*In this multi-part special edition of The Freedom Analects, we will be featuring the excellent written work of author John Vallis titled “Money Messiah: God, Bitcoin, and The Evolution of Consciousness.” This essay beautifully depicts the deeper aspects of value and money, their indispensability to human action, and demonstrates why corrupt money is such a destructive force. John’s original work is available in its entirety here.
Emergence of a Money
So how do these objects, these emblems of our sacrifices, emerge, and why is there ultimately a convergence on one?
Well, anything that results from the expenditure of resources, that is not consumed, is considered ‘surplus capital’.
Surplus, ultimately, is a reference to, and representation of, energy and time, and is the very manifestation of the resolving of potential into useful order.
It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that humans would attempt to maximize it.
Surplus is the outputs of energy and time, in excess of the inputs, that result from some productive effort. It is the transcending of previously ‘imposed’ time and energy limitations, through the application of human work and ingenuity to a given environmental ‘substrate’. Surplus is, in effect, a kind of efficiency reserve.
Given our natural inclination to transcend our limitations (to expand order), there is a drive to ‘trade-up’ such a reserve, along the spatio-temporal spectrum, in a continual effort to extend and expand its utility potential.
Money is the end result of the continual ‘trading-up’ of this reserve.
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It is the pinnacle of our attempts at increasing the optionality of our own limited resources, as represented in surplus capital. This process ultimately results in the optimization for the ‘monetary properties’ that we’re all familiar with: durability (time/trade), divisibility (trade), portability(trade), fungibility(Trade), scarcity (time) — this final metric would perhaps more appropriately be titled ‘degree and nature of limitation’.
In effect, we’re attempting to maximize our ability to manoeuvre (or to ‘expand ourselves’) through space and time, and we do so by ‘projecting’ ourselves onto an object that most mimics the qualities of that which permits the generation of our ‘internal order’, and propels our quest for liberation — most fundamentally, and perhaps counterintuitively — absolute limitation.
This is what money is— the result of the search to find that which inviolably reflects our individual limitation, in order to have it ‘represent us’, such that inter-subjective value hierarchies may be optimally ordered, maximizing the ability to transcend those limitations through exchange with others.
This ‘trading-up’ of potential monies is quite similar to the process by which we ‘trade-up’, through relative valuation, to the highest ideal, principle or motivation.
Both are done to ensure that what sits atop the hierarchy is maximally generative to the order we desire, and all systems of valuation are optimally sensitized toward most efficiently establishing it.
Seen in this way, the ‘best money’ and the ‘regenerative hero’ perform a very similar function, and are developed in a very similar way. The difference, perhaps, is that (incorruptible) money becomes not just a symbol or principle (however ‘true’ it may be), but the very means for establishing the highest form of truthful order, balancing all states of motivation, and their progenitors in the natural and social worlds, into a mechanism for the establishment of the greatest possible individual actualization and social harmony.
Money, in the ideal (which we’ll likely always only ever strive for, and not achieve), turns a portion of ‘our work, here and now’, into a portion of ‘everyone’s work, anywhere and forever’.
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This represents a near infinite increase in utility, or if you like — a kind of liberation.
Furthermore, as limitation is the primary counterforce to all action, that which most transcends it, will most command value — that is money.
Indeed, it is precisely the degree of limitation — the inviolability of its supply — of a potential money, that determines its utility to us. This is because money, most fundamentally, is information, and the preferential selection for certain monetary attributes, limitation being chief among them, is the process of discovering the best vector for that information.
The information which money carries (or ‘attempts’ to), is the relationship between all goods and services, and the value hierarchies of all those who use it, and how that relationship is updated when values are expressed through exchange. Therefore, (ideal) money permits the harmonious entry of new action-derived information into the market — and exclusively thatinformation — so that all hierarchies can automatically re-adjust, to reach optimal equilibrium once again.
By accepting it, all users agree to hold such information as ‘true’.
That information is represented in price, a real-time signal of all the motivations operating in a given market, and how they are impacted by changes in and to the environment in which action takes place. Money is thus a mutually accepted (trusted) means of re-ordering value hierarchies, to advance the journey toward ever-higher states of motivational significance for all parties — the so-called ‘social contract’.
This is why ‘the money’ is so important.
In Part 8, we will examine the corruption of money and its catastrophic consequences…
Thank you for reading Money Messiah (Part 7).
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Money Messiah (Part 7)