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True, today’s world relies on money, and without enough money, you’re screwed. Unless you’re prepared to go off into the bush and become entirely self-sufficient. And some people are. Others have no choice but to do so.
But money really is an artificial concept, created by humans, as the driving force in the artificial structures & communities they created. THAT’S the REAL fantasy.
Money is just bits of paper & metal, which have whatever value humans assign to it. These bits of paper & metal are a substitute for the traditional barter-based trading methods, in which a person would trade the fish they caught to a farmer, in exchange for some of the crops that the farmer had grown. As societies moved away from the “hunters, gatherers, and farmers” model, they created systems of currency, to replace the original, goods-for-goods systems.
Like any artificially created system, the value of currency is purely symbolic, and depends on what people consider it to be worth. For example, the companies who sell gold as an investment, promote it as “the one safe investment, in these volatile times”. Except that, in the past two years, the price of gold has dropped by 25%. If nobody’s willing to pay what you think your gold (or anything else) is worth, then it’s essentially worthless.
Look at the massive currency fluctuations throughout history. In post-WWI Germany, hyperinflation devalued the currency to the point where it took 20 million Marks just to buy a loaf of bread. But, before that hyperinflation, only the richest of the rich could even conceive of such a huge amount of money as 20 million Marks.
When the currency tanks, people turn to the traditional barter system, because if I trade the apples I’ve grown for the eggs your chickens have laid, we each get the food we need. But if those apples and eggs are left to rot because nobody has enough money to buy them, then people will starve…and you’ll end up having to kill & eat your chickens, because you can’t afford to feed them, and when the chickens are gone, you’ll have nothing.
My dad grew up on a farm, in the 1930s & ’40s. He remembers the local farmers back then, having to turn to bartering like that, just for survival.
It’s very telling that, with today’s worldwide economic crisis, bartering is again popular. So popular, that it’s even featured on some “reality” TV shows.
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