Money is the root of all evil.
Or at least that's what they want you to think. This phrase is just a misconstruction of the longer, more accurate phrase "The love of Money is the root of all evil".
I couldn't be farther from being a communist, but I also understand that capitalism in its purest form - at least in theory - ultimately leads to so much inequality, fueled mainly by egoism and always wanting more, that both radical ideas of going full commie or full capitalist is not the way to go.
I could go on and on about communism and capitalism, but I don't want to focus on that, instead I want to analyze the title of the post and set one of the most iconic and yet, hardly known situation where the concept of money brought into action many other concepts, mainly negative, into a society.
When Monkeys were taught about the concept of currency, wild things started happening
If you want to dive deeply into the study, here's a few sources 1, 2, 3, 4 because I'm not here to just paraphrase what happened in the study.
Alright, I'll give you a TL;DR just because I'm supposed to give some context instead of just writing about topics assuming the reader knows about it - which you should, as I said, this is one of the most iconic studies in relation to the concept of money, and if you are reading this on Leo Finance then you should know about this things.
Broadly - very broadly - what happened in The Monkey Economy study was: Scientists introduced the concept of money to a gang of Capuchin monkeys (pic below) which are not the brightest kid in the classroom, but hey they are monkeys and they have a well working brain. Capuchins are well known by having two drives in life, food and sex. The scientists showed the monkeys how exchanging a disc would in return get them food. After having successfully introduced the concept of buying, they introduced the concept of price and then rose the price of specific products the monkeys could exchange for a set amount of discs. After that - remember this is a very short TLDR - the concept of gambling was introduced and the monkeys learned it to perfection. A little bit after this, the monkeys learned by themselves the concept of ownership, intrinsic monetary value and selfishness, which then in turn opened the door for theft and bribery and a very simple form of altruism. In the end, the last concept that was self-introduced by the monkeys was prostitution.
It's almost as if once you introduce money into a society that is capable of thinking and learning, it will always deviate towards a society with a questionable morale, to say the least.
Now that you - obviously, hopefully - read all the sources after being interested by my badly written brief and probably even did some research by yourself, I want to dive deep into what this experiment means.
To me, the part that blew my brains was how these little, dumb monkeys came up with the concept of counterfeiting. These dudes were given blank discs that represent currency but then one of the most gangsta monkeys took a disc shaped piece of detritus from the enclosure, wrapped it in leaves, and then ‘paid’ the monkey hooker with it and ran off before the working lady unwrapped her fake money. If this doesn't strike you as wild then I have no idea what will.
I mean, it's crap like this that I find fascinating as hell because it makes you wonder how they come up with these concepts by their own and you start wondering if this could eventually lead to the same thought processes that we humans go through, including all the shit that we have in our society.
It is similar to how ancient cultures came up with the same concepts even though they never had any interaction, and now that our archaeologists discover ancient practices they find that we are basically the same when it comes to societal behaviors.
One thing worth noting is that Monkeys already were familiar with the concept of prostitution but the practice was food = sex. The fact that they can assign an arbitrary value to an object that has no inherent value (the disc) other than what the central bank says (the scientists that will trade food for X discs), is what goes beyond my amusement.
I was doing some research about animals and money because I thought this couldn't be the only experiment recorded of animals using currency for something and I found this chart:
Then I tried to find the studies related to these but I never found anything. If you know about these experiments/studies or know where I can read about them please leave a comment, I am dying to know if these are true or if I fell for the meme chart.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I'm not sure anyone really loves money. They love what they think they can get with money, and they fear what they think will happen if they don't have money.
Oh, I know many people who are so obsessed with money that I wouldn't doubt they love it, there are wild people out there man. Especially those who have a lot of money, not the ones who don't.
I'd say that the monkeys weren't actually introduced to the concept of money it the first place, as they've already had other means of transferring value between themselves. Every living organism is involved in trade in some kind of way. What the discs have brought to the equation was the ability to preserve the resources, so they can be used later. I think the reason that the monkeys eventually went corrupt is that the discs were fake money in a sense that it was given to them in exchange for nothing (no work had to be performed) and there was no fixed cap on it, so there was no way to put an objective price on it. I'd say that the experiment outcome was inevitable, rather than surprising :)
Exactly, but trade =/= currency. The discs introduced the concept of currency. Instead of 3 hens = 1 cow, a currency introduces 3 hens = 2 coins = 1 cow, but holding the coins gives you flexibility and the ability to play with demand and supply.
The arguments about Capitalism v. Communism fall apart when one realizes that Karl Marx is the founder of Capitalism.
Marx wanted to create a revolution; so he employed a maxim from the Art of War that the general that defines the battlefield wins the war.
Marx spent most of his career writing a three volume tome which described how rogues could use a corrupt financial system to control the people.
Marx is the father of capitalism. So, if you look at the world, you will see that Marxists are generally the most aggressive capitalists because they are following the lead of their master.
!WINE
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Hi @irivers, You Have No Enough WINEX Tokens To Make A Successful Call.
Please Stake at least 25.000 WINEX Tokens.
(We Will Not Send This Error Message In Next 24 Hrs).
Contact Us : WINEX Token Discord Channel
WINEX Current Market Price : 0.310
Swap Your Hive <=> Swap.Hive With Industry Lowest Fee (0.1%) : Click This Link
Read Latest Updates Or Contact Us
Pretty much, even though I would agree that the main difference between communism and capitalism is who gets to call the shots (government vs corporations) but yeah, they're both pretty similar once you look at the base.
Wow! Thats is truly fascinating! Im sure the monkeys didnt look at their fake money as swindling but merely a puzzling but effective way to obtain more food! Money is illogical really and i hope one day as technology advances it will become redundant and replaced by need and a limite and competitive desire to fullfil our needs and not our greed .. great post!!
It is pretty interesting, I was shocked the more I read about the study (and the other ones out there). I mean, in the end isn't that the same for us? We have some coins that we can exchange for goods and services, we understand the value behind the coins, as the monkeys understand that holding a disc means they can trade it for food.
This post has been manually curated by @bhattg from Indiaunited community. Join us on our Discord Server.
Do you know that you can earn a passive income by delegating your Leo power to @india-leo account? We share 100 % of the curation rewards with the delegators.
Please contribute to the community by upvoting this comment and posts made by @indiaunited.
Your content has been voted as a part of Encouragement program. Keep up the good work!
Use Ecency daily to boost your growth on platform!
Support Ecency
Vote for new Proposal
Delegate HP and earn more
Very interesting stuff!
I'm glad you liked it man, see you later for chess 💪