Money, money, money

Ug was a caveman with ideas above his station. He loved painting and even though he said it himself, he was quite good at it. Of course there wasn't a lot of competition or others work to compare with. But those Bison looked pretty realistic - all his friends agreed.

Problem was, painting Bison didn't get the family fed. "If you spent as much time catching Bison as drawing them, we'd have plenty to eat" his female cave-partner reminded him. That's when he had his life-changing idea. (Not to find a new female cave-partner, though he was sorely tempted "A nagging female cave partner is like a dripping tap" he used to say. Given that taps hadn't been invented, it wasn't the powerful simile he had been hoping for).

No, this was the idea he came up with. he called it:  'I do something for you that you want and you do something for me that I want'. Marketing and slogans were still several millenia into the future, but it caught on. Ug got into interior design, painting other cave-dwellers walls, whilst they gave him some Bison in exchange. Which was fine until Grunt, one of Ug's neighbours, desperately wanted a Bison painting on his wall, just like the Jones's had on theirs. Trouble was, Grunt didn't have any Bison to exchange. What Grunt had was funny stories. The way he told the one about the Bison trampling his female-cave partner had them all in stitches. Well it would have done if they'd had any stitches. Sadly though, you couldn't eat laughter so keeping up with the Jones's would have to wait.

Until in fact, the invention of money. Money provides a way of valuing your service, independently of the service itself. It frees the whole system of the need for what you do to be directly useful to the person you want something from. Grunt could have been paid to tell jokes by those who wanted a laugh at the end of a hard days Bison painting. He could have then bought some Bison from the hard-working Bison catchers who went home to rest in their beautifully painted caves. Money is a wonderful tool enabling diversity of production and freeing many to perform tasks and roles that could not otherwise exist.

She sat, shivering in the mouth of the cave. The fire had gone out and the flames no longer illuminated the pictures painted on the walls. The sun was setting and the cold night was encroaching. It was obvious that the men were not returning, that once again, there had been no catch. Her body wanted to cry, but had no strength to do so. She knew then that this was the last night. That she wouldn't make it to the camp tomorrow. So inside and quietly, she wept. They had no money they had said. She hadn't asked, hadn't begged for money. What was money? What she needed, what she had pleaded for, was food. Food for the baby she had almost died giving birth to.

How did the tool become the master? How can we look someone in the eye and say 'you will have to die, we do not have enough of this man-made object that is supposed to serve us'.

Isn't this obscene?

We have a heap of food at our feet and a starving person by our side. But there is this impenetrable barrier between the person and the food. Lack of money. Lack of a tool. Money isn't a god with the power to say 'live' or 'die'. It isn't a real obstacle, it is only an obstacle because we define it as such. And all the time, the food rots and the person dies. Our solution is not to dethrone the new god, not to sweep aside the illusory obstacle. Our solution, such as it is, is to fund-raise, to acknowledge our subservience to the new god by recognising its omnipotence. Our answer is to serve the new god with more zeal.

This is absurd.

We laugh at the stories of primitve caveman. I suspect they would look at our 'civilisation' and pity us.