Faith

Most people immediately think of faith in God (or gods). I’ve realized how much our lives are based on faith, but not in a religious way at all.

Take money. It used to be connected to gold (as in worth its weight in gold, or a gold standard). Gold can be used for things, other than making things shiny. (We humans are REALLY into shiny objects.) Gold, however, is an actual thing, and can be used in many and versatile ways. It could be said that gold is actually worth something.

My money is just a number associated with my name. When I do work, I get more numbers added to my name. When I want to eat, I go to the store and exchange some of my numbers to, say, get some apples, and some sum is subtracted from the numbers associated with my name.

Since cash went off the gold standard, it all became very abstract. It’s just numbers. We have faith in those numbers meaning something to everyone. Dollars have a lot more faith associated with them than, say, Argentian pesos. People’s faith in those fluctuate all the time.

The value of money is just faith.

The question is, can we have faith in something more worthwhile? Once you have enough numbers associated with your name to have enough to eat, to have a decent (or even nice) roof over your head, to be able to go the doctor when needed, those numbers aren’t really worth much.

The best example of this faith is stamp collectors. Any stamp, even the most valuable in the world, is worth nothing to me. I don’t care about stamps. What if none of us collected money? What if we had enough numbers to have the stuff I mentioned before (food, housing, health care), and we just didn’t collect more than we needed? What if our faith in the value of money was transferred, or adapted, so we could have faith in each other and our communities as much as we have faith in the numbers associated with our names?

It could be a beautiful world.