Much like our own nervous system concentrates in places like the spinal cord and brain (which has the highest level of neural density), our system of money concentrates in the world of high finance.
Big Finance plays a major role in pushing money into circulation, pulling it out, redirecting it at scale, and also controlling the entire digital payments infrastructure.
This central nervous system includes the actual issuers of money - which forks into central banks and commercial banks - but there’s also all the players like investment banks and hedge funds who design and trade contracts that scale up, steer, and complexify monetary movements, often via corporate structures.
Our brain has a motor cortex that translates our thoughts into action, sending impulses that make our limbs move. Similarly, financial centres like London, Tokyo, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, Frankfurt, and Dubai collectively create a transnational ‘motor cortex’ that has the capacity to induce mass action in the interconnected body of workers that form the global economy.
For example, a pension fund corrals together money from thousands of individuals into a huge ‘battery’ of monetary impulses, which they can release to charge up corporations seeking financing.
The true lifeblood of an economy is not money but people carrying out labour. But a heart can be made to beat through an electrical shock. Once a corporation is charged up through capitalisation, it can blast that charge out through the monetary nervous system like a defibrillator kickstarting thousands of human bodies into large-scale action.
This is how ten thousand labourers can be mobilised to make and assemble the components of an oil rig, and then operate it to extract the oil which their bosses can sell to customers…
As the product is sold, it sends a flash of money back up the circuit. Some of that money exits in the form of bonuses to management and tax to government, while the rest gets sent to recharge the batteries by giving investors the future money promised in their financial contracts. In this way interest payments accrue to creditors, while dividend payments accrue to shareholders.
The true lifeblood of an economy is not money but people carrying out labour. But a heart can be made to beat through an electrical shock. Once a corporation is charged up through capitalisation, it can blast that charge out through the monetary nervous system like a defibrillator kickstarting thousands of human bodies into large-scale action. This is how ten thousand labourers can be mobilised to make and assemble the components of an oil rig, and then operate it to extract the oil which their bosses can sell to customers…
It also helps us understand various monetary phenomena like inflation, which refers to a loss of mobilizing power in the impulses. If you were to send nerve impulses into an exhausted muscle that doesn’t have the nutrients to move, the impulses lose their power (or purchase) on the muscle.
Similarly, sending money into a situation where people and resources have hit a limit doesn’t mobilise action. The impulses fall flat, a process that ends up with shifts in the price level.
By contrast, a group of unemployed young people standing in front of an un-farmed field is like a muscle bursting with energy but lacking directives from nerve impulses.
They can be mobilized into action, and value-creation, through the issuance of new money.
So, the true ‘store of value’ in our society is human beings, everything we’ve created, and everything we can create within ecological systems.
The true scarcity is never monetary impulses. It’s these real resources that reside in our bodies and the earth.
Numbness
Big Finance might operate like a motor cortex, but the financial crisis of 2008 made it very apparent just how deranged this motor cortex can sometimes be.
Hundreds of thousands of workers were mobilized into constructing real estate that would stand empty, while precarious people were pushed into debt to buy it. Their desperate promises to pay back were bundled into packages and sold to mega-funds across the world. The financial sector was orchestrating a tragic dance, turning the global economy into something akin to a veering drunk losing their motor functions.
But, even when we’re not in crisis, the general direction of travel in our economy is like a dazed drift towards a cliff. We use up our planet’s resources in a short-termist drive for expansion while inequality deepens and power centralizes.
If money is the nervous system of the global economy, it contributes to an emergent ‘consciousness’ in our superorganism that’s often both delusional and disassociated, and a core aspect of this is numbness: an inability to register or act upon pain.
For example, when you look at something bad in our economy - such as the mass dumping of plastics into our oceans - you face a question as to where that badness emerges from. Activists might imagine that the source is the corporate sector, with its corrupt or callous executives. From another angle, however, corporations are just conduits for the financial sector. After all, most corporations are owned by large investment managers like BlackRock and Vanguard that are acting on behalf of players like pension funds and insurance funds. Those players, however, will always claim they’re acting on behalf of their beneficiaries, which may be you or me. Put simply, the financial sector claims to exploit the world on behalf of us, making us the source of the problems we revile, but none of us perceives that we have the agency to change that.
The first thing to come to terms with is the fact that the monetary nervous system might bind us together, but it also scales everything, loosens our direct connections to the outcomes of our actions, and reduces our relationships to each other (and to our ecologies) to numerical ratios. When a monetary economy is your primary means of survival, it becomes as if you’re tied into a nervous system that’s dulled out its pain receptors and can only ‘feel’ one type of thing - profit. When we’re plugged into a systemic entity that cannot sense anything except monetary gain, it steers us in a very particular direction.
Some people claim that this state of disassociation - in which we’re guided solely by monetary incentives - leads us to utopia, while others claim it leads us to destruction. Either way, the fund managers and corporates will say they have no choice: if they don’t act towards maximizing monetary profit, they’ll be outcompeted and destroyed by the market. So, if you ever hang out in mainstream finance circles, you’ll notice that most analysts suffer from a bad case of ‘capitalist realism’. This is a term, coined by the late Mark Fisher, that refers to the state of mind in which it’s literally inconceivable to imagine any mode of action that doesn’t involve optimizing for profit and growth.
This means, when faced with the myriad problems of the planet, most mainstream analysts will never allow their minds to consider a deep level recoding of our system. Rather, they’ll default to some altered variant of their existing principles. They’ll imagine that ecological degradation can be resolved with ‘sustainable growth’, and that inequality can be solved by ‘inclusive growth’. In essence, they tacitly acknowledge that we live in a system that’s numb to anything except profit, so rather than expecting our system to feel ‘pain’ at the pollution of the oceans, a sustainable growth proponent will seek to make it pleasurably profitable for our system to create a solution. Make it profitable to protect the oceans, or to fight climate change, or to combat inequality.
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To people like me, that looks a helluva lot like a shallow form of wishful thinking. It might lead us to the question of whether altering the monetary system - and it’s core institutions - might be a good vector for changing society, but a more immediate problem is that the agents of corporate capitalism are trying to centralize the monetary nervous system even further. You see, Big Finance controls the digital payments infrastructure, but this coexists alongside a peripheral nervous system that detaches from the central one. It’s called physical cash.
Cash is one component of our monetary system, and it’s locked into the same vast structures of interdependence as all money is, but its movement requires no corporate intermediation. It has a kind of peer-to-peer human ‘conductivity’ to it, with the impulse passing from hand-to-hand. In the current phase of global capitalism, cash has a relative skew towards localization and decentralization, but this clashes with the inbuilt default tendency of our system to seek out and destroy ‘friction’ in its relentless and never-ending desire to scale and burst outwards into new territories. Cash jams the corporate-underpinned drive towards large-scale automation, which is why it increasingly gets culturally demonized.
Amazon will not allow you to mobilize its warehouse workers, or its new supermarket workers, with coins.
No, you must route the impulses through a centralized conglomeration of data centers run by the likes of Mastercard and the banking sector.
When you zoom out, Big Tech and Big Finance have becoming the two hemispheres of the global mind, fusing through their natural synergies. Fed to machine learning, large language models and AI and I don’t know about you, but I sense it’s not the kind of mind we need for our global body.
And if cash is a peripheral system, crypto is a parallel state of collective consciousness, out of the central nervous systems reach, but that’s a story for another day…
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