THE META-STUFF OF MONEY

Having just arrived back in Colorado after the Coaching Mastery training (Meta-Coaching III) in New Zealand, I landed on the day that Wall Street took a real plunge, losing 778 points on the DOW sock exchange. And why? The seeming “cause” was the failure of the US House of Representatives to pass the 700 billion bailout legislation. And what was the “cause” of that? It seemed to be the failure of some large banks and insurance companies. Yet the causation isn’t quite that simple.

Such events are just events. In themselves, those events do not inflate money or strengthen the value of money. What does that is much more subtle. What does strengthen or inflate is what business calls the “soft” stuff of life—people and more specifically their thoughts, their emotions, their anticipations, their fears, their worries, etc.

When it come to money, there’s a lot of meta-stuff involved. After all, “money” as such does not exist in the external world. What we call “money” refers to how we establish value—value for our time, our energy, our knowledge, our skills, and so on. Money is just the scorecard. The paper and coins, the credit cards, and instruments are just tools—tools for evaluating. When I first began to drive and to buy petrol, gasoline was 19 cents a gallon. I could buy 5 gallons of gas for one US dollar. Now the same 5 gallons cost $20. Did the gasoline get more expensive or did the dollar become less valuable? Or did both occur over the years?

And how could the same dollar be valued at 1/20 of what it once did? How does “inflation” work? Who does it? And how do they do it? How is it that there are millions, even billions, of dollars of less value in the market today than there was yesterday? It occurs as a joint venture of lots of people—those speculating on the market, those fearful of what might happen, those worried about spending, etc. In other words, human thoughts and feelings. And that means human states—and that means meta-states.

All of this points to the meta-stuff of money. We are the ones who do the valuing. In themselves, things including dollars have no value. They are just things. Things sitting around waiting for some human to look, to think, to evaluate, to draw conclusions, to calculate, to frame, to appraise value. We are the ones who invest our thoughts and emotions into things and as we do, we create a social or cultural realities—money, economics, exchange, and so on.

For money to become worthless all that has to happen is for people, a community of people, to develop beliefs that a system of management doesn’t work. All they have to do is fear that the value they have created will be valued for less. Then like Zambaway, inflation can go spiraling out of control so that the price of a loaf of bread can cost $1 one day and $10 the next and $100 the next. Group fears and distrust can inflate an economy and group trust and belief can make an economy richer and more valued. This is the meta-stuff of money.

All of this takes us back to the key players—speculators, government regulators, legislative bodies, and millions of everyday people known as stockholders. The leverage lies in soft stuff of their meta-minds. It also lies in the political leaders as well as in all the reporters, news people, journalists, analysts, etc. The way they report things, the bias of the reporting, the amount of positive or negative reporting —all of these things set the frames for the rest of us— for how we think and feel about it. It sets the frame for our framing. And, how we frame things determines whether the “soft” stuff in our heads (our meta-states) will feed our trust or distrust, our faith or doubt, our positive orientation or our negative focus, or confidence in our money or lack of confidence.

The “soft” meta-stuff also explains why all of this highly circular. If we slide into a regression, we slide primarily because of our negative meta-states of doubt, distrust, fear, worry, apprehension, etc. This seems to be a blind-spot for many. The media especially seems to believe the old myth of objectivity—that they are just reporting and that what they do does not help create the very phenomenon that they are reporting on. And given that the psychology of the media (another blind-spot of the media about itself) involves a focus on what’s negative and sensational, the media powerfully helps all of us set our frames about what’s happening, what we think and feel about it.

True enough the meta-stuff of money is bigger than any one of us, it is the social mind that we all participate in and co-create. And like the meta-stuff of gossip and myths, some ideas are like viruses that grow exponentially and create massive infections everywhere. What’s needed today is enough well-informed Neuro-Semanticists to challenge the fearful and pessimistic framing and take charge of this facet of managing our social mind.