NOTES ON “MONEY”

The purpose of these notes is to plant the question — What is money? — in the reader’s mind such as Michael Saylor and Robert Breedlove did in my mind 12 months ago.

Anyone who has been alive for more than 15 seconds will tell you how influential money is in life. Just put Gandhi’s face next to a number — even 11-year-old Anchit, who sucks at both numbers and words, will turn into a smooth capital allocator and tell you exactly the number of 100 rupee notes you need to steal from your dad’s wallet to seamlessly earn the fake trust of fake friends, while simultaneously eroding all real trust within your real family. But that’s the problem. Because any and everyone knows what is money, no one knows what is money.

For this and a few other effects of living in complex embedded systems such as — being the least preferred stock market in the world; thinking that being on the top 5 global AQI leaderboards increases our immunity; the many attempts to invade India through history; or the modern wisdom to drive the opposite way down on a one-way street with high beams blazing at 7 AM — I have reason to believe we have abstracted, distorted and corrupted the nature of money in the collective consciousness of India.

Never have I ever met anyone able to provide me a coherent answer to the question — What is money?

Or maybe I’m just being emotional. Had I stumbled upon handsome individuals such as Robert and Michael and known the true nature of money like a good boy with all the answers — I would have not stolen money from my family. Maybe father would be alive. Maybe the act of stealing money to take my fake friends out for lunch in the school canteen so people would talk to me, added that little extra peri-peri seasoning that was required to make his third heart attack the final one. Maybe I would actually have a friend instead of going through the tedious process of which WWE card would be my best friend and which one would be my second best friend. Maybe, despite being surrounded by abundance, I would not have burned my childhood years festering in a perpetual state of shame, lack, torment and isolation. Maybe I would not have misused the power of words to cast hateful spells towards other people.

That’s a lot of maybes.

But had I not stumbled upon such handsome individuals — I definitely would have remained forever imperceptive to the effects of money on oneself — for until you make the unconscious conscious, it continuous to direct your life and you call it God’s destiny.

Before we start, I would like to repeat that the purpose of this post is simply to encourage you to ask yourself — What is money? Handsome individuals have spent years wrestling with what money is, whereas I have merely shifted to stealing other, more challenging things (aka your heart) so that you can give me money without me having to jump through hoops to figure out the password to your bank account. The purpose of this post is offer a question. Not an answer. THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE. I AM NOT A FINANCIAL EXPERT. The only thing that qualifies me to write this post is how unqualified I am to write this post.

