1384 Glitter

Money is imaginary but nobody notices; it’s an illusion, like a magic trick, based on the audience’s preconceptions of what’s going to happen. However, if you know how the trick works, it’s easy to see it happening. To get past your conditioning, every time you think about money, picture glitter in your mind: beautiful in its reflectivity, seemingly complex, it arouses your avarice. We live in the delusion that people with lots of glitter never have to work, that saving glitter is worthwhile, and that watching glitter accumulate is somehow productive. Now imagine you’re picking up a handful of the glitter, feeling its lightness, and throw it into the air to scatter in the wind, and recall that it’s money. It’s amazing that glitter has become so all-powerful! In the distant past, raiders on horseback didn’t care how much glitter a city had, only what they could carry off. A rich trader was no better slave than a peasant girl, less so even. A king could not offer glitter to the Genghis Khan and expect to live; no, it would have to be grain & horses. As time went by and there was no longer the threat of violence, glitter was able to substitute for reality, so much so that there is 100 times more glitter than things to buy, and people deal only in glitter, get wealthy from glitter, become aristocrats by inheriting glitter. Glitter is replacing reality but you can’t eat glitter.