A lot of people are confused about whether money is real or imaginary because they don’t realize that it is a spiritual, rather than material, thing. Before I go on, I need to make clear that a thing is neither good nor bad for being spiritual rather than material. Food is material and revenge is spiritual; both angels and demons are pure spirit. I am only talking about what the thing is, in so doing I’m not saying that it’s either good or bad (except in the trivial Thomistic sense that being is good considered differently).

Another misconception I need to get out of the way before I can actually say what I mean is that “spirit” is not merely “a different kind of matter.” For various reasons, a lot of people seem to think that spirit is basically glowing matter that has the ability to move through ordinary matter. That’s not spirit, that’s a TV ghost. When I say that something is spiritual rather than physical, I’m saying that it is not any kind of matter.

OK, with those common misconceptions cleared out of the way, we can finally get down to business.

It is fairly straight-forward to see that money is spiritual instead of material; the easiest way is to consider what happens when you get rid of the matter.

Suppose I lend you ten dollars, in the form of a ten-dollar bill. Then when you repay me, you repay me in the form of ten one-dollar bills. You have given me back exactly what I lent you, but the matter is completely different. This is not possible with material things, it is only possible with spiritual things. The bills are merely physical signs which point to the spiritual thing.

This is true of any money, by the way, not merely of fiat currencies. Suppose I lend you a pound of (pure) gold. Suppose you return to me some other pound of (pure) gold. Despite the matter being completely different matter, you have perfectly repaid the debt. The thing lent was not specific gold, but merely a quantity of gold. The thing returned was the same quantity of gold. Yet the matter is completely different.

You can observe the difference if I lent you a gold statue. If you merely returned to me the same quantity of gold but in the form of coins you would not have repaid what you owed me, because what you owed me was the specific statue.

That money is spiritual rather than material is why so many disagreements arise about it. Because we are a hybrid of spirit and matter, we recognize the spiritual, but in general we do it through the intermediation of matter. That is, we see the effects of spirit on matter and infer the spirit. You can see this even with where spirit got its name from—breath. Aside from on very cold days when we can perceive condensation, we do not see people breathe. We see their chest move, we hear their voice—we perceive various things from which we infer the breath. Or again consider the wind in the trees. We see the tree move and infer the wind, we don’t see the wind itself. These things are analogous to how we perceive spirit by its effects.

Because of this, we create physical signs to point to the spiritual thing we call money, though if you want to get extremely accurate the thing we call money is the same concept as debt (in the moral sense). These physical signs can be anything, since they are not the thing but merely a thing which points to the thing. At one time they might be records on a clay tablet or a stick, at another quantities of metal, at another pieces of paper, and at another records in a computer.

Like all signs, it is possible to lie with signs. You can see this in forgery and also when governments inflate fiat currencies in order to pretend that they have more money than they really have. None of these things make money unreal, they only make the signs pointing to the money unreal.

Recognizing this solves a great many problems around money, such as in this tweet:

pic.twitter.com/NkiHoJBOQK

— Sam Robb (@SamRobbWrites) August 14, 2023