David Benfell, Ph.D. (he/him/his) on Nostr: I've been contemplating this article while I've been driving around and I think the ...

I've been contemplating this article while I've been driving around and I think the question of the origin of money here is posed as a false dilemma, with a particularly narrow imagination of civil authority.

Indigenous societies, we should note, came in both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian flavors on both small and large scales. These people were experimenting with systems of social organization; they sometimes alternated between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian and I'm willing to bet there were some systems in between. In particular, kings often lacked the ability to impose their authority where they were not present. There's a lot of wiggle room here.

In systems theory, we argue that linear causation is the exception rather than the rule. Much more common is mutual causality, in which factors in a system influence, both enhancing and constraining, each other as the system develops and they adapt to it.

If we understand civil authority as resting on a scale from egalitarian to hyper-hierarchical, the question loses all meaning. Money can have come about as a social construction amid other such constructions of language and culture and agreed to or imposed by a range of societies from egalitarian to hyper-hierarchical.