Money and I have a complicated history. It’s not like we’ve had a very intimate relationship, and there have been many times that I would regard it as more of an acquaintance than a friend. Because money seems to be causing distress in its relationship with so many other people as well, there was a time, about 10 years ago, that I severed our relationship for almost an entire year.
This is not to say that I don’t like money. I think it has extraordinary potential. However, I don’t think that it is always understood very well, and as a tool, it has not always been used by people who wield it in order to get the most potential out of it for all involved. Instead, it has regularly been used to enable mental illness and often used as a weapon.
Nevertheless, I feel that it is similar to sex, power, and faith in that they have all been major contributors to the world we know, and yet, they have also been sorely misunderstood. So after I attempted my year of living without the use of money, I started looking into the history of money, and I found that it was remarkably linked to sex, power, and faith in the development of what we have come to know as civilization.
Considering the historic levels of economic inequality we currently face, with 1% of the population now hoarding the majority of the wealth, I think it would do us well to understand the origins and evolution of this entity we call money better than we do. As the #metoo movement continues to swell after a few millennia of women being treated as second-class citizens, and with a growing number of people wanting to opt out of our traditional gender identification roles, we should probably gain a better understanding of how that has played out as well. And of course with the Black Lives Matter movement still filling the streets with protests over the systemic racism that has infused our hierarchies of power, and the many people who still go to war at the behest of people who don’t actually have their best interests at heart, we really need to understand the power struggles that have forged our concepts of government and statehood over the years. And lastly, since the character of God from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition seems to have put all of this in motion through his undisputed perfect will, we would be wise to understand the history of the notion of Faith as well.
To do this, I wrote a book called Money, Sex, Power & Faith: Questioning the Building Blocks of Civil-ization. After writing and releasing the book, I had a few good reviews and even had a mentor of mine call it a “deep and historical, multicultural tour de force.” Recognizing that people don’t read books as often as they once did, I produced the audiobook last year, and since then, I have had visions of turning it into a web series. And so, chapter by chapter, I am seeking out the visual representations of all that I have written and will be releasing the story of how our culture has developed by weaving together debt, patriarchy, violence, and religion, and how we evolve from here through my web series Money, Sex, Power & Faith.
