Is all money just a ponzi scheme? | Vicki Robin | Big Think | Big Think

We all know: it’s like everything from “Money is status,” “Money is power,” “Money is sex appeal.” I just read that “The more beautiful the woman the bigger the diamond and the uglier the man who gave it to her,” you know, so it’s—why is that? That has nothing to do with the daily transactions! That is something emotional. That’s how the man believes he’s going to feel with a beautiful wife, how the woman feels when she’s got an expensive rock on her hand.

These are all feelings, they’re status, like, “I made it,” proving yourself to your third grade teacher or your nemesis in high school or your parents. There are so many ways in which we project onto money the ability to not only make us happy but to make us “better” or better than other people or safe, or—so many deep gut level emotional feelings are playing themselves out in our relationship with money. And, you know, fine. I’m not saying it shouldn’t happen. “We will all be very conscious and we will not have any emotions in our relationship with money.”

I’m not saying that. I’m just saying the more aware you are of what you’re projecting onto money in terms of meeting emotional and psychological and even spiritual needs, the clearer you’re going to be in those daily transactions. In fact, that’s part of why once you start to become conscious of money and stuff in your life this way, you stop spending so much money. But around that is another level: there is the cultural narrative, the rules of the game of our economy, of the financial system which in so many ways governs not just our daily lives but who wins and who loses, who has power and who does not have power, who gets to say what the game is, who gets to play by the rules and break the rules.

I mean this is a cultural context. It has nothing to do particularly with what’s going on in our individual traumas and histories; it has to do with a longer historical moment in time, and the basic meme of the financial system is growth. I mean it’s really—in a way it’s sort of a very long-con Ponzi scheme, because it has to keep growing in order to keep meeting its obligations. Money is produced—I mean the actual pieces of paper and metal, the credit that you have isn’t just like you go to a job and somebody gives you some pieces of paper, it’s—money is loaned into being by banks.

Banks have the authorization to create money but it’s not like they have to have $1,000 in the vault in order to lend you $1,000. No, they have to have $100 in the vault to lend you $1,000, and then they lend you the $1,000 with interest. So in the world of money, everything has to grow. Everything has to keep growing or it’s Game Over, which is a difficulty for us now because of the capacity of the planet to support this ideology.

So that’s that construct of money, which is fascinating. People studying economics and financial systems were mesmerized by how people have played this system to the detriment of many people except for themselves. And then but what we say is that outside of that whole thing, those are all stories. What we actually know for sure as individual human beings is that we have a body, we know that we’re alive, and that we invest some of the minutes of our lives, some of the vital force of our lives in a process that produces money for us.

However it produces it, whether it’s a job, whether it’s investments, whether it’s dog sitting, whatever it is, whether it’s stealing the Topkapi diamond. It’s like whatever it is, we invest some of our precious life energy in this thing called getting money. So money for us is your life energy. The value of money to you is how much of “you” you invested in getting it.

And once you understand that, once you understand that money is something that’s abstract and seems unlimited, like, “if I go into debt it doesn’t matter, I’ll just keep having jobs and I’ll keep paying it off.” I mean it’s just an endless sort of stumbling process. But you understand that your life is limited, ...