In was asked in a comment to a quote on this blog to write an article in reference to it:
Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world of it’s proper value.
Karl Marx
What is the meaning of words? Letters?
What is the value of things? Money?
Prices reduce wares and services to arbitrary numeric values while in reality numbers are not a property of any thing. Because numbers exist only in the imaginary space of mathematics they can never qualify to weigh up any value that exists in reality. A table does not cost money, it costs wood, which money will never be able to replace.
What all you can get for money compared to hard items makes it seem so much more desirable, Marx postulates the exchange value for this as opposed to the use-value. This and the fact that reducing everything to numbers makes it a lot simpler and quicker to handle is why everything has shifted towards it and now money dominates all other values and thus “has robbed us of all the actual values”. But a trip to the Bahamas is not “5000”, a gold watch is not “2000”. For these reasons, because value is now represented as faceless numeric value, there is also no apparent difference between a morale right or wrong, you can not know has the note you receive been used to pay for a murder weapon, an illegal prostitute and will the money you pay with be used to buy drugs. By partaking in this money system you partake in all the activities it is involved in, by helping making them possible.
Money now represents a monopoly on values and can in turn be used to define how people value almost everything in life. Everybody is forced to adhere to the exact same values dictated by money, allegedly determined through a self-regulating process of supply and demand, truth is that you can influence this process and those who have the most money hold the most influence over this closed system of money total.
You can define somebody as wealthy only in comparison to somebody who has less, or else it is the standard, there can be rich only when there are poor, the rich have too much of what is missing elsewhere. What the largest sum of money in the hands of a tiny rich class does and what it does not has a direct effect on the rest in this closed system. All that money should rightfully work for the people who work for the money most of their lives, repeatedly doing things every day that have no benefit to themselves only so that they can repeatedly pay their tiny concrete box and cars.
Conspiracy theories often contain the hidden desire to find somebody guilty with whom all the problems could be easily wiped away, it is therefor dangerous to allow them because there in a lynch law and there will simply be somebody found guilty. But on the other hand it would be equally foolish to believe there are no people who would want to make these ideas reality, much of what is considered conspiratory today was the reality for the longest time, a select few who at large held the strings of the world in their hands, the freemasons once were a not-so-secret society and perhaps a powerful opponent of the church and thereby may indeed have helped pave the way into the new world.
Peoples pride is always promoted, losing can not be tolerated and is ashaming, which makes it very hard to admit to oneself that this money system is exploitative and that the largest number of people are labourers cheaply and most efficiently stacked in concrete boxes sky high, served only mass-produced factory goods.
The news assure everybody everyday poverty is far far away in Africa, South America and that they themselves are the wealthy, are among “the top 10% of the world”, that the undemocratic regimes are all far away in Russia, China or Arabia.
But back to the abstract and philosophic tone of the quote:
While mathematics may seem very complex it is in fact an extreme simplification of reality, which is only how it becomes so useful. In reality there is no such thing as a “velocity vector” nor is there a meter or a minute anywhere in the world, they are abstractions, models that allow us to handle the much larger and more complex reality in our minds. We could never contemplate what is a planet if not for a so very simple model of a geoid.
The world that we see through our eyes is a picture in our heads, we experience our own senses, our own consciousness rather than an external world. And a picture is never the truth, it tries to depict the truth, the only actual truth is the reality itself of which everybody can only experience a small reflection. Planet and geoid are human terms and definitions, they exist only within us, now what is the actual body those terms refer to? It contains every plant, every man and and every animal and rock, nobody could ever contemplate all that the planet is, not even the sheer size of it alone, without those simplifications.
Lies are truths shed in false light or else they are pointless, “nobody serves the wine pure” doesn’t mean everybody is lying and not even that everybody is only after their own benefit, but that everyone can only tell their own perspective, it becomes a problem only when they try to enforce their own idea on others. Nobody knows or can tell the absolute truth, but only their own truth; value is a human word which meaning is only within us, how much somebody values something only they can tell, when somebody enforces their idea of value on anybody or everybody else they commit a major unrighteousness.