Money and Reality

Stars, spacetime and the phenomenon of money

Thanks to Adobe Firefly for this one.

Full text is below. If you prefer me to read it to you watch the video.

I need to share my thoughts on money with you. It’ll be a weird trip.

I want to tell you what money is and how it structures reality. I write from the position that in the absence of a substantive change in our relations to money, civilization will tilt toward collapse before it succumbs fatally to climate catastrophe.

Even now we can change course. But it’s not enough for love, art, imagination, peace, freedom, care, etc to weigh down more heavily on their end of the scale. We must move the pivot point of money.

A change in our relationship to money will go hand in hand with a change in our understanding of money. Trouble is, money’s grip on our psyche is so strong. Rhetoric is not enough. Money and thought have co-evolved for nearly three millennia. Reason is infused with currency’s utilitarian logics.

The path to transformation - I believe - is through our visceral, emotional and moral attachment to money. Hence I’d decided that for me 2025 was about actions not words. Yet here I am. Drawn back to rhetoric no sooner than I’d left it behind.

In part this has to do with seeing piece after piece of conventional economics - thinking based squarely in the traditional categories of consumption and production - being dressed up as radical solutions to the metacrisis. The metacrisis that those modes of thinking and being have themselves perpetuated.

I try to suppress the urge to engage. I’m not successful. Indeed, I posted something just last week. But like a lot of my criticism of degrowth or of green deals or whatever, last week’s piece didn’t hit its mark. I’m acutely aware I’m criticizing the thinking of people who are, at the very least, earnestly seeking solutions.

To allay my frustrations I decided to have an unfollow frenzy. Out of sight out of mind, I thought. Get rid of the degrowthers, the progressive economists and the sensible, evidence-based, middle-grounders who believe we need to deliver reasonable-sounding solutions to the public and political classes in order to advance sustainable policies.

Concentrate on the task at hand and avoid the narcissism of minor differences. That was my plan. It hasn’t worked. Not yet, anyway. My hope is that this essay is some sort of catharsis for me.

In the meantime, to avoid the pain of self-recrimination I’m going to blame two other people for the fact I’m back here, at my desk, with most of the best books on money just a foot or so behind my head, writing about money; even though it's overwhelmingly likely that very few people will read my words. The metaphysics of money is not a popular subject.

The two blame-takers are

Eleanor Robins

and

Parsifal Solomon

. Ellie had the temerity to publish yet another beautiful essay entitled Who controls the past controls the future: A rallying cry for nerd-activist amateur historians and imaginauts and Parisfal compounded the issue by making a series of insightful comments here and here and brazenly asking questions which he knew I was bound to answer. Unforgivable behaviour by both of them.

So then. Shall we get into it?

Before I describe how the entire Universe - material, imaginal, classic, quantum - is mediated by money, let me first tell you about a moment with my daughter, Amy. It’ll help. One night around the time she was starting her Phd in Astronomy, just after completing her MSc in mathematics at Cambridge, we were looking at the stars.

Ever since they were little I’ve utilised the attention that my children, George and Amy, are duty bound to offer their Father in order to expound my theories on life, the universe and everything. And to share my preferred music, art and literature. This meant replacing kid’s bedtime story books with teaching them to sing Ace of Spades, doing impressions of Winston Churchill’s greatest wartime speeches, Under Milk Wood and reading the entirety of Lord of the Rings to them from about the ages of 4 and 6.

So that night, looking up at the stars, about 10 years ago now - with Amy unable to escape my musings and convincingly feigning interest - I felt able to share with her that I thought money was somehow responsible for the formation of stars.

“How so, Dad?”, she asked.

In the rest of this piece I’m going to give the 12” remix of the answer I gave that night. But because I’m not your Dad and because we haven’t sung Ace of Spades together at bedtime, you might - possibly unconsciously - be inclined to become a detached observer. You might instinctively move yourself to a safe distance; away from an idea that in its nascent form the Professor in my Philosophy of Science class at The London School of Economics called ‘plainly crazy’.

For this to work, I’m going to need you to play along with me a little.

So I want you to try to forget everything you *think* you know about money. If you believe money is debt, or a commodity, or information, or language, or a technology - or anything along those lines - open up a little mindspace, push those thoughts inside, and close the door on them. Just for the next ten minutes.

Trust me, this will make things a lot easier and less painful than me laying out and critiquing theories and counter-theories about the nature of money.

Brett Scott

told our congregation in 2019 that the moment Church of Burn was over, and they stepped outside the Ritual space, they’d immediately be enmeshed back into the network of monetary relations. The same is true of reading this essay. As soon as you finish, money will be waiting for you. You’re already in the most powerful cult ever known, my friend. My ten minutes of word magic isn’t going to change that.

Next I’d like you to do something that may cause you discomfort.

I want you to acknowledge how deeply money is entwined with your life. How it directs you. How it nudges its way into intimate and even sacred spaces. How it is ever-present in the mundane. And - at the risk of losing readers convinced they are immune to the siren call of money - how your resistance and your disavowal is a tacit recognition of money’s omnipotence.

Okay. So now you have an idea of money in your mind - not as coins, notes and digits in your bank account - but as a supremely powerful and pervasive phenomenon.

We could say more here. We could create an intellectual distinction between money and currency. But attempting to define the differences might serve to re-form the amorphous money-blob you’ve just created in your mind, and turn it back into a more familiar pattern. So let’s resist the urge. Let’s accept that one cannot discover new lands without first leaving a familiar shore.

