvenir shop anywhere in a developed country and pick any item up. Chances are that it was made in China because no one in the home country wants to do it. No one in the home country can afford to do it. Poor people overseas are suffering; poor people at home are invisible.
Money is not evil, money is just a game. People have forgotten that it is a manmade system, working only because everyone agrees to play along. How many people are suffering because of this game? What if tomorrow, we all decide we are sick of this game, and the farmers don’t want to take any sum in the world for their goods? Politicians and bankers will say it is anarchy, but then again, nation states and corporations only exist because of the concept of private property. Quoting Derrick Jensen, the word “private” comes from Latin privare, which means to deprive someone else, when the rich Romans used to fence off land.
We ought to be grateful to the people who are feeding the world, and yet they are the ones suffering the most. What has my education given me except to play this game in this system? Yes, I have topped my class for financial management, yes I understand the accounting concepts and principles, yes I know how to read a company’s historical performance of share prices with its prospectus and tell you with some accuracy whether or not to invest. So fucking what? I cannot visually differentiate between basil and baby spinach for crying out loud. I wouldn’t know how to kill a rabbit and skin it to prepare a meal. I sure as hell cannot start a fire without matches or a lighter, and when you think about it, this means I really am stupider than a caveman.
Maybe this is what the world has become. We are all collectively a dumber group of people than our forebears, and we are growing in numbers by the day. If we lived in a true democracy on planet Earth, and each organism in our biodiversity had a say on the fate of homo sapiens, it would not surprise me if they decide we are nothing but pests to be exterminated as soon as possible. €930 billion will not save us then, no amount of money will. Unless we start re-evaluating what is meaningful to us, I am not confident my Likert scale can be extended long enough to describe the day when our present system finally fails us.
(Image credit: 1.)
