1st step – The elephant in the room: the coin

This is the 1st step of an awareness path consisting of 12 overall steps, with which we want to increase everyone's awareness on economic and monetary issues. Happy reading and viewing. A typical expression of the English language is “The Elephant in the room”, that is “The Elephant in the room”, used to indicate a truth which, however obvious and striking, is ignored or minimized by all.

"The Elephant in the room" is made up of a series of now evident economic facts that are completely ignored by most people, who continue to have a wrong perception of reality, because they experience a real cognitive dissonance between their beliefs entrenched and conflicting evidences that continually emerge, but which continue to be ignored.

Cognitive dissonances in the economic and monetary sphere

Let's take examples of cognitive dissonance in the economic and monetary sphere, starting from a series of deep-seated economic beliefs that crowd our mind:

• the state cannot create money;
• if money is created, inflation is generated;
• the state budget is like that of a family;
• a state that has a high public debt risks bankruptcy;
• the Italian State must borrow money from the financial markets;
• the public debt must be repaid because otherwise it will weigh on the shoulders of our children.

I have tried many times to ask my interlocutors for a rational explanation of why these statements have entered their head and are so ingrained, but I have found that in most cases these beliefs are like axioms: it is so because everyone says which is so and therefore it cannot fail to be true .

Now let's see what are the evidences now evident to everyone, which are contrary to the rooted beliefs that crowd our mind without being able to scratch our perception of reality in the least:

• the state can create money, as long as it declares that it accepts it to pay taxes;
• for years the ECB has been creating huge amounts of money and inflation remains close to zero;
• the state is not like a family because it can impose taxes and create money to pay them;
• Japan has the highest public debt in the world and is not considered a country at risk;
• the Italian State can also issue bonds for families, which are always purchased;
• public debt can be monetized by central banks with QE and not burden our children.

So today there are many evidences known to all of us, which undermine our deep-rooted beliefs, creating a cognitive dissonance, which, however, only in very few subjects is resolved with the change of the rooted belief. In most people, dissonance is resolved in a different and negative way:

• denying the evidence, like “it is true that states can create money, but Italy cannot ”;
• inventing a false negative effect for the evidence, such as " if the state creates money, expropriates the citizens ";
• denying the ingrained belief and replacing it with another, like " if the state creates money, then it generates inflation ".

A typical example of cognitive dissonance resolved in a negative sense is represented by the famous story "The fox and the grape", taken from Aesop's Fables, in which the dissonance between the desire for grapes and the inability to get there leads the fox to elaborating the conclusion that "grapes are sour" essentially replaces the ingrained belief with another false one to make it compatible with the evidence.

An answer that I always hear repeated when I highlight the cognitive dissonance by comparing the ingrained belief with the evidence that puts it in crisis, is the phrase “ but do you think that if it were that simple, they wouldn't have done it already?!? ".

Of all the evidence we have illustrated, the one that states that the state can create money is certainly the greatest of all, because it enters into cognitive dissonance with all the others at the same time.

The state can create money

Basically in our mind there is an authentic "mammoth", an ancestor of the current elephants but much bigger, so big that nobody talks about it, because it causes a cognitive dissonance with all our beliefs rooted in economics, and is therefore so strong as to be unbearable and inconceivable.

We can highlight this best with a simple question:

If money does not exist in nature, like air or water, but is just a conventional instrument of exchange created by law and accepted for the payment of taxes, what prevents the state from creating it?

No journalist, politician or economic expert will ever try to ask this question and least of all will try to give an answer, if he can, because everyone prefers to think that the state cannot create money and in this way continue to let it be someone else. to do it, without even asking the question whether it is right to do it or not.

The awareness that the state can create money alone would cause all the other deeply rooted beliefs to collapse like a house of cards: public debt, the spread, the need for financial markets, budget constraints, the fiscal compact, the ESM, the Recovery Fund, austerity policies, etc… They would melt like snow in the sun, making it clear that money is a convention that only the state can create, even today with the Euro.

