you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]QueenOfTheNorthSuperLesbian 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Right, I'm talking more so about paper money. Trade has always existed, but paper money is a relatively new phemomen, and even newer is digital money - there is no gold behind either. It used to be that you could go to a bank and exchange your paper money for some actual gold but over time that evolved to the paper money being just as good as the gold and now there's no gold to back it up, it's held together by belief. Money itself is worthless and not made of anything valuable, it's symbolic, and if we all suddenly stopped believing in its value and digital money there would be issues. But, property and resources and land always have tangible value

[–]soundsituationI myself was once a gay 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Regarding digital money, time will tell how solid the current cryptocurrencies are. But one major thing it has going for it is decentralization, which actually gives it a leg up on gold, or gold-backed paper. Even gold is a symbolic store of value, of course - what I'm saying is that in the case of money the qualities that make it valuable (or not so valuable) aren't arbitrary; societies select for these qualities before agreeing to a common medium of exchange. Just because something is conceptual doesn't make its properties arbitrary; that the Venezuelan Bolivar doesn't equal the US Dollar isn't a matter of mass (dis)belief, but rather one of fundamental differences. We could all suddenly stop believing in a currency but that wouldn't circumvent the need for some kind of currency, as direct trade is impractical outside of tiny communities. So, money is a naturally occurring need, and the properties that make it good or bad are consistent across time and culture.

Gender identity truly is a fugazi though. I think "non-naturally occurring money"--basically everything from WWI to Bitcoin--is analogous with gender identity ideology.