Money doesn't exist
I've had an interesting chat with a friend of mine, lamenting that he has lost a substantial amount of money in investments. Money never seems to be enough and we're always working to make our cashflow look more impressive. In between feeling the loss and the pains of money, we've came to the conclusion that money really doesn't exist.
The key term here is reification - creating by mere definition of concept. As a society, as an economy, we have defined what we mean by money and by virtue of this definition, we assume it to exist. But in actual fact, it doesn't
We speak of concepts, duly defined, and take items of the real world and attach these conceptual labels to them. We convince ourselves that we're actually describing the world by abstracting and assigning categories. But, in essence, what we're really doing is merely revealing the workings of our minds.
Take example, there is no chair, only things we sit on. Is a pile of books a chair? Sure, we can sit on a pile of books; and if someone says 'take a seat' and gestures you to the pile of books, you'll get the idea that he wants you to sit on them. But does that make them a chair? How about he says 'sit down' and gestures you to books scattered horizontally across the floor. Would you then understand he wants you to pile them up to create a chair to sit on?
That's reification and in a very real sense, it goes the same for money. Or maybe we're just sore losers
The key term here is reification - creating by mere definition of concept. As a society, as an economy, we have defined what we mean by money and by virtue of this definition, we assume it to exist. But in actual fact, it doesn't
We speak of concepts, duly defined, and take items of the real world and attach these conceptual labels to them. We convince ourselves that we're actually describing the world by abstracting and assigning categories. But, in essence, what we're really doing is merely revealing the workings of our minds.
Take example, there is no chair, only things we sit on. Is a pile of books a chair? Sure, we can sit on a pile of books; and if someone says 'take a seat' and gestures you to the pile of books, you'll get the idea that he wants you to sit on them. But does that make them a chair? How about he says 'sit down' and gestures you to books scattered horizontally across the floor. Would you then understand he wants you to pile them up to create a chair to sit on?
That's reification and in a very real sense, it goes the same for money. Or maybe we're just sore losers
