Reality Sandwich | Beyond Life Inc: Talking with Douglas RushkoffIt was a fascinating interview.
The Vatican and central Rome did NOT build the cathedrals. The funds came from local currency, which was very different than money as we use it now. It was based on grain, which lost value over time. The grain would slowly rot or get eaten by rats or cost money to store, so the money needed to be spent as quickly as possible before it became devalued. And when people spend and spend and spend a lot of money, you end up with an economy that grows very quickly.
Now unlike a capitalist economy where money is hoarded, with local currency, money is moving. The same dollar can end up being the salary for three people rather than just one. There was so much money circulating that they had to figure out what to do with it, how to reinvest it. Saving money was not an option, you couldn't just stick it in the bank and have it grow because it would not grow there, it would shrink. So they paid the workers really well and they shortened the work week to four and in some cases three days per week. And they invested in the future by way of infrastructure -- they started to build cathedrals. They couldn't build them all at once, but they took the long view -- with three generations of investment they could build an entire cathedral, and their great-grandchildren could live in a rich town! That's how the great cathedrals were built, like Chartres. Some historians actually term the late Middle Ages "The Age of Cathedrals."
They were the best-fed people in the history of Europe; women in England were taller than they are today, and men were taller than they have been at any point in time until the 1970s or 80s (with the recent growth spurt largely the result of hormones in the food supply). Life expectancy of course was still lower; they lacked modern medicine, but people were actually healthier and stronger and better back then, in ways that we don't admit.
That was right before the corporation and the original chartered monopolies were created, before central currency was created and local currencies were outlawed. When everything gets moved into the center, things began to change...
...because people don't believe in that abstraction, because they're used to grain receipts being based in something real, precious metal was required for the king's currency -- silver, gold; they had to use something that was considered valuable so people would believe!
Fast-forward to the 1970s. After four or five centuries of people believing it, Nixon realized that people now DO believe, so the currency can be taken off the central metal and just be based on belief. That's when they started putting 'In God We Trust' on paper money, when it was taken off the gold standard!
For those who aren't too keen on putting forward the effort required to actually read something, here's some video of a different interview with the author.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Douglas Rushkoff | ||||
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I think I'll be reading this book in the near future.
11 comments:
...Juuuuuuuust so readers of this don't go spreading falsehoods, the potent factoid about "That's when they started putting 'In God We Trust' on paper money, when it was taken off the gold standard!" is not actually /true/. I'm sure he said that just to make a joke.
In actuality, the phrase was first put on the two-cent coin during the Civil War, when religious devotion had a resurgence. It then became an Act of Congress the same year that they added "under God" to the Pledge, and there was more of an anti-communist sentiment than anything.
In the full written interview he makes the distinction that "In God We Trust" was only on coins up until near that point.
It's still valid to point out a shift towards a faith based government and a faith based currency even if the timing was merely coincidental. In both it marks a shift from the tangible (government run by people and money backed by something) to an esoteric abstraction (something we have no way of proving even exists). Trust me.
Sure, but the timing wasn't even that close. The congressional act for adding the phrase to money was in the early fifties, and Nixon's shift away from gold standards wasn't until the seventies.
I agree that the point's valid, but the facts don't bear it out, which hurts what it otherwise a strong (and, IMO, really useful and overall positive) argument.
S'all I'm sayin'.
For all intents and purposes, one could say that the Dollar had been backed more by faith than gold ever since Breton Woods. Nixon simply made it official once it became obvious that the fiction could no longer be sustained.
The first Fiat Money (as opposed to Gold Standard money / Gold Certificates) printed by the US government was the "United States Note", which were printed starting in 1862, the second year of the Civil War and two years before the 1864 minting of the two-cent piece. Congress authorized/passed the printing of fiat money a total of three times over the course of the Civil War.
Relevant Wikipedia pages:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Notes
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-cent_piece_(United_States_coin)
So, that would seem to imply the general concept may have something to it - "In God We Trust" was added while the country was in the midst of a temporary suspension of the gold standard, and the legislature was still debating whether or not to return to it.
However, his Nixon timing association is definitely a fallacy (by several decades), and it does make you wonder about the sources and assumptions behind other points he makes.
At first I thought maybe he'd gone off-script and improvised in regards to the Nixon point, but he makes it in both interviews, so it seems far less likely to be an accidental misstatement (hence my need to delete my other posts).
Dead horse done still need beatin'.
What I see happening here is differing perspectives of the time line.
When talking about currency, his data is going back as far as the Roman Empire. He is talking about 2,300 years of money. He mentions things happening in the Middle Ages and nobody bats an eye that he is talking about a period that lasted several centuries. The rise of the merchant middle class took many generations. So did the eventual rise of the corporation which lead into the Renaissance.
From a historical perspective, 25 years from 'In God We Trust' to doing away with the gold standard is the same damn time! 2,300 years of currency and he is saying something that took place in a single generation, in a small section of the Common Era, could be said to have taken place at the same time.
Is it sloppy? Yes. Problem is, when most people think about the 1800's, they think of it as a single unit in history. The average mind sees the 1800's as kind of happening simultaneously and documented in those cool brown photographs of people sitting very stiffly. It won't be long until people think of the 1900's as a giant lump of history captured on film.
Searching through my own mind I find that my brain has a section for everything that happened after WWII up to Nixon's resignation. It splits the counter culture between rockers and hippies (and leaves the beatniks hanging), but the core of America remains the same during that whole period. Nixon seems to represent them rather well.
Flog the fallacy if you must. Viewing it as a part of the greater history, the two events coincided.
Fucking awesome. You rock, Jake.
Krys rocks. I merely put it in words that sound like my own.
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