Yes.
Almost everything is pretend though, unless we’re talking about the basic laws of science (and even those change with context).
Language is “pretend”. Words don’t mean anything unless we all agree they mean something.
Valuing family is “pretend”. We all agree to give family importance, but plenty of animals don’t.
All laws are pretend. Country borders are pretend. Gender roles are pretend. Social position is pretend. Even my job is only my job because everyone agrees to give me responsibility in this role. Pretty much everything in society only works because of tacit agreement.
Yo, the amazing digital circus, it goes hard (the first episode was rather brutal💀)
Yeah it’s pretty good ngl. I’m a fan. Idk exactly who it’s supposed to be for age wise but I like it.
One could argue that since we are but merely very complicated, slow burning chemical reactions, that the very concept of “pretend” is pretend.
See the problem with this though, is that if everything’s just pretend and made up, then I can’t get mad about Elon Musk’s “Nazi Salute”. And yet, there are abundant red flags showing a rise in fascism, that if ignored, may very well permanently alter the world order and our standard of living. In the past 48 hours there was a significant chance the supply of coffee that drives most of my economic output could be disrupted or tariffed.
And, that’s because a lot of this comes back to the connotation of the word, “pretend”. Replace it with the word, “Idea”, and you get sort of the same concept, but suddenly the non-existent thing sounds much more powerful.
Agree with the sentiment, but things being pretend or made up doesn’t mean that you have to ignore them or that they are trivial. It’s probably good to recognize that Nazism doesn’t exist in the vacuum of the cold universe, but is a uniquely human endeavor that does not need to exist because we are the ones that spoke it into existence. We have the power to shape reality for the best
No one is saying you can’t get mad except for the people trying to avoid consequences for their shitty actions. We may have made up the thing which represents another but we did so for a very real reason. Everyone who says “it’s just a word” in regards to very intentionally calling someone a slur has a laundry list of “made up”(and literally made up because Conservatives are dumb as shit and fall for fake news constantly) things that they get extremely pissy about. I mean, borders anyone?
So get mad, a Nazi salute is a fucking threat at its core and that’s plenty real. Dehumanizing language is intended to put people in very real danger. Someone taking your money removes you from our very real system of cooperation and safety. These people do not get to dodge consequences because they have an F- level understanding of the most basic concepts of philosophy that they can’t even apply consistently.
You keep saying that word… I don’t think it means what you think it does.
Pretend, something that isn’t what it is being represented to be. E.g. imaginary.
Just because people collectively agree on things doesn’t make it pretend.
Money doesn’t have value because we pretend it does, but rather because we believe it does. Because we trust that it does.
And yes, there is a difference.
On a more real note, it also has value because everyone else trusts that it does. All those other countries. And no, they are not countries because we pretend that they are. They’re countries because we recognize their authority over their territory, and their citizens recognize the authority of their government.
So why do we recognize authority? Because of means to enforce it.
There’s no pretend going on. The consequences will be very real.
You should check out the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Humans have this amazing ability to make up all sorts of crazy shit, but it has huge advantages in our ability to organize.
One on one, a chimp would easily beat up a human. Ten on ten, the chimps still have an advantage. But 200 on 200, humans would win no contest. Our ability to make shit up allows us to coordinate with huge numbers people that we don’t even know, which is extraordinarily rare.
What differentiates humans from all animals including apes is our ability to cooperate & coordinate. Cooperation is what has allowed humans to dominate the world. I’m quite optimistic about the future simply because our innate sense of cooperation is all the good we have ever needed to conquer any and all evil the world has managed to create at any point in history all the way to now, and will continue to hold true forever.
We’re also surprisingly resilient compared to many other species. We can recover from wounds that would be lethal for other animals in weeks or months - such as broken or even lost limbs. We grow scar tissue at a pretty rapid pace as well, allowing us to heal wounds quickly. And our pain tolerance is high enough that other animals would drop dead of shock from some of these things. We invented surgery at least 200 years before painkillers, and things that we consider minor surgery would outright kill other animals. Hell, we were punching holes in our skulls to “let the bad light out” in the Neolithic era. Our mouths grow too many teeth, so we rip them out and graft metal onto the rest to force them to grow in alignment.
Our endurance is so high that the only other species that can keep up with us is dogs, and even then, they can only sort of keep up. We used to have a hunting strategy where we’d follow an animal at a walking pace for hours on end, never letting them rest, until they eventually couldn’t run anymore or simply dropped dead from exhaustion. We have a pretty wide range of temperatures and climates that we can survive in thanks to our ability to sweat off heat and shiver to burn extra calories for warmth. We can go 3 days without any food or water, and a full week with only water to sustain us.
There was a great sci-fi short story somebody wrote once about how humans were some of the most beloved crew members for spaceships because while we may not be the strongest, fastest, or most intelligent species out there, our ability to pack-bond with literally anything - including inanimate objects - and crazy endurance meant that we were the most dependable and capable species in a crisis. A human would jump into Hell itself in order to save a crewmate and simply walk it off like it was nothing afterward.
our ability to cooperate & coordinate
Yeah, tying back to the original post about whether money is real or made up - that ability to come up with abstract concepts out of asses is what allows us to cooperate on such grand levels.
