Imagine if Money didn’t exist. Imagine if those notes in your pocket were just a bunch of broken promises, unfulfilled ‘I owe you’s’ that at some point in time became the general currency of the world. Promises of silver and gold, moving from hand to hand, person to person, business to business, until everyone was simply carrying around a handful of unfulfilled promises, paying each other with someone else’s words.
Imagine this, think about it; every time you take out ‘money’ from a bank or cash machine, what you’re actually receiving is a promise to pay you that money later. But no time or date is given by which this promise will be honoured, your name does not even appear on the ‘money’ to prove later that that promise was made to you. Imagine this is how the world works; your job, tax refunds, insurance policies, all based on a promise to pay you later. We go to war, debated, argue, rob, steal and kill each other over a bunch of broken promises that we call money. Now Imagine where this all started, in a place we were fooled into thinking was secure, the place where we were actually supposed to trade our promises for silver and gold, but somehow they fooled us, they played on our greed and conned us into believing that it would be better to leave the silver and gold with them, and instead accept another promise, on their behalf, saying we could collect the sum of all our promises when ever we wanted. And for some reason we felt this made sense, blinded by promises of more promises, fooled by terms such as ‘interest gained,’ and suddenly we became slaves to the beast we call the ‘bank.’ That cunning beast that realised how powerful people’s belief in these promises were. That beast that saw the gullibility and greed that lays within us, and used that to pulled off the ultimate con, the trick of all tricks, to make us believe in a myth called ‘debt.’ It weaved its spell of promises and bound us with concepts such as credit cards, mortgages and loans, making us forget about the original promise, as it clouded our minds with the illusion of money. And then, after a few months, or years, the beast came back to collect, saying ‘OK, you need to start paying back the money I gave you- a promise for a promise.’ But now ask yourself, how can you be asked to pay back something you were never given in the first place? If you never actually received the silver and gold you were supposed to get, if that promise was never actually fulfilled, who really owes who?
This is the trick of the beast, the illusion it has pulled you into to make you believe in that myth called ‘debt.’ But the beast is smart and knows that it cannot fool you for long. The trick must change and the illusion must become more pleasing; from paper tricks to an illusion of lights, we are bored of paper and now believe in the mesmerising power of the play of numbers on a screen. We went from trading to silver and gold, then elevated to paper promises, but when that got too much to carry we progressed to the wonders of digital technology. Now we have no more need of useless paper, the beast has made life easier. You work hard at your job and get paid in electronic numbers. You can buy anything with a simple tap of a card that represents what a promise used to be, able to simply tap your life away. You go to the bank for a loan and they say ‘ok,’ and type a few numbers on a screen and say ‘there you go but don’t forget, you have to pay us back.’ I wonder what they would say if you climbed over the desk, typed some numbers onto their screen and said, ‘there you go, paid in full.’ Now you might ask, ‘but why would this beast do this? Why does it want to trick the world?’ Maybe because it figured out that people will do almost anything for you if you can simply make them believe you will give them something in return. And if you can fool them into believing that you’ve already actually given them what they desire, that you’ve already fulfilled your promise and now they must fulfil theirs to you in return, they will follow you like sheep forever. But could you imagine if, one day, something awoke in people’s minds and they started to sense that something was really wrong. That suddenly everyone decided to go to the bank and ask the beast to actually see physical proof that their money existed. It might be a bit like asking to see physical proof of the existence of God. So imagine it… if we all contemplated the idea that Money doesn’t actually exist, if we let go of the desire for more and saw that it’s all really just an illusion, a bunch of broken promises, to keep us mesmerised and wanting... what a different place the world might be.