It's almost like it's not the money that's the problem 🤔
Discussion
It never was. People were waging wars long before money existed. In fact, early conflicts were smaller in scale but far more brutal - mass graves across Europe are proof. Before tribes started trading, there was no concept of negotiation. Other tribes’ resources - including women - were just there to be taken. They’d invade, kill even the kids, spare only women capable of bearing children. This was happening hundreds, maybe thousands of years before barter showed up. Money and trade actually improved life and reduced the brutality of conflicts immensely, but they didn’t rooted out the core issue. Wars were never about money. They were about scarcity of resources and alternative uses of these resources. As long as scarcity and alternative uses exist in human society, wars will always follow.
This is the bell I was hoping to ring. This is exactly what I've been thinking on all these "Bitcoin fixes this" war posts.
money is supposed to be a mechanism, that people intuitively grasp, ensures that there is some justice. but when they debase the money, it reverts everything back to barbarism.
the secret sauce is a culture steeped in a philosophy of private, polycentric law. prior to the inception of the jewish monarchy, when they disobeyed God and ignored Samuel's advice against it (which basically was that this would lead to war) i think that dates back like 4000 years and money already existed, but most of the world was not under the jackboot of imperial power. most people lived in villages, cities were rarely not already captured by that time in history. jericho was one rare example, that was extremely long in its history, 9000 years supposedly.
polycentric law basically means no government and a market in jurisprudence. they have a somewhat similar principle operating in a lot of the less urbanised islamic settlements in the middle east and north africa, and also in israel, where conflicts were brought to the imam or the rabbi for a process of adjudication.
the money thing is true, in some sense, that debasement of currency and an arbitrary privilege to define what money is (aka fiat money), but the horse has already bolted by this point because people have started to wave flags and cheer for the king like he's a god and that's really the root of the problem. collectivism and authoritarianism, and the idea that an elite group can make a judgement that will work for everyone's benefit. it never does, and it always eventually decays into corruption.
Did you know that monkeys have been observed in the wild to wage war on other monkeys? They use tools as weapons, tactics and deception to defeat the other faction. But we haven’t seen them trade with each other and they most certainly don’t have a concept of money let alone the debasement of it.
So there is some concepts of money in terms of rewards form work as in this video
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg
You could argue its also a form of debasement that they don't react well to.
Oh I like this! This is getting good!
I wonder when the earliest evolutionary evidence of money or transactional dispute is? 🤔
the city of jericho was definitely one
Jesse myers argues there's a possible on evolutionary link to money and human development.
Fascinating. Didn’t know about that. It goes to show how similar are we as a species. Maybe not debasement, but they seem to grasp value at very surface level. Probably means they can evolve to use money in some form in the future.
humans are special
money is an expression of our sense of obligation to other people to be fair and just.