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While the animals of the planet had a respite from us, we humans, all 8 billion of us, faced off a global pandemic which was always, maybe, going to happen but please not now because we're busy: with economic growth, trade wars, the cost of living and the next wedding or holiday.
All of that came to a staggering halt that left us confused, and, at the same time, possibly open to a certain open-mindedness of "what next?". If we could stop doing all the things we had been doing, before it happened, perhaps we could do something else, something better, if we just had another chance. To do it all differently.
Here was a watershed moment (perhaps it is still here, but fading fast), a moment when we collectively contemplated our vulnerability to nature. What happened shocked us to our very core, we had progressed so far from the days of the plague. We have rockets and nuclear weapons and self-drive cars (well almost - ask Elon Musk). How could we be going back to where some microscopic bugs could strike fear into us and bring everything to a grinding halt?
Fortunately, it seems that it may have only been a temporary setback, like the many others that have come up in our long journey of survival. Nevertheless, it was a landmark moment in history and an opportunity for us to get the big picture: that we are still vulnerable to nature no matter how tech-savvy we have become. This is where things get a bit tricky, our own nature prevents us from seeing the light. Since the beginning our survival has always been about getting there first; being the fastest and the strongest. Actually, in some instances, it wasn't necessary to be first, but coming last was fatal when being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger. Whichever way you look at it, we are imbued with this human trait, ingrained by evolution; it is difficult for us to stop racing. What if we are missing something, what if we need to change? The one attribute our brains have, over all the other brains on the planet, is our ability to think; to think we are thinking. The thing is we are thinking, but we are thinking about money.
Just think about it for a moment. Everything revolves around money. When this happened is hard to say. Somewhere along the line we went up a level, we moved from staying alive to living it up, at least some of the time. My theory is this may have coincided with the discovery of alcohol and it's stimulating effect, albeit temporary. Possibly around the same time, we came up with money. We know that our ancestors bartered with each other, the step from that to money is sublime. It seems to me that the idea of money is our greatest invention. One could argue that fire wasn't our thing really, it was already in existence, long before we were. Money is pure magic, at different times money was conch shells, salt, and trade beads; but ultimately it was gold and silver. That was then.
Things progressed, most of the time we were focused on survival; we stored food and resources for the winter and that evolved into storing money for a metaphorical winter. When times were hard there was still some money to buy what we needed to survive.
That all went well until relatively recently when we came up with this brilliant idea of paper money. As we all know, the idea was rather than running around with all that gold you just had a "letter" from the bank saying they were keeping it for you. Thus, instead of handing over the physical gold, one could just pass the letter around. The next move came from the bankers; as they had all this gold lying around, why not lend it to someone else? Obviously, not the gold itself but another letter. This, in turn, became a promise to pay, on a nation's bank notes.
With nations came governments and like monarchs of old, they controlled the money. The Gold Standard was a solid plan that worked between nations. The idea was that the money a nation printed was backed by a stash of gold. This seemed to work, although I'm not entirely sure how they checked on each other's stashes. Money is always a question of confidence. and this compromise between metallic and paper money lasted until around the First World War. War changes all the rules and the result was the emergence of one nation's currency as the top dog, the US dollar aka The Green Back.
While the Dollar, and the Pound, continued to be backed by gold, many other currencies, were pegged, in turn, to the dollar. During the Great Depression confidence in money went out the window, and in the US something happened that I find hard to believe. With the lack of confidence in paper money, there was a big move back to gold as a way of escaping inflation. Roosevelt, who was President, at the time, made the radical move of demanding, by changing the law, that Americans sell their gold; coins, bars: any gold that wasn't jewelry, at a fixed price of around $ 20, to the government! It was suddenly against the law to own gold. Now if you ask me that was daylight robbery, especially in hindsight.
In turns out that this manoeuvre paid off surprisingly well. With no other options, the Americans and the rest of the world embraced the Dollar. I am digressing quite far into American territory here but after the Second World War the Dollar dominated global trade. Linking up with the Arabs and pricing oil in Dollars sealed the deal. If you wanted to buy oil it had to be the petro dollar.
Getting back to the wider view of money, or, the lack of it, there was more magic in the air. If we hadn't managed to save that money, for the proverbial winter, there was now the possibility to borrow it, against some future earnings. This is where it gets a bit more complicated. If we are going to borrow money, that we are going to pay back later, so that we can survive now; that's a great idea, but we have to decide how much we need, or, the bankers decide how much we can borrow, when we don't know for certain how much we might be earning in the future. Possibly we should also have a bit extra, for a few little luxuries and living it up. Enter, the credit card.
This is The Magic Faraway Tree (another recent read). There are an almost infinite number of products being offered on one platform or another. The limiting factor should be that there isn't enough money to buy all these so-called needs. That's where the ubiquitous credit card adds a twist. Whereas the need to borrow money used to be something akin to having holes in one's underwear, having a good credit rating is now something of value. How does one get a good credit rating? By borrowing lots of money and being able to pay the interest. There is an obvious Catch 22 here. Invariably, it all comes home to roost, at some point.
While credit in the private sector is something that can be contained; let's consider what the governments of theWestern world have come up with: what the Americans refer to as quantitative easing. What with one thing and another, they also needed to borrow some more money and they decided the easiest way to do that was to borrow it from themselves.
When the pandemic occurred, this concept of borrowing money for the present, from the future, took another quantum leap. The whole planet needed to take time off and isolate from each other but we also needed to get paid, because we needed to buy stuff. With the crisis at hand, the government had to step in and as quantitative easing was something already in acceptance, they just did a whole lot more of that.
So here we are. After that quick summary of how we got from conch shells to credit cards and imaginary money, it is clear that the magic is getting better all the time. Circling back to the planet and nature, these moves result in humanity being further removed from the reality of being part of the holistic nature of our planet; while at the same time, we are still part of the great experiment that is evolution. We are inextricably linked to the matrix of life on our planet; but money might be clouding our view. The next magic trick might be to bring money into harmony with nature. Making something out of nothing is magic, it's alchemy, have we really done that? Perhaps it's an illusion, in a modern world where we vote for people who tell us what we want to hear and give us what they don't have to give. Everything is possible, if we have the will to change things, we might have to swop "economic growth" for something else, rather sooner than later.We won't be able to buy another planet and no matter what Elon Muskrat says about Mars - I'm not buying it.
If the words of Chief Seattle are not going to become our epitaph; we have to learn to stop putting money before everything else. That's not going to be easy - but it is worth thinking about.
This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.