This essay explores the nature of money and argues for the fictionalization of money through an examination of its value and finitude, building on Yuval Noah Harari’s argument that money is a fictional concept that doesn’t exist.
Money has become a very important part of modern society. Money is a constant concern for modern people. From those who are saddened by the lack of money to those who find happiness in the act of earning money itself, the influence of money is immense. As a result, it is easy for people to assume that money is real and that its value must exist. However, Yuval Noah Harari, author of ‘ Homo Deus,’ argues that money is a fiction. Harari explains that money is a way for powerful human organizations to create fictitious beliefs in the powerless, and to get them to actually obey them. I agree, and in this essay, I want to show why the existence of money, which is not mentioned in the book, is not real.
First, we need to think about what it means to be real. According to Martin Heidegger’s ontology, a being that is real is a being that is aware of its own finitude and makes agency within it. While we may not entirely agree with this view, it is undeniable that existence, at the very least, does not derive its basis from external sources, but only from the self. Therefore, we can define existence as follows A being that is real must have its reason for being, its value, derived from itself, and it must be finite. It cannot be infinite. If it doesn’t fulfill any of these conditions, it’s a fictitious entity that can’t be called real.
With this definition in mind, let’s take a look at the reality of money. Money has certain characteristics that make it unreal. First, the value of money does not come from itself. It is always derived from human labor. To put a value on the act of human labor to produce something needed, governments have created a system of money. Money is nothing more than a numerical representation of the value that can be assigned to human labor in an imaginary system. Why do people believe that money has value? It is because of the materiality of commodities in capitalist society. By commodity materialization, we mean that a person’s social relationship is manifested in his relationship to the material things he owns.
To talk a bit more about the system that the government has built, it has created a tool called money to facilitate the exchange of labor between people within society, and it has built a system that is deeply involved in human life. This system is capitalism. Therefore, all transactions in a capitalist society are not actually exchanging the value of money, but rather the exchange of labor between human beings, which is manifested in the relationship of substance to substance. The value of money does not come and go. One of the best examples of the fictitiousness of money is securities. The securities market is a market where various products such as stocks and bonds are traded, and the value of securities changes according to the fluctuation of stock prices based on trading volume or transaction amount. However, the market evaluates the value of the company whose bonds or stocks are listed on the market, i.e., how outstanding the sum of the labor of its members is, not the value of the numbers. In other words, what is evaluated in the market is the value of the company, not the value expressed in numbers. Nevertheless, it is money that makes humans hang on to numbers and mistake money for something real.
The second way in which money deviates from its true meaning is that it is never finite. As mentioned earlier, money is simply a number within a fictional system. This number can change freely in size within the larger fictional system of the market. An example of the fictitiousness of money from this perspective is the Money Multiplier effect. The money multiplier effect shows that under certain conditions, when the government releases a certain amount of currency into the market, the amount of currency actually released into the market is greater than that amount. To calculate the money multiplier, all that is required is that the bank lends out all of its capital, reserving only the reserve requirement of the government’s money supply. Individuals save all of their capital in banks. The reserve requirement is the ratio of the bank’s reserves to the total amount of deposits. If the amount of money printed by the government is M and the reserve requirement ratio is x (i.e. 100x%), the amount of money actually released into the market is calculated as M/(1-x). In other words, the amount of money supplied to the market is larger than the amount of money printed by the government. While the law is defined in order to give it a certain formula, in the real world, most bank money outside of the reserve ratio is used for lending. Therefore, it is obvious that if the government prints a certain amount of currency, the market will actually see a larger amount of currency. This example illustrates that the value of money is not constant and can be infinitely increased or decreased. This characteristic of money, which contradicts one of the great tenets of reality, is another indication that money is a fictitious entity.
In light of this, Yuval Noah Harari’s argument in the book is correct. Money can never be real, and its appearance is just a ploy by governments to keep the country running smoothly by keeping people attached to a fictitious entity. In the modern world, money is so influential that many people think it is real and that its value is the most important part of life. I would say to them: think about it. Is it the paper in your wallet and the numbers on your bank account that really have value? Or is it the ability to earn it?
