Money

Money is a tool, not an end in itself and the sooner we recognise this, the happier we will all be.

We assert intrinsic value to things which possess no ultimate value beyond that which they acquire in the process of asserting it.

Beyond this superficially stultifying tautological bootstrap of monetary self-significance, a sufficiently mature analysis of the integrated macroscopic financial and economic systems that money endlessly energises is bound to arrive at a critical insight: money is never a record of value – it is an unacknowledged assertion of belief in an intrinsic value of the uncertainty and ambiguity that a quicksilver, dancing cartography of relative values indirectly encodes.

Money inadvertently encodes the symbolic significance of uncertainty and through this provides us all with useful psychological and cultural dissonance. We unwittingly anchor our selves and our self-identities upon a system of value and meaning that can never actually guarantee that value or meaning. The beautiful recursive symmetry here is that we are as individuals, as tribes, as nations and as a civilisation so profoundly and reflexively dependent upon an orientation towards the *possibility* of self-definition (without closure) that we unconsciously assert value and meaning to things that can never fully manifest it because this provides us with the complex and hyper-inflating space of endless self-definition that we actually need to continue to exist as individuated entities in a material (as much as a cognitive or cultural) world that is anything but certain or complete.

If we were ever to obtain certainty and meaning (or closure and truth), we would as complex and culturally self-inflected, self-determined individuals and distributed tribal identities quite simply cease to exist. Money is a tool by and through which we mask our own critical psychological dependency on existential uncertainty.