http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital

Charlie Stross talks about - I forget what he calls it - but media personalities essentially being “publicly traded” according to their trust ratings online, etc. Really interesting stuff…

Wo.

Also, how about pop culture as a form of currency. I mean, literally: if it’s current, it has currency; it is currency.

I ask myself…Is money power in a worldly sense?

I’ve been thinking a lot about currency as a form of language: the fixing of value to a symbol system, so that people can exchange amongst one another. Tower of Babel, Twin Towers, Pentecost…. there is a thread here to unravel for when I’m more awake.

Right, it pays for media outlets to foster a sense of mistrust among people, because it serves their interests to have us only be able to trust in brand names and corporations instead of people.

Yes, that’s right…I wonder what happens if we look at ALL the things that work against trust, and all the things that foster the kind of trust that drives such financial systems.

Given our conversation about Hawala and the Knights Templar, we guess that it was the influence of what was at the time “liberal”, scientifically advanced, religious thought from the Muslims that provided the necessary seeds to create Western banking systems. Its interesting to me that the religious system of the Knights Templar, influenced by Muslims, had to have been both scientific and thoughtful, yet also religious enough to create the culture of trust and integrity that could last. It is also interesting to me that our modern culture perpetually offers us a false dichotomy between stupid fundamentalism, and the kind of stupid atheism that asserts that the most powerful cultural force in the history of mankind is “nonsense”, precisely leading us away from this middle path which has the devotion, trust and community of religion and the reason of science.

I also find it interesting that we find ourselves, whatever other names we may come up with for it, at war with Muslims.

I ask myself…Is money power in a worldly sense? If it is, then given the history of banking, it also becomes clear that there are religious ideologies which create large amounts of worldy power for their adherants. Its weird to step outside the box and look at religion as a form of social programming which effects people’s minds to create structures of wealth and benefit through trust, but now that I see it, its an aspect that’s also hard to ignore:

http://www.soundvision.com/Info/life/qandh.asp

And this is only one thing. What a wonderful can of worms this topic is.

Indeed. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I just heard that on the ‘news’. And those guys who abused that trust and blew the pension fund in Monte Carlo, they’re just corporate slags.

How would one go about proving or disproving a hypothesis such as this?

Is this a rhetorical question?

We each just need to subscribe to such a financial system, and see if anyone kicks in the door.

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/17450

My financial adviser once told me the the laws of ‘trust’ in the UK date back to the time of the Crusades. People went off to war and left their stuff ‘in trust’. When they came back, someone had to work out who was owed what and the law of trust was born. Pensions, for example, can be held in trust. Apparently, it means just that: you elect a trustee, whom you must then trust… you cannot actually bind them over to do anything. Leads to all sorts of strangeness… seems every few months in the news there’s a group of trustees who go and blow it all on roulette… but I guess that’s a legal system built on precedent for you.