The business world will never open it's dark moneyed heart to me... long have I tried to understand this aspect of the networks of relationships in the world. A symbolic system rules our realities - capital enables us to survive in Capitalism even amidst the rich resources of the world. Marx died penniless and in debt. Hadn't I better go in fear of what dumbfounds me?
Making it in the world means making it economically. Being grounded means being moneyed. Yet the soil is not made of printed paper money. Rather it's in the ineffable mysteries of bank statements, stocks, numbers on sheets, endless transactions.
If I wanted to reproduce the world papered in money I couldn't have done a better job than a globally persuasive Capitalism has. Health is cash flow.
It isn't really, but how did we substitute a symbolic system for reality?
Despite what may be said, it is not plain nor simple nor easy to understand.
It is the dark moneyed heart beating at the centre of it that I understand least of all.
It is a system we've created and I accept that. I accept it as I accept the aesthetic system, in its art, literature, music. Or any of the other systems. But that doesn't mean I don't see such systems as manipulations of and overlays on nature.
It's just that the economic system is so vast and complex and all-pervasive; the multiple ways it substitutes a monetary system for reality are confounding and largely unpredictable.
I cannot walk barefoot on the earth, nor do I live in an Eden where food is plentiful. Nothing is free. We are trapped in our own syllogisms.
It's too late for me to go and do a degree in economics. But everything pales beside it. It's the monolithic, gigantic, over-arching true God of the millenias.
Terms like lucrative are appealing, aren't they? Wealth. Prestige. Success. Mammon shores us up. Let's be practical about it.
But Mammon is shouting at me through dark beating waves, "Then you make a better system of distribution..."
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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"...how did we substitute a symbolic system for reality?" -- This has always astounded me.
ReplyDeleteIn today's paper I found the story of Kyle MacDonald, who through barter turned a red paper clip into a house. Had me grinning ear to ear. A CBC post is here.
It's the first I'd heard of this story, but I love it. This bartering, and a site (I have the URL buried somewhere) that deals with gift recycling as an antidote to the December holiday feeding frenzy, brings home to me the added variable of renewable resources. Only recently have monetary values been applied to ecological and renewable resources in a way that gains them admittance into someone's spreadsheet.
Which becomes even more mind-boggling -- how much our "spin" on things changes economy and perception of the world.
Kyle's story is amazing! There definitely are other ways through the financial maze... like his, or things like freecycle, or even I heard in Denmark there are banks that offer interest free mortgage loans (I'm not sure how they work, since there are administrative costs, and the bank has to make something from the loan, but apparently they are structured differently to our mortgage loans).
ReplyDeleteTalking about adding monetary value to important things like ecology, or education, I read of a high school, again I think in a Scandanavian country, that paid high school students to attend school!