Money as a System of Control (2017)
We do a poor job of being inclusive. I think most of that is not intentional.<p>If it&#x27;s written in English, it&#x27;s not because the author seeks to exclude people who speak something else. It&#x27;s because I the author knows English.<p>Getting anything to work at all is hard. It&#x27;s made harder in a highly multicultural world of billions.<p>If you think only of your culture, you get a colonial system. Europeans came to the US and saw <i>wilderness</i>. They did not recognize lands actively managed by a mobile society with a completely alien culture.<p>Trappers would show up first. Natives felt there was enough to share and saw no reason to forbid their activities or kill them. The trappers operated much like the Natives.<p>Settlers followed. Settlers did not operate like Natives. They laid claim to specific plots of land, usually the best plots. They often showed up while there was no current presence of people. When Natives returned to the area, as they tended to do seasonally, the settlers saw them as trespassers. They didn&#x27;t recognize that they were the trespassers.<p>Agricultural societies can readily outcompete hunter-gatherer societies. You produce more per acre if you cultivate the land. So the conflict was probably inevitable.<p>I don&#x27;t know the solution here. But I don&#x27;t think that seeing the exclusion of the masses as intentional despotism is particularly helpful.<p>Everyone decries the downside of regulation when they have it. They fail to recognize the benefits.<p>Before we had regulation, fire fighters from neighboring towns couldn&#x27;t help in a serious emergency because their equipment wasn&#x27;t compatible. They would show up, then find they couldn&#x27;t connect their hoses because it was a different size.<p>When I was a child, the Swiss were famous for their neutrality during WW2. That was seen as virtue. At some point, that narrative changed and I began seeing stories about how the Swiss were guilty of being Nazi collaborators due to their neutrality.<p>Most things are a two-edged sword. We laud them when we can see how it benefits us. We attack them when we are the ones getting hurt.<p>Designing good systems that work well for everyone is tough. It&#x27;s made all the tougher when you want it to serve billions.<p>That&#x27;s not nefarious intent. That&#x27;s just how it is.