Money is synthetic trust; relationships are the real currency

The other day I was recording News from a World in Flux with Charlie Gardner, my co-host. It’s a podcast we’ve been making for the climate movement for about four or five years on a volunteer basis. There’s a fantastic team of camera people and editors who work for free behind the scenes to keep our conversations publicly visible.

As the climate movement has grown, evolved, fragmented, diversified, and expanded into the realms of cost of living, inequalities, discrimination, global justice, near-term impacts, adaptation and preparedness, to name just a few, we felt responsible to have a public dialogue about the impending food crisis, which is expected to shock the UK this autumn.

The day before we recorded, I’d been with Dan Burgess, who makes the Spaceship Earth podcast, where he has conversations with change makers and people who are working for Mother Earth and the human family in a variety of different ways. He repeated a quote from someone he’d met that he had always found valuable: if you’re growing your own food, you often find yourselves with a glut or with too much of something, but it’s never a problem, because it can always be stored; and if it’s perishable, in your neighbour’s belly.

The reason that this is a good idea is obvious. Once your neighbour has received something from you, when you’re in need they will send something back. When you feel like you’re in a sturdy set of relationships like this, it is possible to feel that your needs will be met without necessarily having a very large amount of money, because money is not the only determinant of whether or not you’re secure or kept alive.

When I think back to Tina (“There is no alternative,” said Margaret Thatcher) it strikes me that the idea of there being “no such thing as society” and “no alternative” to rampant individualism goes hand in hand with an effort – a purposeful effort – to sever all of our human, intimate relationships, which only leaves us with a relationship with money in order to get things to feel safe.

I found myself recently describing the neoliberal era as a period of unparalleled relational destruction which has literally been designed and enacted on purpose as a political project.

It’s remarkable to me that anybody would think it was a good idea to systematically break down all of the relationships that keep people alive, but what I haven’t really thought about before (and of course many people have) is that money determines a type of relationship. It codifies a commitment to something owed; it formalizes that commitment; and it gives you as much of a guarantee as you can probably find these days in terms of trust with a stranger, a company or an institution.

But of course you don’t actually need to trust somebody if you know that they’re giving you a 10 pound note. You simply take someone else’s trust from them and carry it away with you to pass on impersonally to anybody else who doesn’t need to know you or know anything about you.

Money is synthetic trust. It’s the white coagulant in the robot’s lubricant system that stands in for real red blood.

You can tell how synthetic it is when you try to borrow some money. Go to a bank, and they will want to see inside every aspect of your life, your job, your children, your health, your income, your past debts, your current debts, any criminal record. It’s a level of invasion into your private life not matched by the depth of knowledge of our friends… but for this synthetic form of trust we have to give an institution greater access than we ever give to anybody else? What they dish back to us is a huge volume of borrowed trust.

I had a friend who worked with a very wealthy family who told me a story about how they hire their staff: they pay for a plane ticket to bring that hopeful applicant from where they are to the interview, and unbeknownst to them, the wealthy family also buys the two seats either side of that person. On the way to the job interview there are two people annoying the living shit out of the interview applicant for the entirety of the flight in order to test their character. What will their reaction be? And indeed, how will they respond when they arrive for the job interview, and those two people are sitting on the other side of the desk?

This is the behaviour of people who cannot trust anyone.

Perhaps for all of that borrowed synthetic trust (which is what you have if you have many millions or billions) there’s a sliding scale, in inverse proportion, of how much real trust you can actually hold? When you don’t trust anyone at all, things can become very expensive, because you have to build a fortress around your life circumstances in order not to feel dramatically unsafe. It’s a perpetuating cycle: more and more money is needed to make the person ‘safe’.

