Money.. If we want to move away from capitalism and towards a more sustainable way of living, we need to start thinking about our relationship with them.. To make it easier for you, i’d suggest to check out the special miniseries of the hidden brain podcast - money 2.0 - and I would start from the ‘emotional currency’ episode. This episode, with an anthropology focus, makes us re-think a little bit about what we learnt in school about bartering. But I won’t spoil it for you too much..
Let’s just say, bartering may not have been at all as it was taught to us in school, as an immediate exchange of two things: it may have been more a sort of a ‘gift economy’ (and if you have read my ‘Christmas science’ post, you may have already started realising that gift giving is not really that altruistic). An interesting extract from the article says ‘ the barter myth implies humans have always had a sort of quid pro quo, exchange-based mentality, since barter is just a less efficient version of money. But if you consider that other, completely different systems existed, then money starts to look like less of a natural outgrowth of human nature, and more of a choice.’ - who knows if our ancestors who apparently chose this had thought about the mess we would end up with, where money is a power that divides, that kills (well, humans do that - but money is nearly always the reason). So, should we choose to go back to a ‘bartering’ system? One where cooperation is at the centre? Some further reading on the topic BBC article Thesis
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