[발췌: B.Scott's] Breaching the monetary Matrix: Five exercises to help you understand money (2014)

본래 출처(original source): Brett Scott (2014), "Breaching the monetary Matrix: Five exercises to help you understand money", CONTRIBUTORIA, July 2014.

저자 블로그(author's blog): http://suitpossum.blogspot.kr/2014/07/understand-money.html

※ 발췌 (excerpts):

"Like everyone else you were born into bondage, 

born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch, 

a prison for your mind."

This is a line from ^The Matrix^. Morpheus is explaining to Neo that he's actually stuck in a nightmare prison-world enslaved to computers. ^The world is not as you think Neo, but I can set you free, provided you take the red pill.^

In some ways Morpheus resembles one of those single-agenda zealots who goes around telling people that they have a certain secret truth that will liberate them, like the guy who corners you in a pub and says, "Don't you realise we're trapped in a corporate prison. The Bilderberg Group owns the world's governments!"

Morpheus, however, is also different to the average conspiracy theorist. The key dynamic in ^The Matrix^ is that the power structure he's trying to reveal is invisible in all ways, an immersive totality that transcends the world of identifiable 'things'. He spins no tales of illuminati hiding in Goldman Sachs, or secret meetings between elites in Swiss cantons.

The problem with the average conspiracy theorist is that their targetsㅡsuch as corporationsㅡare too obvious. Corporations may be giant, semi-mortal entities that vaguely resemble autonomous hive-minds bent on cultural hegemony, but they often do it bluntly, pushing cheesy propaganda and brandishing gadgets at us, lobbying politicians, and so on. In the end, there are ways for people to exert influence over them, and they occasionally disintegrate. Corporate power is subtle, but not that subtle.

If anything in the world actually resembles Morpheus' conspiracy, I'd say it is ^money^ itself. Money is extremely subtle. We think of the monetary system like we think of air, or languageㅡas something that surrounds us and that we take for granted. We are born into a monetary system we cannot smell, or taste, or touch, so obviously normal as to be virtually invisible.

Indeed, when we're asked to describe money, we often give fuzzy, imprecise descriptions, despite the fact that we may use it everyday. Even those who work in the financial sector, and who spend all their time designing financial instruments like bonds to steer money from one place to another, frequently cannot tell you precisely what money is. Take, for example, the anti-hero of The Wolf of Wall Street, a hotshot broker immersed in money, but who literally has no idea of what it is, and what's more, is controlled by it like a puppet.

I find money intensely mysterious, and there are no Matrix-style red pills that can be taken to help one deconstruct it. ( ... )