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Since when did caring about money become such an important virtue? It's like making the best plumber a heroic pillar of society. An important role yes, but hardly the divine figure that the wolf of wall street inspires.

Because we figured out how to use it as a weapon. It started out as life infrastructure but then became a weapon. As a weapon it absorbed a lot of yang energy and imbued it's profession with many heroic virtues. To wield money well was to wield Excalibur.

The darkness is in how we figured out to use it as a weapon. Money as a weapon only works on stupid people.

What Money as God does is that it re-orients societies into a value hierarchy based on the manipulation of money. This turns society itself into a "spear".

A society that is a Money Spear is very powerful. It has a decent degree of correlation with intelligence so the more knowledgeable people are making the more important decisions.

Though at the top pure knowledge isn't enough. Knowledge isn't the god, Money is. The top consists of people who know how to handle vast swaths of money to make it grow.

A Money Spear society will have better weapons and also make far better macro-scale decisions.

It utterly crushes Physical Strength societies (barbarian tribes) and even Whoever Has the Most Guns Societies (which often implode from money mismanagement)

This society where it is organized in a way so that people who can make "money" "grow" are valued as the most useful is the best society we've had so far. Valuing people based on other stuff just doesn't come close.

One of the reasons high school is terrible in the U.S. is b/c it's a physical strength society. Kids have huge size differences at that age combined with the social emphasis on football.

Valuing people based on who their parents were or how pure their bloodline is also doesn't work. Humans just aren't very good parents. (Though good communities in the aggregate *are*, takes a village to raise a child.)

Besides better macro decisions. (The high school jock or the used car salesman don't end up making National Economic Policy) what really makes Money Spear the most powerful weapon shape for a country is that it's recursive.

The best money managers are the best because they can manage, identify, and train good money managers. Because money management lends itself to recursion it allows for snowflake-like incredibly robust scaffolding for society. Like carbon nanotubes or something.

At each level in society, people can roughly point you to "up" or "down" and tell you how to get there. Society becomes a paved road rather than a wild jungle.

At the top of these pyramids you can have single individuals making massive amounts of money because of how many layers they seeded. Each layer a recursive and thus SIMILAR to every other layer. Each layer looks at the others and think "I could do that." and are RIGHT.

Countries who worship Money are granted great demon-like powers. But Money as God has some weaknesses:

Money has gravity and over time it loses it's ability to actually "grow" in a lively sense. It's just like a black hole sucking up everything it touches. Over time it's no longer possible to use "can make money grow" as a useful measure of ability.

(Reading and writing similarly are no longer valued skills when they would make you valued scribes in ancient times.)

It's still quite valuable now. Many CEOs are not just trust fund babies having some fun. Many *are* very good people to have in positions of leadership. They understand the fractal scaffolding needed despite the heated societal arguments around the money as infrastructure problem

It is getting less so though I think. E.g. I've rarely felt that my managers in my career have actually provided me any leadership.

Still though, a skeleton of money managers is the best society scaffolding we've come up with so far. I'm quite dubious of the "programmers" as best societal scaffolding.

The theory is that because each programmer can have leverage over thousands/millions of machines the structure is very lightweight and very strong.

However this feels like a cyborgy sterile kind of world because it doesn't use actual Humans as the brick and mortar of Human Society. It's the Impossible Meat version of human society.

Yeah it does have some merit, especially is you add in moral arguments, but it's also kinda weird and untested. Yes yes, factory farming and coal are bad but immediately replace ALL school cafe food with Impossible Meat and Soylent starting tomorrow? r u super sure???

Plus add in the fact that programmers don't tend to be highly representative of the average human. They might do something crazy like make the world into a giant MMORPG. You'd have to like..follow the direction on ur phone to grind for resources or something stupid like that.

Money comes in to save the day again (sorta) because such a society does not let Linus Torvalds make huge sweeping decisions that affect entire nations and human communities. Instead decisions go to people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

Amazon Prime? Pretty cool. Electric Cars? Pretty cool. "Should these guys continue making decisions for the world?" "Yeah I guess. seems ok to me I don't have a better idea."

Back to the original invisible mountain thing. So while each small individual human ecosystem can be based on its own value hierarchy they often don't scale. The money-manager value hierarchy(aka Capitalism) is the one that scales best so far based on history.

The thing they're trying in China is really weird. It's just Capitalism 2.0 but they're calling it Communism 3.0 and yet is also being derided as Authoritarianism 1.0.