I’m curious about this because I’m trying to build a framework to help us think about relational power. I think we often understand power as force either enacted by state actors or just enacted by individuals or armies or the police. And we understand money as power because it can get you things, and it can make stuff happen. It can buy people’s time, and it can coerce people to do work that their hearts don’t want to do. The culmination of certain projects, agendas, and money as power can create force – but what is happening in communities that have real strength is not force, and it is not power as we understand it through the lens of money. It is relational. The relationships are a strength measured in units of trust that are not synthetic, and which we need if we want to really create a functioning, living, breathing day-to-day in real life democracy.

I think we need to understand relational power much better.

My hunch is this: we can do more that matters with relational trust than we can with money.

That’s because I think relational power is defined around the intention, not the token. Being seen and being visible doing stuff with, for, and serving others, is how you build trust, which requires people to properly see each other. It’s about getting things done, enacting your strength within a framework of commitment that is measured by intention. And that framework hinges on relationships being personal, not impersonal (like money), and intentional, not tokenistic (like money). That’s because action comes from intention, like feeding your neighbour. And in our attention economy, giving your attention to your neighbours is a radical act of resistance? Does this hunch sound right?

One way to help ourselves think things through would be to interrogate the neoliberal program as an effort to eliminate relational power.

The project of the Sovereign Individual (which I’ve written about before) and its philosophy, neoliberalism, can be seen as to entirely replace relationships with money as a synthetic form of trust. You can’t invest much of your time in anything else if there’s only one thing that can secure you in life, and that is earning. So, the whole story and the whole purpose of your life is consumed by the market. Your life is consumed by a mythic, made-up story that is supposedly legitimate; and in deciding who gets what – which businesses succeed, whether or not you can survive doing this job or that job – then reality is decided. Because the neoliberal idea is the one that becomes your reality.

We all know it’s a game. Some people play it very well. It’s not an invisible hand or god; it’s a game made of humans. It has some rules, but many have been removed and many are broken. But it’s still a game.

We really need to redirect most people’s efforts away from making our problems worse and into making our problems better, and a lot of things that are going wrong in the world would be helped by people just working less, because an awful lot of people’s work is making everything worse. Instead, we put neoliberalism on steroids using technology, and we do more of the bad work more quickly, in a more lean methodology, so we’re doing more harm for less investment and less time.

Maybe we need a new metric: harm returned on energy investment.

Or harm returned on time investment, so that we can see precisely how slowing down might help.

But while we’re in this screen-addicted, frenetic hyperpaced economic reality, it’s very difficult for us to make the time for ourselves and our relationships. And if you’re my age, born in the ‘80s, you will only ever have known the politics of Tina.

It’s quite clear to me that there is actually an alternative. There are many alternatives, and people live differently all over the world, but slowing down is not easy. Building relationships takes time and trust is a thing that you get when you give it.

It’s actually not really a thing that you earn. It’s a thing you immediately have to give away, in my experience, in order to get it back. That means you have to become vulnerable, and the story of Tina and synthetic trust in the relationships that can only be held and managed and moderated through money has left us, I think, not really being able to become vulnerable, not having the muscle memory, not being willing to do it.

I believe in the fundamental general goodness of people, and in order to test that, it is helpful sometimes in life to be aware of my vulnerability and therefore aware of how you’ve trusted those generally good people.

For me, like trusting a jury of twelve people in a criminal trial.

If most people have decent values, but may disagree on how the detail should shake down in this area or that area, then what’s stopping us from getting together and seeing if we can build some unlikely layers of trust?

I think trust can be rebuilt quite easily, because it is a very normal and natural human thing to want to be in good relationships with others. Perhaps that’s all this work really is, at the end of the day. Finding novel ways in the difficult context of the early 21st century to get more people into right relationship with each other. To get ourselves into a better relationship with the earth. To see those relationships as strength and power.

And, finally, to see money for what it is: a form of technology that was developed to mediate larger scale networks of trust than we can manage on our own. Perhaps we should be wondering whether or not that form of synthesised trust – being monetised and weaponised and systematised to the point of the financialisation of basically everything – starts to look, to put it politely, rather perverse.