You might only personally know 100 people that you reasonably trust. But you don’t need to personally know and trust someone in order to sell something to them. We all sort of magically agree that money has value and it allows us to transact with almost anyone.
Same thing with governments. A government isn’t a real thing that you find in nature, but by believing in the concept of it, we’re able to (somewhat) unify millions or billions of people to get shit done.
I guess what I’m saying is, don’t discount the power of something just because it’s not “real”. Making up imaginary shit has got our species pretty damn far!
Also why would a child ever ask if money is pretend? It’s not something they’ve only heard about in a storybook and never laid eyes on themselves.
Whole post is bullshit, lol.
I disagree with this statement. My kid, age five, has not asked this about money; but they have asked about, for example, characters on a screen. If you’re asserting that they wouldn’t ask because it’s something they’ve physically touched, I see your point, but my kid has (when much younger) asked similar things about, for example, figurines they’ve held.
I will say, for my kid in particular, that it’s more likely they would ask questions like “what does a dollar mean” or “does someone make decisions about the money” or even “what is money,” but the “real or pretend” question is plausible IMHO.
If you’re asserting that they wouldn’t ask because it’s something they’ve physically touched, I see your point
Yes (though seeing it ‘in person’ without touching it also counts), I thought it was obvious that’s what I meant.
it’s more likely they would ask questions like “what does a dollar mean” or “does someone make decisions about the money”
Exactly. Nothing a kid can just pick up and hold is going to be something they ask “is this pretend?” about, lol.
Valuing family is “pretend”.
Not everything is “pretend” but what you have identified is that all societal rules are participatory algorithms, and that includes money and laws. Money, or really wealth and value, are effectively resource allocation and prioritization algorithms. It’s why the very idea of individuals, or even organizational entities largely decouple from societal benefit, having comparable allocative power to actual societal management structures is batshit absurd.
No it’s not, but if you don’t have any it will destroy your life.
I personally suspect that the belief that money is real is problematic, psychologically.
There are all sorts of experiments that show we treat money in our minds differently from most other things.
A famous example is that many people would think nothing of taking a ten cent pen from work, but would be abhorred at the idea of taking money, even ten cents, from petty cash and just keeping it.
An experiment has shown that, if you give people the chance to cheat for money, or to cheat for tokens that can be immediately exchanged for money after the experiment, they will cheat more for tokens, despite the fact that at that point, the tokens are technically a type of money.
So, this sort of thing makes me suspect that beliefs about money also influence our ethics and our mental proclivities. So maybe people who believe money is more real are more likely to hoard it or to have gambling problems.
From the movie ‘The Magic Christian.’
Billionaire puts a swimming pool full of manure, blood, and other offal in the middle of the London financial district.
See what happens.
If you don’t want to click it, he spray paints “ free money “ on the side of the swimming pool, and then begins to put stacks of money in the disgusting pool and the financial business man in their suits still choose to wade through the muck for the money.
If I steal a cheap pen, it’s because I wanted a cheap pen. There’s no deeper meaning to it. I’m not going to fence it for a fifteenth of a baguette at the bakery.
If I steal ten cents though, I break a much deeper taboo because money is by definition fungible. Why do I need the money, what am I going to use it for, and why didn’t I empty the cash register while I was at it? These are all worryingly open questions.
Furthermore I reject the premise that stealing 10 cents is functionally equivalent to stealing a pen worth 10 cents; if anything, the premise that these are equivalent depends on a very debatable modern consumerist idea that commodities are perfectly interchangeable for money and/or the belief in a “rational actor” that has never existed outside of economics classes. Sure that may have been be valid if I was in charge of doing a bulk purchase of pens (and even then people aren’t as rational as economists would like but I digress). These economics concepts are all too theoretical to apply to individual actors in everyday life.
That pen is “worthless” to my employer (at least in my mind) and simultaneously worth a lot to me; I wouldn’t part with it for 10 cents or even 1 euro because that wouldn’t be worth the inconvenience of not having a pen, or simply because the idea of someone wanting to buy something I own and didn’t intend to sell is offensive to me.
I do agree with the basic premise that we treat money as special, but to me that’s a natural and rational consequence of its fungible and abstract nature. It’s much weirder to consider physical objects to be fungible IMO (even if it makes sense on an abstract level for commodities), and that’s why the sentence “you’ll own nothing and be happy” induces so much existential dread despite being based on theoretically sound economic principles. I don’t care if it’s actually cheaper or more resource efficient, I’m not buying a subscription to my woodworking tools or selling my house. I like the psychological safety of owning things.
That part about rationality is huge. Far too many people believe that something costs an amount because it is worth that amount, and far too many people believe that something “is worth what someone will pay for it” while neglecting concepts like advertising and propoganda. So many things in this world cost far more than they should and wages are getting, relatively speaking, lower each year while those aforementioned costs rise and where’s the rationality in that? And all while people use that same belief to justify to themselves why a billionaire has “earned” their hoard.
It’s our biggest flaw, economically speaking and in my opinion, that we judge someone based on the money they have and not how they may have gained or lost it. A parasite with millions “must be pretty smart” and a hard worker out of a job “must just be lazy”.
I’ve never heard people say that someone with money must be pretty smart.
Is that something American?
It’s as real as a word is.
