The only reason that people need money is that they use it as a scorecard. When playing a game, either golf or a card game, we need a way to keep track of our position with other players.  We need to feel that each player in the game is playing fair, not cheating, and we want to know our skill level compared to that of other people. You can see this with even young children as they run from one end of the room to the other to see which child can arrive the fastest.  They will do this over and over again. They will do this to establish their position with other children.  Other people will admire the person who can run around the table the fastest. They will admire the person who can throw the ball the furthest. They will admire the person with the best physical appearance. 

The need to be superior is built into our gene code. It also exists in animals and even in lowly bacteria.  The reason that this exists is to make sure that the genes are passed on to the progeny of the next generation.  The quickest, fastest, and strongest usually get the most food. The strongest and most able can also find the best mate and increase the chance of their gene code being passed down. This is how complex life has evolved from a single cell.  What causes the cell to evolve or change is its surroundings. How much oxygen, carbon dioxide, acid, or water is in the environment will determine how the cell will adapt or change. They have found that these cells can adapt or change in as little as two weeks to an environment or food source. 

When a cell exists deep underground, and the food source, oxygen source, and pressure and temperature are the same, the cell will remain unchanged for millions of years. The closer the cell moves to the surface of the planet, where the amount of water or gases or temperature or pressure can change rapidly causes the cell is to mutate and adapt to these environments. The reason that the cells can do this is that they are competing for resources.  When the environment changes rapidly this causes a depletion of resources, and only the cells that can make rapid changes are the ones that will survive.  

This desire to compete is built deep within our gene code. As the environment becomes more volatile, cells that cooperated with each other found it easier to survive the onslaught of change. Within a group of cells, you would have some cells that were specialized in different chemical processes, which would all benefit the body of cells. Then you start to have competition between the bodies of cells, and the one that was able to adapt to the environment the most would be able to survive.  

Move on to a billion years later, where humans started to appear on the planet. Even though there was an abundance of food and resources, the human brain was not capable of imagining how to use these resources.  You can imagine a lion learning that it didn’t have to eat a deer; it could eat worms instead. As humans evolved and became more intelligent, they were able to expand the use of existing resources. 

When the tribes were small, of 5 to 20 people, it was really easy to keep track of the particular members of each tribe.  One person could be quite strong and fast, and be looked up to as a hunter. Another could be quite fertile and able to produce new offspring to replenish the tribe. Another could have knowledge of plants and fungi which could heal illness and disease.  It was quite easy for each person to understand the power and position of each member of the tribe. Everyone knew their place. 

Eventually, as the tribe became larger and larger, it was more difficult to keep track of the value of the different people in the tribe.  Also because of the plasticity of the human brain, one member could easily morph and change into another position if needed. This could be comparable to amphibians that could change their sex according to the needs of the pond. If all of the frogs in the pond are females, one will become a male frog, which will help propagate the species.  Humans do this in prisons as well, not necessarily for propagation, just to keep things in balance. 

As tribes started to communicate with each other and to trade products with each other, this helped to strengthen the power that each individual tribe has.  In order to keep track of these trades, humans realized that they could use blue shells and grey rocks so that they could tell if everything was even, and you knew the value of their trade. These shells or rocks have no value within themselves. They were just something that was recognized by the tribe as a scorecard. 

As paper became easily accessible and people learned writing, a note was passed from one person to another that let other people know the value of the trade that had been made. Or a king would write a note that says “If you bring this piece of paper back to me, I will bring you a barrel of wheat.” The person wanting to make the purchase didn’t want to carry a barrel of wheat or a bag of chickens. This could be quite time-consuming and slow down the trade process, carrying all of the objects with you. This invention of paper money accelerated the ability of the tribe to make trades and create commerce.  

Today, the only reason that we need money is so that we can know our value compared to others' value in society. This money that we carry with us or keep in our bank account allows us to possess shinier objects, bigger sticks, and larger cubes with windows. The reason that we possess the nice car and the nice clothes and the nice lawn is for us to establish our position and power in society. If you go to the side of the track where poor people live, you will see dead or sick lawns, you will see broken windows, and non-functioning doors. Though at times you may notice a very expensive car in front of the house, this is because the person drives their car into the other part of town and they want the people to think well of them.   

The only reason why we have nice lawns is that hundreds of years ago the only people that had nice lawns either had lots of slaves to mow the lawn (with scissors) or a large herd of sheep.  By keeping a well-groomed yard, you are letting people know that you are wealthy enough to own a yard service and you have lots of free time.  

The problem with society today is people think that money has value within itself. “Since I am working all week long to get this paycheck, this paycheck has numbers on it that represent money, then money must be the most important thing.  This is why you can imagine a miser counting his coins in a secret room thinking that someone may want to take these from him. This is why people become upset when a third of their check is missing because the government takes this out of their check for taxes.  They are only thinking of the money as valuable, not the goods or services that they are receiving.  They are not thinking about the roads, schools, and hospitals that are being built. They are only thinking about their own microworld, and something is missing from this microworld. 

Money is just used as a scorecard so that we know our value compared to someone else. Hospitals use the color of your uniform to know your position compared to that of other people. Schools will use uniforms to let you know where you stand in comparison to other teachers and students. Humans also need clothing to let others know of their sexual persuasion. We also wear clothing to identify our position in business. At first, a suit implies superiority until you become wealthy enough, and then a t-shirt and tattered Levi’s signify that you are the owner of the company.  

