image by JamesKidsArts

Last fall, I wrote a piece about money’s place in our world, and how we must transform it to get to the elegant future we want. I sent this piece to my friend, the great economic thinker and writer Richard Kotlarz, and he wrote back to me a while later. Here’s a brief excerpt of our correspondence:

Me: In school we all learned that economies started with bartering—I’ll trade you my red stones for your black ones. But past a certain level of complexity, simple trading didn’t work well enough. So we invented placeholders—money—to make it a little easier to get what we needed.

RK: To call money a “placeholder” can be thought of itself as an empty linguistic placeholder that overlooks the fact that money is pregnant with life.  Witness how it has worked its way into every material and spiritual niche of existence in this world. There is no single definition of money.  In the earthly realm, asking “what is money?” is like asking “what is life,” “what is God” or “what is spirit”? There are no placeholders for those terms. It behooves us to impart of money living images that bespeak something of the burgeoning power it wields in life.

I read his response at the time, but it actually didn’t sink in until the other night. I was in bed, drifting off, when suddenly I sat up with a sentence in my head: “Money is a creative force!” And I realized that this placeholder stuff is not only inaccurate, but harmful! Let me explain ...

Just like Rich says, money is not a placeholder for anything. In and of itself, it is a powerful tool of creative force—the stuff we humans use to bring our ideas into reality.

When money is exchanged, it is an act of supporting what we have created, and believing in our ability to create. I believe that you have done something good, says a purchase. I believe that you will do something good, says an investment. Take my belief and keep going!

And the more people you can get to believe, the grander the good thing you can build. Maybe money started out as a placeholder, when people didn’t have much to trade besides that which can be seen, felt, and touched—perhaps five red stones can be the placeholder for a bearskin. But how many for the Brooklyn Bridge, or a trip to the moon? The placeholder analogy breaks down when projects get big and abstract, and when they exist in the future instead of the now.

In a talk I went to a few weeks ago, speaker Kona Goulet said that our current economic crisis is an ethical crisis, and not just for the folks who did the *seriously* unethical stuff, but for all of us. Since I’ve been pondering what Rich wrote to me, Kona’s words have taken on a new meaning.

If money itself is a creative force, then everything that exists in human culture right now has been created by us, wielding the tool of money. Every dollar we spend combines with others to create the world we live in, for good or ill. Money’s inherent creative capacity gives it great and potentially terrible power. It can be a destroyer, or a supple tool in our hands. The choice and the responsibility are ours.

The money-as-placeholder misconception works against our ability to connect with this truth. If money is a placeholder, then it’s apart from us. If it’s apart from us, then it doesn’t really matter much what we do with it. And if on top of that, our goal is to amass it rather than use it as an instrument of invention, then we really lose our way.

Do we want to live in a world full of gross industrialized food, or do want fresher, cleaner options? Do we want vital and educated people or malnourished and hopeless ones? Do we want a verdant earth or one that’s tapped out, gray, and inhospitable? We answer these questions in every expenditure and investment we make.

Of course, each of us is a work in progress, and part of world which is also a work in progress. It’s unlikely that we will blink our eyes and immediately go from unawareness to full consciousness with respect to the creative nature of money or anything else.

But we have to start to awaken to the way the world works. Creation is made up of all the decisions we make—all of them. And the more we understand about the forces we’re working with, the better choices we can make.

What if, when you wanted to buy something, instead of saying “I want this” you said “I stand wholeheartedly behind the existence of this”? Does that change what you’d want to spend your money on? How? Let us know what you think in the comments.