The Icy World of Money

A group of Inuit men and one white man sit outside in a circle and talk in the middle of a vast, white landscape on Baffin Island, part of what is now Nunavut in far northern Canada. Despite the frigid temperature, they’re sitting comfortably, sipping tea and eating biscuits, on the blindingly bright, frozen sea that stretches in all directions. The scene is from the extraordinary Inuit film, One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk. It’s 1961. Noah and his Inuit companions are wearing snow-white parkas with hoods over their heads. They are nomadic people, out on a seal hunt that day in a frozen land that they love. The sole white man wears a dark parka and speaks with Noah and the group through an interpreter. He is an Indian agent known to them as “Boss,” an employee of the Canadian government, sent there to persuade Noah and his nomadic community to move their families into a settlement. Their children will go to school, he explains. Each family will have a wooden house with a heater. They will get money every month for each child.

Noah is very skeptical about what the children will learn and from whom, and what they will do with the learning later. What will he and his fellow hunters do? They can earn money as guides, says the agent. “Money,” sniffs Noah, and walks off. When he returns, he asks one of the other hunters, “Do you know about money?” “I heard of it,” says the other. “But I don’t understand it.”

I felt much the same way when I read an article in the New York Times about Bitcoin, and how it is an energy hog using so much computing power and electricity (more than the country of Norway) that it is contributing to global warming. How many of us understand Bitcoin, or for that matter, money? People who claim to be experts on money talk about things such as retained earnings, bond yields, hedge funds, or (my personal favorite) short-selling.  But I wonder if even they understand it at its core, or if they’ve forgotten.

I try to remember that money is simply something we use to help us trade for things. It’s also just a cultural agreement. It’s not a chair, table, or a piece of fish. You can’t eat money, though most of us find it hard to eat without it. It’s also not power, or status, or even security  – unless, that is, we say so. Money is only worth what we agree that it’s worth.

We seem to be getting farther and farther away from understanding that basic agreement. The more complex money becomes, the more it becomes an end in itself, and the more we become tools of what was once a useful tool. Complexity makes it so easy to forget.

Then there is greed, the most insidious threat to the reasonable use of money. The unbridled desire to be rich, to accumulate more and more money, way beyond what we need -- it’s an ancient curse. Even the Roman Catholic Church, one of the wealthiest institutions in human history, calls it one of the seven deadly sins. Today it’s a strangling obsession, at its worst a madness, a disease, often resulting in terrible crimes along with suffering for a great many.

I don’t understand much about money, but I know that it’s just money. When we forget that, it becomes dangerous. Noah Piugattuk, the Inuit leader, is instinctively wary of it. It’s not just fear of the unknown; he sees how it might play a role in shattering his community and their way of life.  As for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, how many more complicated instruments of greed can our psyches and environment handle?

To borrow from Henry David Thoreau, who was talking about the cost of something but whose thought I will extend to money itself:  Money is “…the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.”

Money Talks

You made me. You wanted me and you made me.

I started out as a useful tool. With my help you traded goods, pleasantries, trust. I used to bring home the bacon.

Your rich imagination – that’s where I came from. But now you only imagine getting rich.

You’ve dirtied me. You’ve lied and raped and killed for me. I never asked you to.

You’ve laundered me. A lot of me lives in sheltered offshore accounts. Just like your days, they’re numbered.

I also live with ordinary people. They think about me all the time. Mostly they have no idea.

I once was bullion. Then coin. Then paper. Then plastic. Then pixel. I’m more and more cryptic.

I used to sit snug in your wallet. Now I never know where I am, what I am.

I get more and more remote. Or is that you?

An object of desire. A power play. A starch for ego. That’s what I am to you.

What will you not do for me? Almost nothing. But not for me. For you. Always just for you.

Sometimes I think I’m going out of fashion. I’ve lost currency. But no, there you are again, grasping. You  want to have your way with me.

You keep careful ledgers of my movements. Or you don’t. Part of you thinks it’s all the same. Part of you knows it isn’t.

You count and count me. I can’t count on you.

You’re drunk on me. I’m wasted.

I keep you awake at night. But you’re no fun anymore. If it’s not worry, it’s scheming. If not scheming, fawning. I hate fawning.

No matter how much of me you possess, you feel poor. You can never get enough of me.

In the backroom of your psyche you shiver. Your days are a tight tourniquet. You shoot up dollar lust.

You think you’re buying time with me, but really you’re selling it. Either way, you’re running low.