Why does an interested man, on seeing a wedding ring on a woman's finger, decline to make an advance? Because of the "collective delusion of marriage" ?
No. Because the ring stands in for what-will-happen. It's a sign of consequences and expectations which are real, but grounded in the reality of human action.
When taking money for payment, we don't want bread -- bread satisfies my hunger, but not my need for *PAYMENT* -- which is to have *something to pass on* to another person, for what I want later on.
"Bread" is no more a collective delusion of hunger, than money is a collective delusion of trade. All trade is trade with money. Receiving "bread" as payment, isnt a payment -- it's consumption. To trade at all is to receive money, ie., that think which can be passed-on.
Trade is a game of receiving something pass-on-able for something consumable. That we use bank notes for this is a contingency, but it merely a symbol for the underlying necessity -- inasmuch as a ring symbolises marriage, which is that series of actions which will occur if you have an affair.
Money is not a delusion. Trade is not a delusion. People's need for a medium of exchange is as real as their need for hunger.
Very well put. Money derives its value from a shared understanding that it is useful for trade, but even in the event that this is its only value that doesn't make it an illusion.
I think it's more radical than that, money is trade.
Simply: if a person acquired bread to pass on (for something else they wanted), then bread would be money.
I think probably some animal species use money, on a rare occasion: if a monkey exchanges a grape for sex, and the money with the grape exchanges the grape, the grape is money.
It might be that amongst other animals, that ability to see the future-value-to-others of grapes is very very limited. So other animals dont keep grapes around. If they did, grapes would be money.
That the value of a grape depends, like that of a dollar, on what we expect another to take for it -- this makes it seem mysterious -- because we ourselves are distrustful of the future, and of having-what-you-dont-need.
I think this is an animalistic impulse: its a kind of paranoia about the behaviour of others. This is at the heart of why people use "collective delusion" and the like. There's something, in that sort of person, which views depending on the future behaviour of others with paranoid suspicion.
Yes. Money is the abstraction or value - it's the abstraction itself, not the currency itself, as the currency could take any form (gold, fiat paper, grapes, pearls, or a 4 ton Rai Stone [1][2])
Edit: Rai Stones often don't move (like coins/paper money do), but rather stay in one location. Per Wikipedia: "The ownership of a large stone, which would be too difficult to move, was established by its history as recorded in oral tradition, rather than by its location. Appending the transfer to the oral history of the stone thus affected the change of ownership"
Currency is not given value because people "believe" in it or not.
It has value because the government decided that to operate inside its country, you must use this currency. This is enforced through taxation. It doesn't matter if you believe in the dollar or not, at the end of the day the government will tax you for a dollar amount and you're gonna have to pay in order to keep having access to the US market.
This is why cryptocurrencies have no inherent value, only value as it pertains to actual currencies.
You can have multiple currencies in use at the same time. A good example would be the Soviet Union where vodka could buy you things that rubles couldn't. Or as a more current example there's Venezuela, where the government backed currency is the Bolivar but most transactions happen in USD or Columbian Peso.
Yeah that's true, that happens when trust in the government has been lost, or when trying to avoid taxes. But there's an important distinction there. People use alternative currencies when the government is incapable of punishing them for doing so, and when the local currency is inconvenient to use, such as during hyper inflation. It has nothing to do with whether they believe it has value or not.
You make two strong arguments about why the value of money is based on people's belief in it's value. And then you just ignore them.
As you said, if people don't believe the government will enforce it, it has less value. As you clearly say, it doesn't matter what the government says, it matters what people believe.
And it hyper inflation or matters what people believe future value is.
You should rethink your definition of money because you've essentially demonstrated its value derives from belief.
