Money is not motivation...

Money is a standardized bartering chip.

There is nothing more slavish about trying to acquire money in civilization, than it is to try and acquire food in the wilderness.

Wow. That statement doesn’t even deserve a response because it’s the highest kind of naivety and gullibility.

I see nobody else beyond Stoic wants to address what I have spoken about in this thread.

Intellectual cowardice at it’s best.

All of you want to sit and pretend this world is equal where slavery doesn’t exist within your contradictory liberal social philosophies.

What’s naive or gullible about what I said?

People who think they see the world more clearly than almost everyone else have never been in short supply, and the number of people who actually do has probably always been small.

As I said for lying in general, I always thought lying to oneself was always somehow intentional. There’s a difference between being self-deluded and just plain wrong, right? In order to self-delude, you need to know the thing you’re deluding yourself about, even if it’s on a not-quite-conscious level.

I would, but I like how Stoic said it, so I’ll just affirm his statement as deserving a response.

OK, I think I see what your saying, but for me the justification/motivation distinction isn’t the best way to capture it (or I still don’t understand what you’re saying :wink: ). As I understand it, you mean to point out that, once something becomes a higher-order motivator, it’s just a justification, in that the connection between the action and that motivator is somehow less accurate than the connection between an action and a first-order motivator. For example, when you are offered money to touch your nose, your decision of whether or not you do it is tied closely to cost/benefit calculation of the value you’re offered relative to the cost to you in time/energy/distress (e.g. if you have a sensitive nose) etc. On the other hand, if you accept a job touching your nose, your decision to get up in the morning to go to the job is much less closely tied to true cost/benefit of pay vs. nose-touching, even though when prompted you still point to the cost/benefit to explain your actions. Is that right?

If so, I agree. It looks a lot like status quo bias, although it’s more like an explanation for why we end up favoring the way things are: we stop analyzing our underlying assumptions about them.

Yep, this world has really become all about scraping the bottom of the cesspit.

You people miss the entire point of my posts in this thread. Human nature is what it is; I just like to ridicule other people for being douchebags and inferior to me.

Money is simply a standardized bartering chip JLW.
It is a piece of paper exchanged for goods and services.
It only becomes enslaving when a few have most of it and can lower wages/increase prices as they wish.

What do you think we have at the moment? #-o

Poor corporate slave: I’m a slave to the system. The Man keeps waving his dollar bills in my face with the promise that I can have it if only I toil and sweat for him, like a carrot dangling from a stick and I’m the horse.

The Man: I’m a slave to the system. The “poor” corporate slave keeps waving his talents and skills in my face with the promise that I can use them to make money if only I hand out my hard earned cash out of my own pocket, like a carrot dangling from a stick and I’m the horse.

:smiley:

The (private, non-corporate) Entrepreneur Who Actually Thinks With His Brain: If I offer this guy money and the resources with which he can profitably use his skills, which he otherwise wouldn’t have had, and I also take the burden of monetary risk from him, and in exchange for giving him this opportunity and taking all the monetary risk from the venture, I ask from him some of the profits, we can both benefit from the interaction.

The Employee Who Actually Thinks With His Brain: My boss is offering me a deal, and I can choose to accept it or reject it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone offering me a deal, even if the deal is a bad one. If I find it a bad deal, I can reject the offer. I am no slave to this person, I have analyzed my options and have found that the deal he’s offering me is one that is the most profitable for me given all my options, so I accept.

The Corporate Bank Owner: I can risk other peoples’ money haphazardly in order to make tons of my own money, and if my risks pay off, I’ll be rich! – if they don’t pay off, the government will bail me out, and I’ll be rich! Thank you government for providing me with this opportunity! What would us rich people do without “government regulations”?

While that is whats occurring, it is not a property of money that it is enslaving.
Our system is enslaving, not the money.

Excellent analysis, FJ.

Many things motivate me - certainly not just money. But I have a job to make money. Making money is my primary motivation for having a job. I guess the only way to test whether I’m telling the truth or not is if I win the lottery (though I never play)…

It’s a bit more complex than that and you know it apart from your pointless smug diatribe.

The system controls the money supply as it is one of it’s main instrumental tools of functioning.

You have to obtain money and tons of it to do anything within the system of society. That is how money is used to enslave and control people especially when it reduces all life to being an abstract of accesses and restrictions.

Human beings are not naturally inclined to work for others which is why currency was devised as a means of controlling the daily behaviors or activities of people by that of coercive motivation within it’s abstract rewards and punishments.

In what way is it more complex?

You really have to ask?

Obviously, it’s far more complex - in many ways - which way are you thinking of?

Humans naturally engage in economic activity. The most ‘natural’ is bartering; many monkeys and apes (including humans) have instinctive intuitions about what constitutes a ‘fair’ trade, though to my knowledge only humans engage in spontaneous exchanges of goods. As someone has already said, money is just an abstraction of bartering, allowing the value of exchanges to be saved up or divided, and allowing people to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges even if they couldn’t make a direct exchange of goods.

It’s actually possible to re-appropriate monkeys’ economic instincts to get them to use a abstracted means of exchange: