This applies to the entire culture as well.

We are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, reciprocal reality and one major consequence of this is that we treat money as a signal to extract from the noise of society and the economy, but markets require money to circulate.

So ever more has to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted are devised. Resulting in an enormous bubble of financial speculation.

Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, but a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, while fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, while the hall closet is a store. The average five year old senses the difference, but economists lack that level of insight.

As a medium, money is an accounting device, a voucher system, with the asset backed by a debt. Even gold backed currencies are a reciept for some quantity of gold.

Consequently, in order to store the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be created. Which is all good, if this relationship is kept in mind. Given much of this debt is public, the secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth. Try to imagine the capital markets, without the Federal government siphoning up trillions in otherwise surplus capital. Where would it go otherwise? Derivatives? Apple stock?

Yet in our linear focus, we lose sight of this necessary relationship. Given a lot of this money gets spent on a military industrial complex that lost its primary motivation, with the end of the Cold War thirty years ago, we are now blowing up other countries to spend the money, in order to borrow more and store more money! Which would explain how we can have such strategically inept wars and no one is held to account.

The fact is that there simply are not the investment opportunities to save for what we need, but we do save for many of the same reasons, from raising children and housing, to healthcare and retirement, that if we invested in these needs directly, as community assets and networks, rather than trying to save for them individually, we would have stronger communities and healthier environments, as stores of value, not just resources to be mined.

After tens of thousands of years, we are reaching the edge of the global petri dish and it’s time to realize the world really is round, not flat.