What I’d like you to do now - while remembering that the balance of your online bank account relies on physical servers for its existence - is let all that currency stuff sink down into the world. And I’d like us to float off with money into what Ellie calls The Great Consciousness; into the layers of reality existing beyond any scale that is meaningful to the human body; into a space beyond the limits of reason, rationality and Enlightenment thought; into a dimension that can be sensed but not subjugated to measure; into a place outside of time and space.

While you try to keep the door in your mind closed to protect your newly carved mindspace I’m going to waft in a few of my thoughts.

I believe that money is the word we give to a phenomena that exists across different levels of reality. Akin perhaps to what physicists might call a multidimensional field. And I define money as the movement between determinacy and indeterminacy.

I like that determinacy and indeterminacy conjure up an idea of quantum mechanics. But I’m utterly ill-equipped to expand upon it or use the language of physics. I’ll have to rely on a less precise language to describe what it is I see.

In her piece Ellie argues that we need to roll back a little on Enlightenment thinking. She says we need to re-balance our ways of knowing; so we make more space for intuition, imagination, ritual, faith, and tradition. I’m the High Priest of a Church that engages in ritual sacrifice. I ain’t gonna argue with that!

But I do think Ellie is missing something. Specifically the conjunction between The Enlightenment and the Financial Revolution. The Bank of England formed in 1694 as those new thoughts first permeated the collective consciousness. In Frozen Desire James Buchan puts it like this; as the Enlightenment dawned “men sought to reconstruct the old certainties [of Faith] on the foundation of money”.

In his musings on Ellie’s post, Parisfal asks whether money and time share the same point of origin? Sociologist Anthony Giddens makes great play of the role of clocks in the creation of modernity. During the Enlightenment and through the Financial and Industrial Revolutions time and space were restructured to serve economic rather than religious ends.

In The Time of Money Lisa Adkins argues that in today’s financialized order “time is not a simple vessel through which money flows and moves; rather, money and time merge together." In other words, Walter Benjamin was right when he said;

“Beyond doubt: a secret connection exists between the measure of goods and the measure of life, which is to say between money and time.”

Ellie notes that in Ancient Greece acts of divination determined political outcomes. Leaders would visit the Oracle at Delphi to seek the wisdom of the Gods. The utterances of the Priestess would be laden with ambiguity. But they would appear, at least, to transform the inherent mystery of the future into a riddle that could - potentially - be solved in the present. Ellie would like us to bring a little of that mysticism into the current moment.

Here’s an idea to throw into the mix though. In The Politics of Divination Joshua Ramey argues that actually, the machine of neoliberal capitalism, is a massive unavowed engine of divination. Capital is obsessed with knowledge of the future. It makes its predictions with spreadsheets rather than pig entrails - but it still seeks to make a solvable puzzle out of what is a radically uncertain future.

I’d suggest that humankind has expressed, exhibited and acted upon an insatiable desire to transform the indeterminate into the determinate since the beginning of history. Both the drive to knowledge (determinacy) and its opposite, mystery (indeterminacy), are written into the fabric of reality. Our quest for knowledge is not something that newly appeared in the 1700s.

For me, Parisfal’s speculation is entirely correct. Monetization and temporality are bedfellows. It’s a difficult, if not impossible, relationship to dissect. Time is irrevocably embedded in the concept of causality. So applying that cause-effect mode of inquisition is problematic. Indeed, I believe that any feeling of money and time as discrete phenomena is illusory.

You know the saying!

Taking ‘time is money’ seriously as an idea demands a deepening of our ontology of money. As physicists talk about spacetime, C21st economists should talk about moneytime.

Staying in Ancient Greece for just a moment longer - and aware those thoughts you locked away in your head might now be banging at the door - I think the second but no-less important argument for deepening our ontology of money is to guard against hubris. There were many behaviours the Old Gods tolerated. Behaviours which the Christian God frowned upon. But hubris was always an absolute no-no.

I think the certainty with which we claim money emerged from human civilization is a fatal example of our hubris. I baulk whenever an author declares ‘money was invented’. ‘Invention’ implies that it was a conscious creation of humankind. Very few actually believe that. Even devoid of the claim of invention the assertion of money as an emergent property of civilisation is just not intellectually rigorous. It is an assumption. The only safe thing to say is that money emerged either from - or through - human civilization. My bet is on the latter.

So shall we get back to our star gazing before those money thoughts finally break out of their temporary prison?

I never did manage to string together the right words about subatomic particles bubbling up from the quantum soup and gas and dust collapsing under their own gravity, to tell Amy a coherent story of how stars are formed by the movement between determinacy and indeterminacy; of how stars are formed by money. I sort of knew that task would be too much for me before I started.

But the joy of communication based in love, trust and play is that proof is not required. All I wanted to do for Amy - and for you here now - is to show that another reality can be imagined. Once that new space is created, perhaps a story will fill it? Perhaps there are words and numbers that can be moulded around micro and macro and quantum and classical that would eventually equate to proof of the existence of the moneytime field? Of the movement between determinacy and indeterminacy being the phenomenon we’ve called money?

Last week, the Finance and Society Conference announced their keynote speakers for this year’s event. Among them is Fabian Muniesa. You may not have heard of him, but in the world of money nerds he’s a big deal. On the few occasions I’ve met him he’s been absolutely lovely. He was delighted when I gave him my Burning Issue magazine. A few years back he introduced a panel who were going to dig into a bit of metaphysical speculation on money.

He started off by saying, “Money is a puzzle…” then he looked at me, smiled and added. “...at least.”

As the locked-in thoughts now escape into your mind and you re-immerse yourself into the moneytime of 2025, remember that you have an escape pod in your wallet. All you have to do is set it alight.