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Dear friends,
Do you remember your first encounter with money, and what kind of feelings it stirred in you?
My relationship with money began before I was even born.
As some of you know, my dad was a money historian and coin dealer. His love of history imbued this topic of money with mystery and meaning for me long before I had a brain capable of logical thought. As a child, I knew money as gold and silver coinage that connected us mere mortals to the spiritual deities governing the earth from the cosmos.
Today, money signifies survival. Or power. It can bring us together, and it can bring us to our knees.
But what is its true nature and purpose?
Joining me to explore the intersection of money, law and society is
- an author, fellow Substack writer, philosopher and humanitarian.I loved this conversation.
We explore what it looks like to create a healthier relationship with money, law, individuation and freedom - by going back in time to prior eras of human history, and by taking a sober look at current reality.
Max takes us on a journey through the sharing ethos of paleolithic tribes, to the rise of settled agriculture, the formation of proto-states, and the evolution of law and money within Greek and Roman society.
With philosophical, social and economic wisdom, Max describes how our ancient instincts for reciprocity and trade gave way to systems of fiat law and fiat money, exposing the devil's bargain humanity made by outsourcing protection to governments and centralized powers.
Fiat, for those of you that don’t know, means “by decree.”
What we have in much of the world today is fiat money (currency issued by private corporate powers) and fiat law (social rules issued by nation states that have been captured by corporate powers), which have merged to create a monstrous superstructure seeking to control every aspect of human activity - by decree.
In order to move forward, sometimes it’s critical that we look back - to see how we got where we are today; to conduct an honest reckoning of our individual and collective weaknesses that contributed to the current crisis; and do our best to integrate those lessons so we don’t repeat them in the future.
Why should we care about money’s origins?
At first it may seem strange, this expansion I am currently in - from creating content exclusively about the body, fascia, the nervous system, pain, trauma and healing - in order to write and record podcasts about money and law (among other topics).
But for anyone paying attention, all of these things are interconnected. That is what fascia taught me. As the communication highway of the body, fascia connects us to ourselves, to each other, to the cosmos and this planet.
I’ve come to see fascia as the core of social economy within the human organism, acting as both medium of exchange and recorder of all physical and spiritual transactions happening inside of us - from the memories and habits that are imprinted there, to the light photons exchanged for energy production by mitochondria, and the phononic vibrations of our own resounding “I am” when we use our voice. Fascia’s role is to facilitate communication and the trade of “goods” and services within our organism. When fascia becomes diseased, our whole organism suffers.
Externally, it is money that circulates, touches and connects everything in modern life, often invisibly, yet leaving a record along its every pathway. When monetary ecosystems become diseased, the whole of human society suffers.
So, what is money?
Money evolved into coinage around 600 B.C., emerging from the Mystery temple of Ephesus, first, and then from other initiation centers in and around ancient Greece. For the first time in human history, the sacred metal silver - representing spiritual Moon forces and previously reserved exclusively for ceremony and ritual use by priests and priestesses - was sent into human society as coins with sacred images depicted on them, connecting us to a shared spiritual striving to honor the cosmic forces that give us life. Soon after, gold coins were struck and began circulating, and these represented the spiritual Sun powers.
The Ephesian Bee is my personal favorite. I photographed this one for my dad many years ago.
This trend - of ennoblig money with pictoral reminders of its spiritual significance - was carried forward all the way into our modern era, with 20th century coins depicting archangels and winged gods like Mercury.
Separation of Church and State ushered us into the transition away from gold and silver coins to paper (and now, digital) currency, veiling the spiritual properties of money, that had, for thousands of years prior to the 20th century, been depicted on most of our coinage.
In my opinion, a vast majority of the individual and social sicknesses we are experiencing today are due to the outsourcing of responsibility for our economic lives and our systems of law (moral governance) to State and Corporate powers. These two aspects of life - economics and law - have become heineously enmeshed.
The materialization of money and the machanization of human beings.
With the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913, and the subsequent abolition of gold and silver coinage, money became nothing more than a modern technology: mechanized, automated, devoid of any reminder of our spiritual origins or the moral fabric connecting us through every financial exchange.
Simultaneously, human beings were programmed through the industrial revolution all the way to the present (thanks to the Prussion model of education adopted in the west, of molding children into obedient factory workers) to become machine-like, robotic in nature and unquestioning in their loyalty to the State.
