Money allows you to delegate reach. When all you have is threat of violence as a coordination mechanism, you're limited to physical vicinity. Money can coordinate across continents and cultures.
Steelmanning "Money is Important": Society has a few mechanisms for social control. Guilt, shame, "Follow the will of God", and most importantly, holding a gun to someone's head. i.e Threat of Violence.
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Because so much of modern life is delegated, there needs to be a Strong mechanism of control. The reason we can own a house, or stuff in general, is because the person managing the piece of paper that says what belongs to who is scared of losing their source of money.
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A vagabond hippie mountain guru is the opposite of a shining beacon of responsibility. You can't tether anything to the untethered and you need tethers to solidify reality. The core heart of society is the faith that Social Reality is Important and Should Be Maintained.
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that wall street is (stereotypically) full of "greedy traders" is a feature, not a bug. If the people running a system that requires money to be important don't care about money, then that system collapses.
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It's like holding a nerf gun to someone's head: "You'd better make smart decisions or else I'll shoot this foam dart at you!"
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The more you care about money, the more effective you are within a society that controls via money. You're more sensitive to the environmental signals. There's strong correlation to greedy behavior and greedy individuals but also correlation with 'higher-level' macro experts.
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Because of money's proximity to the Threat of Violence mechanism, it feels 'dirtier' than other mechanisms of control. We killed god, so the opposite of coordination via money is coordination via ideals. E.g. politics and say the BLM movement.
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To understand money you have to understand the mechanism of violence and its critical role in the universe. (Cats as obligatory carnivores are a living representation of the necessary pain and suffering involved in life.)
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When given a choice between enforcing certain conventions via money or guns, money is less violent. History is shit show of the downsides of violence as an enforcement mechanism.
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There is a strong argument though that money is less indirectly violent but overall still produces the same amount of violence. E.g. I suspect a viking warrior would rather die and enter valhalla than drown in debt and homelessness, having no idea why he is abandoned by society.
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What i think happens is that the violence is amortized into the future instead of hitting you all at once. The violence is spread out over time. Instead of a sharp intense temporary pain, it's a chronic ache. A chronic ache that spills into every one of your interactions...
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Overall, money is a shitty solution just like expecting everyone to have a high IQ is a shitty solution just like expecting all women to be perfectly beautiful is a shitty solution. (IQ is analogous to beauty as something men are judged on and has a strong genetic portion)
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The ability to deal with violence is the ability to deal with the ugliness of reality. Money is a blindfold that forces normalizes and homogenizes.
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Money is hugely important if a society's response to any sort of ugliness is to "Kill it with fire!" (shame, embarrassment, guilt, ostracism, etc..) And a society's response is just a bundle of individual responses.
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So.. to 'save the world' is to 'save my world' is to accept the ugliness that arises within. The self sees self as ugly because it is more privy to inner reality than curated image. Reality always falls short of the Ideal. Ideals literally are "That which shames reality."
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If shame isn't working out for you as a self-improvement mechanism, then it's working out even less when you use it on others. This 'pain' of being ugly to yourself is your inner 'higher' self telling you to reject your parents/society's threat-of-violence mechanism.
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