jerryk on Nostr: Man is a tool making animal, that is perhaps the most straightforward definition of ...

Man is a tool making animal, that is perhaps the most straightforward definition of humanity that we can ever arrive at. Our species, and its direct lineal ancestors, have been systematically fabricating tools for almost 2 million years now. Other animals, particularly primates, can and do use tools to a limited degree in foraging for food, but the extent of actual tool fabrication is exceedingly limited. Man is uniquely suited and uniquely capable at tool fabrication, the creation of so called technology. It has made the modern human species great and powerful.

Money is an invention dating from the dawn of human civilization, a mere 5000 years ago. It was undoubtedly very closely associated with the effectively simultaneous inventions of writing and accounting. The first writers were certainly accountants, you see. The complexities of managing the needs of reasonably large cities necessitated more detailed records than oral recall recall could easily manage. So, city officials and managers developed simple visual, mnemonic devices to symbolize essential commodities of various types. The numbers of these types of commodities increased over time, until something rather like a comprehensive written language was developed.

So where does money come into this? Money is invented simultaneously, with the simultaneous inventions of accounting and writing. Money is the means of exchanging all those commodities that are so essential for the community. The Shekel -- still the unit of currency in modern Israel -- was the first form of money, used in early Mesopotamia, to represent an equivalent weight of barley or silver. In other words, silver could now be used in exchange directly for needed barley, or, for that matter, vica versa. Very convenient, no? No need to have the exact commodity on hand that is needed, money could be used in exchange for whatever was needed, within a very broad range of possibilities, by common communal social agreement and trust. Great idea!

Now it is a great idea, of course. However, there is a problem here, to some extent based on the power of the human imagination for over-generalization. The problem is, the human imagination could tend to make the error that money is an equivalent measure for absolutely everything! And, that may not really be the case at all.

Let's consider the very interesting example of a somewhat related human creation -- the ring. These days, of course, rings are considered essentially just a form of purely aesthetic adornment. However, even now, rings retain an element of special power, particularly conspicuous in wedding rings, and diamonds in wedding rings. Really, diamonds are just semi-precious stones now, they are actually quite commonly available, and should be quite cheap. However, their supply is strictly controlled, and this is tolerated because of the social power of the marriage industry, and their special use in diamond wedding rings. We don't want cheap diamond wedding rings, that would cheapen the sacrament of marriage itself, right? Try reselling your diamonds from a wedding ring though, you will find they are almost worthless!

So, in other words, rings have a social power, still. And, in the past, it was much, much greater. Why exactly? Why are rings powerful? Well, fancy, jewelled rings were much rarer in the past, and were a symbol of great social power, as well as wealth. But, even more significant than that, rings could bear seals, an early form of printing, which required highly skilled, extremely expensive craftsmen to engrave. And seals could be the basis of all essential social contracts, laws, decisions, state warrants, legal contracts, diplomatic agreements, etc. The seals on rings literally could be the basis of all or most of the power of states before the invention and widespread use of mass printing devices!

And, this is almost certainly the entire basis for the role of rings in the history of the Western imagination -- the Ring of the Nibelungen, Wagner's operatic Ring Cycle, JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In other words, people are overgeneralizing the uniquely massive social power of rings at the time, for some kind of universal physical power of rings to control absolutely everything! Which, of course, rings do not have, and never will have.

Similarly, people are inclined to confuse the power of money as a convenient means of exchanging a wide range of useful commodities, for a power to control absolutely everything in existence! Money cannot do this, and, it never will be able to do this. Money is not the be all and end all of existence, whatever capitalists economists may say to the contrary, any more than rings are. Money is merely a convenient means of exchanging a large but limited and finite range of commodities. The fundamental error of all modern economics is to assume that money is the equivalent of absolute physical power in the real world, and can be used to control everything. This is totally false and totaly ridiculous!

Which gets us back to technology. Technology is the basis for manipulating the real world. In theory, technology really can do anything, and everything, if we can figure out how to invent it, anything whatsoever can be accomplished with technology. Unlike money, which just can just be used to exchange established, understood commodities, technology is a creation of human imagination, and intuition, it has no defined limits at all. So, by definition, money cannot be used to develop whatever technologies we wish. Even limitless amounts of money cannot automatically lead to the development of any technology to do anything we choose. Non-existent technologies simply are not a "commodity" that can be purchased. Human imagination and intuition simply cannot be controlled, predicted or purchased. Human inspiration cannot ever be fully understood.

Now part of the confusion here, is the development of the concept of the idea of a "scientific method", from the period of the European Enlightenment, the eighteenth century, when modern capitalism was also developing. Capitalists loved money, and saw money as the basis of all of human society, so, academic theoreticians were more than happy to fabricate the notion of some "method" that guaranteed scientific and technological progress, as long as enough time and money were thrown at the problem. This was pure fantasy of course, there is no such "scientific method", and, there never will be. However, this has led to immense confusion, and an immense waste of money and time on absolutely useless research of all types. The most extreme exemplar of this is, of course, Mr. Elon Musk, and SpaceX, and Starship. And, we are now about to suffer a massive stock market collapse, a bear market going on for years, because people have assumed that the more money they throw at problems they have no idea whatsoever how to solve -- like colonizing Mars -- the more progress they will make!



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