I find these allegories rather confusing than enlightening. I also don't buy into the idea that a sheet of music should represent a collapse of time. But that's just my personal opinion; others may feel differently.
I think I once cited Konrad Lorenz's insight that you can't be loyal to a dog because they have a short lifespan. But you can be loyal to a family of dogs, even if their characters may differ from generation to generation. I find this dissolution of the self much more understandable, even if it's projected onto dogs.
Scarlett Johannson makes some very interesting statements about time and existence here. I don't want to say they're well-founded statements, but they do give an impression of the relativity of existence. Alexander Dugin also cites this concept of Dasein in his "Fourth Political Theory" as a concept of Heidegger, who calls for a "society-focused Dasein" in which humans perceive themselves as part of a community. This is a challenge to the methodological individualism that characterizes contemporary liberalism and the economic theory based on it.
And then there is the systemic error that involves conceiving interest as a means of ensuring economic sustainability and not as a means of enriching one's own ego...
I love this insight of Lorenz's that you bring up. It vividly illustrates the idea that we're part of an interconnected sequence, pattern, or series. Not the individuals we appear to ourselves to be in each moment.
I haven't seen the movie Lucy, but the clip you linked seems to be exploring the same idea: that our illusory moment-to-moment existence as individuals arises from the limited way we perceive time.
I'm also loving that you can see where I'm going with this. Finance measures VALUE across time, and admits of the same calculus-based mathematics as Newton's physics. It has the power to create a bright future that closely matches human ethical intuition, AND the power to glorify individual ego at collective expense.
We are so sick with ego that we're careening toward the latter. Can anyone doubt it? But it's not the first time humanity has stood at this particular historical crossroads...that's the preoccupation here at System Failure.
"Finance measures VALUE across time..." Let's get more specific. "Finance" is a term consisting of the elements "means of payment" and "debt relationships," and has an operational logic that links both elements. To make a long story short: Means of payment have the exclusive function of ensuring the settlement of liabilities. This has nothing to do with value or other euphemisms usually associated with the term "money." In this respect, Kocherlakota's approach of "Money is memory" is also misguided, because "money" (the means of payment) has no memory. As always, he confuses both elements here.
Debt relationships have a memory because, once concluded, they help determine economic behavior for the future. This should be obvious. And debt relationships are also responsible, via an indirect mechanism, for linking means of payment to value: the costs of production are divided by the unit output of production to obtain a cost price. In the simplest case, this is a simple rule of three. Add a markup for profit calculation, and the offer price is ready. One can complicate this as much as one likes, but the principle always remains the same.
The linking of money with value is, however, merely a mental construct, which may be sufficient for everyday use, but lacks analytical significance. This can be seen in the fact that a central bank does not report its own cash as an asset on its balance sheet. Or in the fact that money is not transferred because of a service, but because one has entered into a monetary debt with the contract and now has to pay that debt. The fact that this debt was incurred because a service is to be acquired in return does not change the fact that money is transferred because of a monetary debt.
This connotation, that money is associated with a service (exchange of money for goods), is responsible for the chaos that is taking place in monetary theory. One could also say that monetary theory still concerns itself with the experiential object "money" while continuing to ignore the knowledge object "money." If you're looking for an example of scientific failure, this is it. Or to put it another way, we're still dealing with high priests in this field who cloak their own inability to think analytically in the garb of a quantity theory in which even the units aren't well-defined.
It should come as no surprise that, with this finding, the discussion about monetary theory, and even worse, about monetary policy issues, is lost in an inextricable tangle of partially contradictory recommendations. What did Lucy say at the end of the clip?
Because of your comments, Renée, I can now see that I missed a GOLDEN opportunity here. There's a brilliant parallel, just waiting to be made, between (1) mistaking the ego for the self and (2) mistaking money ("means of payment") for value.
Said another way:
The real structure of our economy lies not in money, but in the web of debt relationships that connect us all across time.
Similarly, the real structure of humankind lies not in our individual egos, but in the web of social relationships that connect us all across time...
Yes, of course. The web of debt is also a social connection, because there is no claim without the corresponding liability.
But this aspect fits perfectly with your topic, because your starting point was the obligation that results from a loan. If this inspires you for the following posts, all the better...
The part about Plato / Socrates reminds me of Walt Whitman who wrote in "Song of Myself":
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes."
