An Interaction: Traditions and Money

In time immemorial, we have basically spend whatever we earned. Anything more, in the long term would lead to an implosion of the economic system as well as order of a society.

But in modern times, this idea has been turned on his head. Order in the society is basically dictated by a widely-accepted and legitimate distribution of resources. And from time to time, there would be a widespread inequity, it would be policed by whoever that have a monopoly on organized violence. But ultimately, with unhappiness and war, production would decrease and it would lead to an ultimate demise on the system- in spite of ownership of organized violence.

When order has entrenched itself into the system, traditions are formed. Traditions and rituals are created to legitimize prevailing order and persuade people on the “rightness” of existing system of distribution and status hierarchy. This “soft” approach prevents a more overt and expressive form of control- that of sanctions and organized violence- which could undermine the “equity” of prevailing system.

Therefore, when we have a finite amount to distribute- we give out according to the existing system- generally “agreed” by everyone and any “deviant” who attempt to take more than what is “understood by everyone” would face “harder” coercive means.

Ultimately, this is how distribution of resources in a relatively closed off society perpetuate itself through various generations- without extensive international or external financing. This meant that assuming we have X amount of rice, we would distribute to what is understood- nothing more, nothing less.

But come later into the 1960 and 1970s, there was an explosion of money and credit. This rather delicate balance and order has been turned on his head. Millionaires become billionaires, money can be doubled within a very short period of time through very legitimate and legal means like the stock markets. Young people became richer than their parents overnight. Parents depend on their children for income much earlier than understood before. Traditions that came to legitimize previous order- which work well before- no longer has salience on the existing scheme of things.

Age, seniority, experience, status no longer has any bearing when you consider that risk management and intelligence seems to be a better marker for success than an understanding for how things work- or organizational knowledge. Moreover, with the explosion of money, now X has become X+Y+Z. Therefore anyone with X can leverage till X+Y+Z and perform much better than anyone who has a concept of only X- because they are only dealing with limited resources while the other is dealing with multiple sources.

It is with this explosion of money that the previous mode of traditional mode of distribution of resources- which assumes X- no longer have salience with the populace; and it is therefore traditional understanding of society going from status to seniority to age cannot make sense to many when we dealing with X+Y+Z rather than X only.

Salience and legitimacy- or soft understanding of order is one matter. But there would still be policing of boundaries and order of the more “harder” kind as well. Sanctions, exclusion and when deviance becomes more overt, violence would ensure that “traditional” order would still prevail at least on the “everyday” actions of people and on the superficial level.

But unfortunately, the battle of supremacy is fought mostly in heart and minds of people rather than it’s outward action.

Ultimately, it is mistaken to note that technology that dilutes traditions and culture but rather traditions and rituals are formed around people’s economic understanding of the world. Technology just quickens the pace that’s all.