The Second Most Important Thing to Know

Overall, I believe the single most important wisdom is to know the life and teachings of a particular Jewish carpenter, one of the most influential human beings in all of history at minimum, and much more than this to millions of others, including me.

But what I want to write about right now is the second most important thing to know, the penultimate in timeless importance. Its subject is something virtually everyone strives for -- though it was relatively unimportant to the aforementioned great rabbi -- but almost no one understands.

People think about it even more than they think about sex. And those who have mastered its accumulation find that it even helps guarantee them a good sex life. Or almost anything else they want.

It's said that the only thing you can't get with it is love. This is almost certainly true, but it's also true that if you have lots of it, you are better able to show love to others.

Yes, we're talking about the root of all possibilities: filthy old lucre.

While my lifestyle proves that I have not devoted a great deal of time, attention, and effort to acquiring money, it is something that I have thought a lot about. The problem is that I haven't been able to think very deeply about it.

It has always been a great mystery to me, as well as to many others. Where does it come from, I've wondered. Just what is it?

I have not been alone in my ignorance. No one seemed to know any more about it really than I did. Some people knew enough about how to get it. But they seemed to me to be more like good drivers rather than automotive engineers. They knew something about how but did not waste their time worrying about why.

Despite all the mental effort, I have not been able to figure it out, nor have any of the thinkers and writers I've looked to had anything that I found worthwhile to say about it.

Until recently.

Suddenly, I have stumbled across two or three or more writers who seem to know a lot about it indeed!

Now I feel like I understand something about money. I have a clearer sense of what it is. And I know where it comes from. I know how it is made, and I know who makes it.

The people I've discovered who seem to understand money and its origin are Silvio Gesell, an unconventional and dead 19th century economist, Bernard Lietaer, a highly successful currency speculator, professor, author of The Future of Money and co-creator of the Euro, and Ellen Hodgson Brown, author of The Web of Debt.

I have this feeling that I might have learned more about money than I wanted to know. The creation of money is no more elegant a process than making of sausages and laws.

The most troubling thing I've learned is that the nearly universal ignorance about money has allowed a tiny elite who do know something about how money is created to gain enormous power over the rest of humanity. This is a very frightening discovery.

Clearly, this elite is incredibly powerful, and I rather imagine that they do not really welcome public scrutiny. It's said that the devil's first trick is to make us think that he does not exist.

So those who rule the world by manipulating its currencies have at least one thing in common with the forces of darkness.

In my next post, I will share some of what I've been learning about this topic, a subject that people need to understand if humanity is ever to enjoy the prosperity and power destiny intends.

If I disappear before then, at least you know who dunnit.