Ha! Outstanding, thanks for the quote, Jason
I find these allegories rather confusing than enlightening. I also don't buy into the idea that a sheet of music should represent a collapse of time. But that's just my personal opinion; others may feel differently.
I think I once cited Konrad Lorenz's insight that you can't be loyal to a dog because they have a short lifespan. But you can be loyal to a family of dogs, even if their characters may differ from generation to generation. I find this dissolution of the self much more understandable, even if it's projected onto dogs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIal4k5kR3k
Scarlett Johannson makes some very interesting statements about time and existence here. I don't want to say they're well-founded statements, but they do give an impression of the relativity of existence. Alexander Dugin also cites this concept of Dasein in his "Fourth Political Theory" as a concept of Heidegger, who calls for a "society-focused Dasein" in which humans perceive themselves as part of a community. This is a challenge to the methodological individualism that characterizes contemporary liberalism and the economic theory based on it.
And then there is the systemic error that involves conceiving interest as a means of ensuring economic sustainability and not as a means of enriching one's own ego...
Thanks for another incredible comment, Renée!
I love this insight of Lorenz's that you bring up. It vividly illustrates the idea that we're part of an interconnected sequence, pattern, or series. Not the individuals we appear to ourselves to be in each moment.
I haven't seen the movie Lucy, but the clip you linked seems to be exploring the same idea: that our illusory moment-to-moment existence as individuals arises from the limited way we perceive time.
I'm also loving that you can see where I'm going with this. Finance measures VALUE across time, and admits of the same calculus-based mathematics as Newton's physics. It has the power to create a bright future that closely matches human ethical intuition, AND the power to glorify individual ego at collective expense.
We are so sick with ego that we're careening toward the latter. Can anyone doubt it? But it's not the first time humanity has stood at this particular historical crossroads...that's the preoccupation here at System Failure.
"Finance measures VALUE across time..." Let's get more specific. "Finance" is a term consisting of the elements "means of payment" and "debt relationships," and has an operational logic that links both elements. To make a long story short: Means of payment have the exclusive function of ensuring the settlement of liabilities. This has nothing to do with value or other euphemisms usually associated with the term "money." In this respect, Kocherlakota's approach of "Money is memory" is also misguided, because "money" (the means of payment) has no memory. As always, he confuses both elements here.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr218.pdf
Debt relationships have a memory because, once concluded, they help determine economic behavior for the future. This should be obvious. And debt relationships are also responsible, via an indirect mechanism, for linking means of payment to value: the costs of production are divided by the unit output of production to obtain a cost price. In the simplest case, this is a simple rule of three. Add a markup for profit calculation, and the offer price is ready. One can complicate this as much as one likes, but the principle always remains the same.
The linking of money with value is, however, merely a mental construct, which may be sufficient for everyday use, but lacks analytical significance. This can be seen in the fact that a central bank does not report its own cash as an asset on its balance sheet. Or in the fact that money is not transferred because of a service, but because one has entered into a monetary debt with the contract and now has to pay that debt. The fact that this debt was incurred because a service is to be acquired in return does not change the fact that money is transferred because of a monetary debt.
This connotation, that money is associated with a service (exchange of money for goods), is responsible for the chaos that is taking place in monetary theory. One could also say that monetary theory still concerns itself with the experiential object "money" while continuing to ignore the knowledge object "money." If you're looking for an example of scientific failure, this is it. Or to put it another way, we're still dealing with high priests in this field who cloak their own inability to think analytically in the garb of a quantity theory in which even the units aren't well-defined.
It should come as no surprise that, with this finding, the discussion about monetary theory, and even worse, about monetary policy issues, is lost in an inextricable tangle of partially contradictory recommendations. What did Lucy say at the end of the clip?
"Ignorance brings chaos, not knowledge."
Because of your comments, Renée, I can now see that I missed a GOLDEN opportunity here. There's a brilliant parallel, just waiting to be made, between (1) mistaking the ego for the self and (2) mistaking money ("means of payment") for value.
Said another way:
The real structure of our economy lies not in money, but in the web of debt relationships that connect us all across time.
Similarly, the real structure of humankind lies not in our individual egos, but in the web of social relationships that connect us all across time...
Yes, of course. The web of debt is also a social connection, because there is no claim without the corresponding liability.
But this aspect fits perfectly with your topic, because your starting point was the obligation that results from a loan. If this inspires you for the following posts, all the better...