The psychology of Money

Money has an almost magical effect upon us. Most of our lives revolve around making money. It has become a cultural condition, a ritual en masse. There is no denying its omnipresence in all matter of things. It effects, and affects, everything that we value. It is appalling the complete and utter dominance money has over our lives. And yet there is almost nothing we can do about it. In order to understand why this is, we must first understand how the brain relates to reality.

In the beginning, the human brain has no mechanism to recognize what is relevant or what is not. Relevance is an environmental/cultural phenomenon. It is a cultural condition. Money is a good example of this. Money is only an invention. If one does not assign any value to money then it has none, simple as that. All value is actualized through imagination alone. We all agree, as a society, that the invention of money represents the exchange of goods, and therefore it has value. This is fine, but only if we understand that it is just a symbol; that it is an abstraction. And we must further understand that since money is now printed out of thin air, and thereby no longer representing the exchange of goods, it has become an abstraction of an abstraction. It’s when we lose sight of this fact that things go awry. It is when we lose sight of value as truth that things become unhealthy.

Truth-as-value trumps truth-as-certitude, always. The problem with money being the preeminent modern-day ritual is that it is based upon truth-as-certitude. Our culture, over time, has conditioned its people to believe, with almost absolute certainty, that money has absolute value. In reality the only absolutes are natural, cosmic, and universal absolutes, and as long as the laws of humankind coincide with these absolutes then there can be a healthy balance between humankind and nature. As it stands, however, mankind’s fixation with the ritualization of money is not in accord with these absolutes, and so we flounder in excessiveness and disequilibrium.

Having more than what we need has become almost pathological in our modern civilizations. It isn’t our fault, really. We evolved this way as a species. We think we need more than we actually need because of a basic fear of not having enough during “lean times”. It really is that simple. But just as we must fight the urge to eat too much, we must also fight the urge to horde too much. We do this in order to maintain balance and to remain healthy. What’s healthy is having a proper orientation between culture and the natural order of things (nature and the cosmos).

In regards to money, as a symbol for the distribution of goods, we don’t have a proper orientation between culture (economy) and nature (ecology). We've gotten to the point where the economy does not match ecology, or in other words, money does not match resource. This is a gross imbalance that can only lead to the inevitable collapse of any economic system which upholds it, and continues to go about “business as usual” like nothing is wrong. Unfortunately this “economic system” is the current monetary-based system.

David Brooks pinpointed the issue perfectly, saying, “If the fathers of classical economics knew what we know now about the inner workings of the human mind, there is no way they would have structured the field as it is.” He goes on further to say, “Rationality is bounded by emotion. People have a great deal of trouble exercising self-control. They perceive the world in biased ways. They are profoundly influenced by context. They are prone to group-think. Most of all, people discount the future; we allow present satisfaction to blot out future prosperity.”

Here’s the thing: Moderation is the key, but nobody knows how to use the key. It’s a matter of the need for immediate gratification on the one hand and rampant immoderation on the other. What we need is a new ritual. We need a ritual that trumps the ritual of money and the over-consumption that comes from it. We need a way to diffuse, to reciprocate, and to moderate immoderate wealth. And then we need to somehow make this an aspect of our psychological makeup. But how do we do this?