Soul Over Matter. Zhi Gang Sha

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       A Brief History of Money

      NO ONE KNOWS for certain when money was first invented. We know that money is a man-made invention. No animals have ever created a system of barter or trade that involves money. Although there are instances of animals hoarding food, there is no evidence of animals trading foods or goods. Animals for the most part live in the present moment and are not primarily concerned about the future. Money is mostly about the future.

      Money is a marvelous invention. It allows human beings to not just barter and trade but to create and plan. Physical goods and resources can be magically transformed into storable, durable, lightweight currency in its myriad forms: paper, checks, credit cards, electronic transfers, bitcoins, and so on. This magical ability to set aside resources for future needs without creating additional work was a breakthrough without which modern societies could not have evolved.

      Of course, once money was created, human ingenuity took over and numerous ways of utilizing money were devised. Money experts emerged and, along with them, the concept of banks, and eventually our present economic systems evolved. Capitalism today favors those with large sums of money at their disposal. Money itself under capitalism generates money whether or not the owner of that money contributes to the production of goods and services. To some extent, this has always been true from the beginning of moneyed societies, but never to the extent of today’s modern capitalism. In many ancient societies, it was considered immoral to charge interest when lending money. Money was considered a tool and a mechanism to benefit the entire community and to ensure trade and commerce, but not to create tiered societies in which some groups controlled a disproportionate percentage of the wealth of their community. One of the clearest demonstrations of a society that valued economic parity is documented in the indigenous potlatch ceremonies in the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States, where every year the wealthiest village members would hold festivals during which they shared or even gave away the majority of their possessions, in effect trading material goods for social standing and prestige.

      In the majority of primitive civilizations, people had few possessions and little ability to store possessions for future needs. Even today there are Amazonian tribes who move with the seasons, carrying all of their possessions with them and recreating living quarters from whatever plants and trees might be growing around them. These and other nomadic peoples barely recognized the concept of private property. When hunters caught a wild boar or other animals, everyone shared the meat. When the hunt was especially abundant, there would be festivals and celebrations, and neighboring tribes would even be invited to share their bounty. Oftentimes these invited guests would become allies and share their bounties, creating a safety net against less abundant times.

      Individual tribe members had differing statuses, but these distinctions were based on inherent abilities and not on accumulated wealth. A skillful healer would be venerated as a shaman, and his or her knowledge of the medicinal value of plants would be highly valued and honored. A great hunter would have status, as would a wise leader who could guide community decisions, but their rewards were not more possessions or greater accumulated wealth.

      As human beings moved from hunting to agriculture, the accumulation of property became possible. People developed fixed, permanent villages where they could build structures to store grain and other commodities. Once accumulation became possible, there was a true need for currency to enable economic trade and economic planning. A farmer could sell his excess wheat, buy a goat or cow to supplement his diet with milk, and diversify his dependence upon a single crop or activity. A goat herder could sell goats and invest in buying seeds to diversify as well. In the beginning, these simple transactions could be handled by bartering, but with the invention of money, the ability to involve multiple members in a transaction not only accelerated the frequency of such transactions, but created transactions that could have never occurred through bartering alone.

Scarcity Is a Human Invention

      One of the unexpected outcomes from the evolution of money was the creation of scarcity. That’s right. Before money, there was no scarcity. This does not mean that there were no instances of calamities, which resulted in starvation for an entire community, but there was no relative scarcity. There were no rich or poor; everyone had similar possessions and “economic” opportunities. There were those with greater status, those who had more wives, those who had more power, but in hunter-gatherer societies that did not use money, there were no significant economic differences. There was no scarcity as we think of scarcity today.

      Scarcity is a concept that relates to having insufficient resources to accomplish a task or goal. For most wildlife, scarcity is related to natural cycles of the seasons, the migration of food sources, or the impact of seasonal change. Nature in and of itself has no scarcity. There may be drought and other weather-related challenges that create less abundance of resources, but generally there is a group survival instinct in the animal kingdom.

      The relationship to scarcity for human beings is quite different. With the advent of money, opportunities were created to hoard money and to use money to control basic goods and services and to develop and control luxury goods and services. In the process, ever-increasing economic disparities have formed to such an extent that today the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of humans on our planet own and control more resources than the poorest fifty percent. A consequence of this economic pattern is that over one billion people on planet Earth today live in abject poverty, barely able to generate enough money to feed themselves and their families.

      This economic disparity and daily experience of scarcity by billions of human beings is not a natural development or an unavoidable consequence of a free capitalistic system. Of course, no one wants to be among the bottom billion and since you are reading this book, it is unlikely you are. In the following chapters, you will learn specific techniques that will ensure that your experience of scarcity will be limited or absent. Paradoxically, you will learn that part of your overcoming scarcity will include helping to reduce the scarcity of the less fortunate.

Prosperity Rituals

      One of the most-used statements of scarcity in the world is “I can’t afford it.” If personal finance were a category on Family Feud, I can’t afford it would be the number-one statement on the board.

      For example:

      • I’d love to go to Hawaii, but I can’t afford it.

      • I’d love to hire someone to help me with my business, but I can’t afford it.

      • I’d love to move to a nicer neighborhood, but I can’t afford it.

      They’re all statements of scarcity. But if you dig deep, there are two critical things to understand about these kinds of statements:

      First, scarcity statements are habitual.

      We tend to think and speak scarcity statements without real awareness. We’re not consciously saying, “Look, I ran the numbers for last month. We’ve got a twenty-seven percent budget shortfall, which leaves us insufficient cash flow for the Hawaii project.” We’re just knee-jerking a habitual “I СКАЧАТЬ