Monetary Power to the People
The critical path to solving the financial problems of the present day lies in individual people understanding the individual nature of money. One must learn to recognize the acceleration and amplification money provides a person in social interaction, how it extends inner wishes and desires into the material world, and tightens the bonds between individuals in mutual pursuit of common interests.
Money as Medium
"[A]ll media are extensions of ourselves, or translations of some part of us into various materials…"
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Central to understanding money is the recognition that the human body is extended and amplified through media. Media magnify human sensibilities and reorient human sense ratios. Imagine a wheel and consider how it extends the human foot, accelerates and amplifies locomotion, and opens the imagination to new possibilities in the physical world. All media act similarly on the human body and mind.
Money is no exception. Money embodies human understanding. It represents the concretization of the human desire to exchange, fosters mutual agreement between transacting parties, allowing each to satisfy desires by transferring value through an extension of themselves and into the material of the money medium.
Money carries as its content perceived human value and possesses the ability to transform itself into valuable things. Value originates from the perception of differences between things and the recognition of how benefit can be gained from those differences.
As physical objects come into use as money, the most marketable or saleable commodity in a society naturally progresses to become money — the intermediary medium through which value is preserved from when it is obtained to when it can be put to other uses.
"As a translator and amplifier, money has exceptional powers of substituting one kind of thing for another."
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Money offers its holder maximum possibilities in obtaining valuable things. By utilizing the commodity most marketable to the most people as the basis of exchange, communities of individuals objectify a measure of value for efficacy to catalyze the movement of things between themselves, despite each having unique and ever-changing value assessments.
"As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money — like writing — speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community."
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Hot and Cold Media
McLuhan introduced the concept of media as "hot" or "cold" — a measure of the degree to which they require participation by the user, and the amount of data they contain as content.
"Hot" media are low in participation because the human sense being amplified is saturated with data, a condition we call high definition. "Cold" media demand high participation from their users because of the dearth of information they contain. By juxtaposing a cool medium like television with a hot medium like a movie theatre, the difference in informational content and degree of definition of the visual sense being amplified reveals itself.
Money's catalytic effects on social interaction compound as it becomes hotter as a medium and more effective in its facilitation of human agreement and information exchange. Consider the situation before the advent of money when exchange by barter dominated human affairs. The haggle of exchange demanded total participation by the parties involved and dictated that no two negotiations were likely ever the same.
With the advent of commodity money in the form of the most marketable goods, the degree of participation in the haggle was reduced, as easily recognizable standards were employed to simplify the terms of trade. In the Information Age, human participation is eliminated as money glows red hot as a medium and its exchange automated with instantaneous precision.
The Selection of Gold and Silver
We inherit a rich and dynamic history in the selection of the most marketable goods. Through thousands of years, on all corners of the earth, people tested objects with various characteristics as money and came to develop standards that held over wider spans of space and deeper tracks of time.
Repeatedly, individuals and communities of greater and greater numbers came to exchange gold and silver in the trade of goods and services. Gold for its marketability in the large — its ability to efficiently transfer high magnitudes of valuable decision-making power over space and time — and silver for its marketability in the small, its ability to expeditiously catalyze smaller-scale movements of the same power.
Understanding a person's motivation for money, and the advantages its acquisition promises to bring him, remains as essential to understanding the human condition as ever before. History reveals to us a miraculous evolution in the logistics of how people interact socially, how agreements are made and kept, and the catalytic conditions for the flow of goods and services.
Two goods were chosen as the best agents of exchange: gold and silver. These metals met all the aesthetic criteria people valued to facilitate exchange, and massive hoards accumulated through time.
The Present Crisis
Up and until the Age of Abundance dawns, and the existence of massive hoards is rendered meaningless by the nanotechnological recreation of even the most marketable goods, the miraculous circumstance of possessing gold and silver hoards millennia in the making blinds us with its reflective light, numbs us with its latent ability to bring people together and channel human action towards decidedly valuable endeavors.
The financial crisis of the present time represents the clash between thousands of years of hoard-building empires and the global village that exists in the Information Age. If individuals wish to avoid further pain and disruption to their economic affairs, they must educate themselves on the dynamics of money and the human faculties it serves to amplify. Anything less and the Medium of Understanding changes us unknowingly, mesmerizes us with its magical ability to transform, and enables the poaching of our actions to what someone else deems valuable.