My previous article focused on the notion of Divine money and money’s alignment or otherwise with Universal or God’s law. However, many have attempted to sever themselves from this essential spiritual connection and consequently dismiss its relevance to them and the world around them.
Today’s article is about the human context of money and its structural consequences for society in the widest sense. An atheistic or humanistic look at money, if you will.
One of the most damaging misconceptions (in terms of freeing ourselves from our current predicament) is that “money replaced barter”. Archaeological and anthropological evidence shows that credit (and ledgers) preceded money.
Our misconception that money replaced barter, an idea that Adam Smith conjured up, has no empirical basis. Money came out of the need to deal with strangers who might disappear before reciprocation could occur.
Reciprocation occurred in pre-literate societies which operated on an informal, undocumented basis where goods and favours would be exchanged as required. While there was no explicit ledger (in most cases), there was an oral memory or implicit ledger within communities that recognised the value and activity involved. In essence, this implicit ledger was the “social glue” that ensured social cohesion within the community.
I say “in most cases” because in Rai Stones we have archaeological evidence of physical ledgers that symbolised the oral history of the value of activity within the Yapese community.
Rai Stones
Early “Distributed” Ledgers.
From Wikipedia:The stones were highly valued by the Yapese, and used for important ceremonial gifts. 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. Thus a change of ownership was effected by appending the transfer to the oral history of the stone.
Rai stones have been viewed by modern economists as a primitive form of money [more accurately, ledgers], and are often used as an example to support the thesis that the value of some form of money can be assigned purely through shared belief in said value.
An invaluable source in our work has been David Graeber’s Debt, The First 5000 Years. David refers to the anthropological evidence of pre-literate societies operating by reciprocation of needs and capacities to create.
Ledgers for Social Cohesion
Medieval documents show the tariffs associated with reparations for harm etc. and the relative worth of different means of compensation such as how many cows were equivalent to a milkmaid. There’s a lot more rich detail in Debt, The First 5000 Years, corroborated by other sources.
Endogenous tokenisation replicates these ledgers or “social glue” on a global scale but within distributed, self-organising, autonomous networks that reflect individual and communal needs, capacities and valuation thereof.
Yesterday’s article highlighted the importance of co-creative development and how the co-creative methodology led to the discovery of fundamental truths relating to money and its application.
ENabling Tokens and endogenous ledgers (that capture, store and transfer the value of Human Activity) enjoy a symbiotic relationship with co-creative development.
We discovered the possibility and the potential of endogenous tokenisation through co-creative research and analysis; ENabling Tokens and Endogenous Ledgers discourage competition and conflict in favour of collaboration and mutual support.
Human Proclivity in the Modern Context
Essentially, pre-literate man and woman were not much different to us today in terms of their mental sophistication and arguably, in many respects, they were wiser. Evidence of their familiarity with the pros and cons of institutional hierarchy, for example, suggests as much; not least because for a long time they avoided permanent institutions of hierarchy, even though they “experimented” with such notions on a regular or occasional basis.
However, we are trained to believe that these were primitive, unsophisticated, ignorant people and any suggestion that we can learn from our ancestors is often dismissed as no longer necessary or relevant. Yes, their technology was primitive, in our eyes, but their thinking was anything but primitive. Furthermore, today we are trained to be ignorant, which is why academia has failed (in spite of the $billions spent on the study of “economics”) to identify the fundamental flaws arising from our collective misunderstanding of money and its effects.
And that’s the point, money drives everything, including our ignorance which is why
Endogneous tokenisation is the fundamental lever for change.
Endogenous tokenisation offers the best of both worlds: co-creative development within a sophisticated technological environment. We know that self-organisation is far more effective in managing complexity than institutional hierarchy – just look at the internet, most of which runs on open-source software.
The New Political Economy
Self-organising, co-creative development can deliver value and reward structures that satisfy human Needs and the will to Create. In so doing, social cohesion is “baked” into the new political economy.
The final slide in the deck presented to the Digital Currency Global Initiative (DCGI) on 17th February 2021 listed some significant benefits of ENabling Tokens and Endogenous Ledgers.
- Financial and Economic Stability
- Optimise Resources, deter Waste and Environmental Destruction
- Financial Inclusion
- Societal Cohesion
- Remove Motivation for Theft, Fraud and Financial Crime – most crime starts and is supported by people being unable to satisfy their Needs
In short, Endogenous Tokenisation is “human money” or money that serves humans.