Making sense of money: Part 2

In our first session looking at the nature of money we took a birds-eye view, trying to outline its structural make-up. In this second session we wanted to ask people about their personal experiences with money - what does it do to us?

Loss

Loss was a repeated theme throughout our conversations and it showed up in a number of ways.

Money facilitates exchange at scale but in doing so it was identified by our group that it can also lead to a loss of relationship. By making the exchange process timebound, there is no need to build an ongoing relationship with others through the exchange of goods or services. This sits in contrast to societies where it is understood that a gift or service offered today might be reciprocated hours, days, weeks, or maybe even years in the future. 

This could also help us to think differently about debt. Debt is usually seen as something to be avoided to the point where to be “in debt” to someone is seen as a burden or even moral failing. But what if debt is in fact the realisation of the interconnectedness between us? And to be in debt is simply a way of saying we have ties and responsibilities to others? In which case, the curtailment of those through monetary exchange could be leading us to overlook the dependencies we have upon one another. Notable too is the fact that money allows for international exchange which means our capacity to appreciate the “debt” we owe to people we will never meet is limited with consequences for how we think about and value people outside our borders. 

Picking up on a theme from our previous workshop, it was also identified that money emphasises loss and leads us to feel this way about exchanges with one another. A further branch to this conversation that emerged in our workshops was about how this can make us feel about the people we are doing the exchange with. If exchange is about minimising loss, then it stands to reason that we understand the process as being about winners and losers. We expect others to be trying to cheat us and judge harshly both those who seem to “drive a hard bargain” as well as those who seem to be easily duped or swindled. Not only did this have us thinking about the way money can make us view or assess others it also led us to question the assertion often made by proponents of free market economics that people are inherently greedy or self-serving. We concluded that if these behaviours are sometimes on display, it is likely that it is the system and the context that makes it so. 

Disempowering

On the one hand, money could be seen as empowering because it - theoretically - gives everyone the right to purchase goods and services that may have previously only been the preserve of certain classes or groups in society. 

And yet, the corollary of that is that money creates a barrier between us and the things we need to survive. In a system where everything is valued through money, we lose the ability to discern what we need and what we want. Everything in effect becomes something we have to earn, including food and water. The ability to sustain ourselves becomes contingent and so too, arguably, does the value of life itself. 

The ability to use money as a form of power to gain access to ‘anything’ was also identified as a potential loss of agency. One participant talked about how our capacity to use money to purchase knowledge and skills is progressively weakening our own ability to know and use those skills ourselves. This was seen as particularly troubling given the changes we are experiencing to our climate and the possible knock-on effects that will have on food systems and energy supplies. 

Money was also seen as something that ignores our own unique sense of value. One participant shared how their community was prevented from retrieving seeds from a tree that holds immense importance to their people because, according to the international seed bank policies, the tree had not yet reached “threatened” status. In this way, we see how one community’s sense of value - and the ability to act according to that value - was being diminished. Similarly, we can think about how the ability to raise money is used as a yardstick or enabler of the success of a project. Why, we might ask, should that be? Why should what we hold to be valuable and significant need to gain credibility from money? Especially, we might add, when money gives credibility to activities - like the building of weapons or emission of toxic gases - that cause harm. 

Anxiety

Unsurprisingly, money was also seen as a source of anxiety for many in our workshops. 

The most immediate reason for this - the need for money to buy our survival - was immediately understood. The group reflected that while this source of anxiety is especially pronounced for those whose lives are the most precarious, the fact that money is a tool of comparison means that no one is immune to the anxiety it creates. Moreover, the fact that the value of money is itself determined by factors that sit outside of the actual money we have at any time - interest and exchange rates, supply and demand - means that the power it seems to bring can be illusory. 

But there were also some further sources of anxiety that we were able to explore. 

One was the way money seems to constrain or mould our identity. In a money economy, humans become quantifiable products to be sold and bought. This isn’t only something that we experience from others - we do it to ourselves. We shape our lives into career trajectories, learn skills to make us valuable in the marketplace, and use our time and energies for activities we dislike simply to ensure that we are financially compensated and to earn prestige for our efforts. Anyone familiar with some of Karl Marx’s writings might recognise this as the process of "alienation" he spoke about but it seems to go further than he imagined. Marx talked about how workers become alienated from the products of their labour. But in the 21st century, we are talking about people being entirely alienated from their sense of self. 

Furthermore, this dynamic influences how we structure our surroundings. A participant noted their unexpected affection and sense of connection to a self-seeded shrub in their garden. Exploring this as a group, we wondered where some of the unique attachment this person developed came from the fact the plant seemed to exist outside of human definition or categorisation: being self-seeded, it was not there with any pre-determined ‘purpose’ either to bear fruit or provide aesthetic value. This gave it a unique life of its own. This helped us recognise how monetary frameworks prompt us to view items purely through their utility or function - such as productivity, practical use, or aesthetic value - while overlooking the idea of existence for its own sake. 

Mana

To restore our agency and reclaim all that gives life, one participant shared the importance of mana - a combination of integrity and dignity. They reflected that this is the true currency that we can share between us. 

It gave us a doorway into thinking about where we might go with our feelings of loss, disempowerment, and anxiety. If money is determining value, then we need to look at what we value and how we create more room for it in our lives. If, too, money is creating distance or separation, how do we bring the world closer to us? How do we redefine what energy and resource is without and beyond the strictures of money. The opportunity to do that might not initially be within the established structures of our lives but outside them. History is replete with examples of communities who first experimented outside the boundaries of society before finding ways to either weave those experiments into their existence or transpose their existence into their experiments. It seems this might be the path we’re needing to take.