The reason that we use money is not that we need more resources or to make sure that we have distributed the resources properly.  When the planet produces 1000x as much food as every single person eats every single day, the problem is not the resource; it is our position compared to other people. We then build walls to keep other people out.  We build boxes to hide things away in. We will hire soldiers to take food away from others. 

There is enough oil on the planet to take care of our needs for well over a billion years.  There is an unlimited supply of methane, which can also provide energy. We have unlimited nuclear energy at our disposal as well. We have plenty of air, food, and water. The only thing that we lack is love, kindness, and respect. 

The only reason that we need money today is so that we can feel comfortable with our position compared to others. We need to make sure that they have earned their living just as we have had to earn our living. This is because we have been convinced from childhood that there is not enough to go around and we have had to earn our fair share so that mommy and daddy wouldn’t have to go on supporting us.  

The only purpose of a bank is to keep track of all the scorecards. A bank doesn’t need to have money to function. A bank just needs to have trust from the people that it is keeping score for. This is why a bank usually has the name trust in it somewhere, or the word security. We need to feel that the bank is not going to mix up the numbers on our scorecard with the numbers on someone else’s scorecard. When we acquire lots of numbers on our card, and a computer hacker breaks into the bank and erases our numbers, we feel violated. We feel like we have no value in life. We could go back to people that we build homes for, cook meals for, and say “don’t you remember all of the things I have done for you.” They could respond, “I remember you did something for me; I don’t remember what.”

By having numbers in an account that keeps track of our value, if we want a home, car, or vacation, we can trade these numbers with others, and they will say, “No I don’t remember you very well, but these numbers seem quite familiar.” Again, the people that we are buying stuff from will keep track of our value correctly. 

Another example of this would be the movie “In Time,” where the human beings no longer aged or got old. As soon as they were born, a clock was placed on their arm; when they were 21 years old. They would start out with five years of time, and they would have to work to get this time back every single day. As they made purchases, such as a cup of coffee, a sandwich, or rent, time would be taken off their wrists.  As soon as they used up all of their time, they would die.  It was impossible for them to work enough for them to buy their basic food, clothing, and shelter.  The hero of the story started stealing time from wealthy people so that he could live longer. You could also go to a bank, and they would have machines that would take off or add more time to your wrist. All of the people in the story thought that there was a limited supply of time, and not enough to go around. Yet the machine that gave you more time just required a push on the reset button for it to give you more time. This is like today, where all the banker has to do is type numbers or write on a piece of paper, and you will instantly have more money in your account.  

This is why computer hackers today can hack into a bank account and move numbers from one account to another, or just make up numbers altogether.  This money actually has no value within itself; it is just that other people will look with confidence with the person keeping the records. This is very difficult with the people who keep the records; it is quite tempting to steal a portion of these numbers and put them into your own account, noticing that most people will never even notice the loss. 

In the movie Office Space, they cook up a scheme to take 3 cents off of every transaction and put that into a private bank account, realizing that several years later they will have millions of dollars in their account. The person who wrote the computer program made a mistake and took 30 cents rather than 3 cents off of every transaction, and this is where the mayhem occurred. 

The less transparent banking is, the easier it is to start stealing funds and putting them into your own account. Some economists from MIT have figured out that this theft over the past 50 years in the United States has amounted to over $100,000 per person per year. This amounts to hundreds of trillions of dollars being stolen from the economy and being put into the pockets of private people. This is much more than any bank robber could ever fathom stealing.  This is one of the main reasons that we have income inequality. 

Until we as human beings can release our hold onto a number value or a scorecard to compare our relationships with other human beings, we will continue to need money. We will need to evolve past this phase in life and understand that our cooperation as human beings is what creates power for us, not our superiority for winning a competition.  What creates power for us as a human race is our ability to harness and distribute the resources of our universe with wisdom.  Once we have realized that we have an unlimited supply of resources, more than our minds can possibly imagine, it will help us understand that we really don’t need money to survive.

In the meantime, we have to be aware of “what is” and where we are living right now.  In this society, other people, for the most part, will require evidence of a scorecard. We will need to play by their rules and apply the rules on how to conduct ourselves and how to acquire these numbers. If we can do this and keep in mind that these numbers in reality are just numbers, and they have no value within themselves. The only true value we have in life is our friends, family and members of our tribe. By doing this, we can gradually change the thinking pattern of the world and be able to survive and thrive in our communities. As computers and AI become more prevalent, this will help society to understand that this thing that we call money is just a series of numbers that we call our scorecard. A computer or AI when trying to distribute goods, will try to figure out what the number two has to do with an apple, or what the number eight has to do with hot dogs. It will see that there are 100 apples and 100 people that need apples, and it will make sure that the 100 apples go to these one hundred people. 

In today’s society, a wealthy person will take 90 of the apples and put them in his own vault, and tell the other 100 people to fight over the remaining ten.  Meanwhile, out of the 90 apples to be put in the vault, he only eats one of them, and the rest of the apples are thrown away. 

This is shown in TV shows Hoarders and Storage Wars. It becomes really depressing to see how people have worked hard their whole lives, and all of the useless garbage that they keep in storage and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep it there. Then they go bankrupt or die, and people go into clean it up, and 99% of the stuff in the storage unit is thrown into the dumpster.  We really need to advance as a human civilization and get past this point of using numbers to give value to each other.  There must be a better way. I haven’t figured it out yet. But there has gotta be a better way.  

Part of the problem is from our gene code, and the other has been taught to us.  How do you think hierarchy and equality can be balanced? What can you do in your life to open other people’s perspectives about money? Do you give as liberally as you would like to receive money?