Untethered from the kind of soul and spiritual values that once made financial transactions a moral act within our evolving social economy, money has become just as corrupt as our waterways are polluted. Dark powers have taken control of this previously sacred administration, and we the people have allowed it.
Along with the issuance, circulation and accounting of monetary value within society, we have outsourced the issuance, circulation and accountability for most of our moral acts, from how we tend to our bodies and our education, to our vocations and even our relationships. How we treat each other and conduct ourselves has become a matter of political fervor, with millions of citizens demanding that their governments mandate moral behavior within society - from compelled speech to compelled actions - on pain of imprisonment.
Instead of sourcing moral authority from within, or from a spiritually rich culture, we look to State and Corporate powers to guide most of our daily actions. This mechanization of the human being has led to chronic sicknesses of body and soul, as our spiritual nature mounts its revolution.
Money, Morality and Law.
The story of money is one of spiritual significance and moral imperative. And if we do not take full responsibility - as individuals and communities - for a profound economic transformation in our time, then I believe we will watch our world fall into darkness and decay. It is already happening. But this shouldn’t fill us with fear, or powerlessness.
It has been my conviction for a long time that we do not wake up and pay attention to what matters most in life without pain. Which is why I call myself a pain advocate.
The sooner we pay attention to pain the sooner we can respond, and the less overall pain we will have to endure. Economic pain is no different.
▶ Have you noticed how much your groceries cost compared to 4 years ago?
▶ Are you struggling to make ends meet, and wondering why - when the job you have today used to pay enough to sustain you and/or your family just a few years ago?
▶ Have you or your children given up hope of ever owning a home?
Economic pain leads to moral outrage.
All around the world today there are protests occurring, as farmers and truckers and the vaccine injured rise up against the tyranny of governments that have been captured by corporate (private financial) institutions.
When the poorest or hardest hit among us become sick (often literally) of economic and political corruption and discover that they have nothing left to lose, revolutions ensue.
Financial despair inevitably leads us into a question of moral obligation.
But whose obligation is it, that we maintain healthy, transparent and morally sound economic ecosystems?
If we believe it is anyone’s obligation but our own, then we are deceiving ourselves.
We cannot demand moral integrity from State and Corporate powers (who, by their very nature, have no capacity to act with moral judgment) any more than we can demand a stone turn itself into bread.
So, what can we do?
Is there a way to renew the spiritual significance of money and law, to create a future of mutual aid and human freedom?
This is Part I of a series I am doing with Max.
At the end, Max asked me to write a Substack about my dad’s work on the spiritual historical significance of money’s evolution into coinage during the ancient Greek age. I’m not sure when I will get to it (because I want to do it justice and it is a profound subject), but today’s commentary should serve as an introduction.
In Part II (which will go out next week), Max and I will explore a possible future for humanity that we could initiate today - if we cultivate a sufficiently inspiring vision, and support the builders among us to execute on the mission in order to make it a reality.
During the second podcast, you will hear Max and I talk about the necessity to “exit and build.”
As Max details very well in this article (and in many others) we have a state and corporate system posing as government today that is so utterly corrupt (diseased) that it cannot be saved from within.
When this is the case, the only peaceful option is to exit and build.
One example of “exit and build” that I am involved in is exiting the state regulated professions of bodywork, psychotherapy and medicine, to create a School where we will study the whole human organism without the government interfering in our efforts to gain self knowledge, and - for the practitioners among us - to address the whole human being in our private practices, instead of following orders and addressing only parts we’ve been given permission to “treat” by way of a state license.
However, it is very important that anyone embarking on an exit and build mission understand the very real risks associated with doing so. And it is best to initiate this action from direct experience with sufficient economic, moral and/or spiritual pain, so that the leaving is sufficed with deep purpose and meaning; the kind of purpose and meaning that can sustain us through the wilderness that lies ahead.
With this in mind, this first podcast with Max was meant to help orient us to the present moment.
I thoroughly enjoy this conversation and I hope you do, too.
P.S. I’ll be teaching some live workshops on Zoom starting May 8th. Click the pic to get on the waitlist and I will email you the links.
꩜ Money, Law and Society: Origins and Evolution | Max Borders