I have recently been reading Yuval Noah Harari and he talks about humans are the only species on Earth that believe in “Myths” and do widespread collaboration on the basis of myths. When he said money was the only “myth” that is perpetuated world wide with universal acceptance I pulled up short and thought “F*ck Yes … and that explains many things”. In a TED talk he says if you were a chimp running a grocery store and somebody entered with a handful of “green paper” the chimp would NEVER trade any of that for a banana. If somebody came in with a coconut and the chimp needed some coconut they might swap for a few bananas. You might train a few chimps that they could swap some “green paper” for something they had then swap it back for something else they needed but it would never reach the scale of acceptance as humans accept money.

And so it goes. We humans do value many things over knowledge which does reflect in the salaries of teachers and many other issues. The value of some things is perpetuated because we have been “tricked” with these myths about value into a false understanding of value. We also don’t teach much critical thinking which would help people understand our world better and even better understand the behavior of our current POTUS.

Many myths are accepted by smaller groups in the world but money is the only one that has 100% universal acceptance. Maybe that explains how it has become perverted and why capitalism is perceived to have so much value because it drives the accumulation of money.

Anyway … I will paraphrase what I have heard before … “This problem of predatory capitalism is beyond my pay grade”.

Haha … but not funny.