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• Money is pure optionality. It affords you the widest set of options in any given scenario in life. When you are dealing with uncertainty, as you always are — not knowing what the fuck will happen in the future — the only strategy to deal with the conditions of uncertainty is to have options. Is it going to rain? Or is there going to be a drought? You don’t know what you will need. Uncertainty is always around the corner, but if you save in money, you can buy the umbrella and you can buy the water.
• Optionality is a good definition for money, and a damn good synonym for freedom. Freedom, not philosophically, but in very a pragmatic sense. What purchasing power can you bring to bear? Purchasing power being the economic jargon for what goods and services can you command in the marketplace. Money determines your degrees of freedom as a human — your access to good food and healthcare, your ability to move from one place to another, so and so forth. Money determines A LOT of things.
• “Money talks” ; “Put your money where your mouth is” ; “Let your money talk for you” — all these adages we have are because money is the strongest communication tool that we have in the physical world. I can sit hear and say that I will send you a million dollars. But wiring you the money on the spot is considered as a stronger signal of trust. Money is the language of power. Money is the language of value. Money is the language of human action itself. Whether you save your money or buy a car — you are communicating to the market that you want to abstain from consumption or that you want it to make more cars. People constantly communicate their preferences with one another in the language of money. Language broadly being any system that we use make sense of the world. Like literacy is used to describe subjective experience, and numeracy is used for objective experience — money lies somewhere between the subjective and the objective and used to describe transjective experience. Money is liquid. It is neither subjective or objective. It can be in cyberspace or it can be parked in a beachfront property. It can be gold or it can be in rupees. Money reflects the difference in the structure of reality in New Delhi vs the structure of reality in Dubai.
• Money is that which you use to buy goods — basic definition, perhaps the only definition I remember from all the economics teachers I have disappointed in life. But in order to produce goods, it takes labor, energy and time that are scarce resources. So in a sense, money is a representation of scarce resources. But money is also optionality. It can buy you the goods. Therefore, money is always scarce. We will always want more money than there is money because we will always want more goods than there are goods, forever.
• What you really want in money is an inflexible supply. Gold became money because its supply increases slowly and predictably over time, which is why people stored their hard earned money in it to protect their effort and livelihood from getting inflated and debased because you cannot produce gold rapidly. This begs the question as to why then do we have money that can be produced so easily while goods are scarce and hard to produce?
• The Federal Reserve prints dollars — USD. US government prints treasuries — UST. US government prints as much UST as it wants, to borrow USD, which is what the Fed prints, as much it wants. Now that the government has USD and the Fed has UST — the Fed is being paid interest by the government on the UST they hold. In what? In USD, the same USD that the Fed printed and the government borrowed. So before any dollars go into circulation, you are already paying interest to the currency counterfeiting cartel i.e. the Fed. The dollars themselves are born into existence at an interest. Which brings us to another definition that money is the final extinguisher of debt. If I owe you, I can give money to you to satisfy the debt. The problem with this UST-USD ad infinitum circlejerk is that it creates a “debt based money.”
• Goods are good solutions to life’s problems, which is important if you want to survive on this planet. The amount of rupees and dollars in my bank account directly dictates my survivability in the world.
• Hermetic principle no. 1: All is Mind. Everything we say, do and make started out as an idea. The purpose of an economy is to generate and share useful ideas through trade. As we trade more and more, our ideas get better; giving everything we say, do and make “specialized” qualities. In trade, everything is valued at a certain ratio with respect to everything else — my house can be worth 6 cars, my car can be worth 600 guitars, so on and so forth. Money is the medium through which we can easily calculate this exchange ratio — a medium of exchange — a medium through which economic actors communicate their preferences which then further drives human action. By choosing to buy a house or car or a guitar, the economy responds accordingly by producing more houses and cars and guitars.
• Like any other tool, money saves us time. Generating time savings itself is the purpose of all tools. You can use your hands to dig a hole in an hour or you can use a shovel to do it in 10 minutes.
• Money is NOT a government creation. Yes, central governments print money out of thin air. But there is no pressing need for such thugs and cartels, for money emerges naturally in any trading society. It is simply the most tradable thing. The most marketable good in the world. Why are the best sales letters of all time always about money? Because everyone wants money — tis the good that buys you all the goods. As societies advance, they coalesce around precious metals as money for their superior monetary traits — durability, divisibility, portability, recognizability, and the most important, scarcity. Gold which is the most scarce monetary metal dominated the world because its supply is the most inflation resistant. Governments co-opted gold, and over time, built a pyramid scheme on top of gold called fiat currency or fiat money.
• The dollar was originally issued to make gold more convenient, more portable and more transactable. Because who wants to carry blocks of gold in their pocket, right? I can only imagine the trust issues in settling a transaction in gold. If you abstract gold into paper, it gets easier to transact. But my trust issues still act up because now you have to deposit your gold with a custodian that then issues the papers of trust that are redeemable for the gold. Over time, I can only imagine how alluring this power has turned out to be for governments or for anyone that can command force. Who would not want to control raw economic energy? Who would not want “the call option on everything” that is money? We went from a full reserve currency where each paper issued could be exchanged for a unit of gold; to fractional reserve banking where there are more paper notes in circulation than the gold reserves can justify themselves; to post 1971 fiat currency where it is not redeemable for gold whatsoever. Essentially, fiat currency is an irredeemable government debt certificate undergoing slow motion default via inflation while its use is forced on all of us.
• Why would anyone voluntarily hold fiat currency? Why would you choose to hold a money that someone can arbitrarily diminish with a click of a button? Because people trust the government — some critical thinkers even call them gods. Because your parents did it. Because it is considered as stable and secure. And given how complicated and abstracted money has become, one would simply choose to trust the government out of laziness and terror. You see, we are all prone to cognitive expedience — a fancy word for the mind’s tendency to favor mental shortcuts that require less effort over more thorough, accurate reasoning, the tendency to favor habits over decisions, guesses over calculations, old shit over new shit — essentially, taking the “path of least cognitive resistance” when processing information or making decisions. We think in {insert your home currency}. Like a typical schrodinger’s bird, whenever I fly out of my nazi gas chamber to visit another country, I’m constantly adjusting and converting my expenses into rupees. I can’t help it.
• Money is a psycho technology. You think you need dollars. But what you really need is purchasing power. We are actively pursuing dollars but what we are really pursuing is what those dollars can get us. Money is a software implementation. It is programmed in you. You use it to communicate, negotiate, strategize. Money is deeply embedded in our machinery.
• Money is the most important form of property. All the houses, schools, businesses and governments are property strategies — ways to reach a consensus on property, distribute property in a way that’s fair and equitable. We typically think property is the house, the car, the stock, etc. But the true nature of property is a relationship between the owner and the asset. The fact that you own your house and a stranger cannot enter it and if they do, you can call the police force or the government to remove them; the fact we can take our first and most personal property i.e. ourself and our body anywhere with us — is the foundation of civilization. I know I am taking bad examples because we, as Indians, are known to be spiritually evolved and believe that we can hijack anyone’s property, rape a teen girl at will, or drive over anyone if we are driving a bigger vehicle than them. But bare with me. As an owner, what you choose to do with your property when you go out into the world, whether it’s planting a tree or starting a business or trading your expertise, is how you add value to society and create wealth. So, the basis of civilization is the relationship between the owner and the asset which we call property. And money is a reflection of the wealth we have created in the world. When you give one organization legal monopolistic privileges to control the issuance of money, they have a stupidly simple mechanism to violate the property rights of all other economic actors that are using dollars. This is so fundamental because it contradicts the very meaning of self-ownership and responsibility.
• Money is energy. And this goes back to my point earlier on its transjective nature. It is a more abstract and higher form of energy and you can’t really analyze it through a model. You can model how much energy will be released when you burn gasoline. But there is no physics model for money as it operates on this higher, more abstract space of human action.
• When the measurement scale that is money is getting inflated and an inch is not an inch anymore every 12 months, there is no way to measure anything accurately, thereby corrupting every human action that follows. With inflation, you cannot expect to have rational economic actors. If there is more money in the economy, the honest premium wine seller will go out of business because the not-so-honest premium wine seller will dilute the wine with water and sell more bottles at a lower price. When we print money, we don’t debase our currency, we debase our morality.

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Just the way I swiped cash from the family stash, to prevent an abrupt ending to this post, following is an excerpt I have shamelessly stolen from the badass novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand:

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?”

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?”

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.”

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.”

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more.money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?”

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.”

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgement, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?”

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?”

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?”

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?”

“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.”

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.”

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and of his life, as he deserves.”

“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.”

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.”

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’”

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world? You are.”

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization, and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood—money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves—slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers—as industrialists.”

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money–and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.”

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.”

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I think, he will.”

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out.”