The question, however, is very complex to understand and unsuitable for people who do not ask questions, those who willingly accept everything that the news or talk shows tell. Those, to be clear, who wear masks because they think it is right not to cause harm to other people, without even wondering if this is true or not.

However, there are many people who today are starting to ask questions, because they do not believe in the official version of the mainstream, but to answer these questions you need to know several very complex economic, legal and monetary aspects, which are often dispersed within of many "fake news", from which it is difficult to distinguish them.

For all of them I have decided to propose a path of awareness on economic and monetary issues that allows all of us, and perhaps also me through your comments, to "tune" our thoughts so that they can play "unique" music on these themes, such as the many different instruments of an orchestra, which only after having tried many times together, are they able to play many different music but which “resonate” with each other as if they were a unique but much more complex and complete music.

The path of awareness on economic and monetary issues is divided into 12 steps, also accompanied by as many explanatory videos, which identify a simple and clear path to get to understand what is wrong with the current system and how we can do to change it.

The videos are a reworking of a cycle of 24 videos that I made last year in the Money.it studios, which I thank, but which I later reduced to 11 videos to deliberately eliminate the useless and redundant parts that they made the path bumpy.

At the end I will add a final twelfth final video, which will also incorporate all the arguments that will have been highlighted by you in the comments and discussions that I hope will follow.

There is no reality, only our perception.

How many times in our daily life, listening to the stories of people who have lived the same situation with us, we suspect that we have lived different experiences, so different are the sensations that each of us has experienced.

This happens because what we see is always filtered by our senses, but above all it is reworked and interpreted by our brain in different ways depending on our judgments, prejudices and deep-rooted beliefs, but also on our preconceptions, habits and negative or positive feelings.

Among other things, we are conditioned not only by what we think, but also and above all by what others around us think, to the point that if everyone thinks the rooted beliefs we have listed are right, we find it hard to think differently, because to do this we should have such knowledge of these issues, to be able to argue and overcome all the preconceived and pre-packaged objections that will be provided to us.

It is certainly much easier and more comfortable to conform to the prevailing thought, rather than thinking with one's own head and trying each time to follow the truth of our conscience and knowledge.

Because to succeed in this aim, it is necessary to have such a thorough awareness of economic and monetary issues, to be able to easily support a thesis against the current single thought, certainly not an easy undertaking.

To overcome this challenge, we have decided to create a simple and clear path of awareness, which can give all the tools to face with their own head and their own reasoning, any discussion and with anyone else that comes within reach, from the housewife or housewife. of Voghera to the expert or economic expert on duty, interpreters of mainstream thought.

But there is another reason why we have decided to carry out this path of awareness.

If it is true that reality does not exist, but only our perception, there are two corollaries to this statement that are much more important and that can make us reflect:

• to change the reality that surrounds us, it is sufficient for each of us to change our perception;
• to change society, it is sufficient for a group of people to change the perception of each one at the same time and all in the same direction.

This is a topic that we will resume in the last steps of the path of awareness on economic and monetary issues, today it is premature because we still have to take our 1st step.

Step 1 – Our perception of money

In this 1st step we limit ourselves to analyzing our perception of money from different points of view, through the following topics, which you will find more developed in the video, with simple and clear accompanying slides, which will allow us to address some key topics concerning our perception of money.

The Myth of Plato's Cave

Our condition today has not changed much since Plato's time, we are still chained at the bottom of a cave, forced to watch television screens that always tell us the same story: the state does not have the money and the public debt must be repaid. But the truth is quite different;

Change starts with ourselves

To get out of the cave and understand the truth, we must change our perception of money, the economy and public debt, because they strongly condition our perception of ourselves, of others and of society, preventing us from changing reality;

What makes the economic system work

The path starts from the basics, analyzing the reasons why money is so important within both the real and financial economy, but above all why we accept it in economic exchanges.

What is money

Definition of money, as a unit of measurement of value and also as a payment instrument in the exchange of goods and services, analyzing the main and secondary functions performed within our economic and monetary system: instrument of exchange, payment of taxes and reserve of value.

In conclusion

To better understand the consequences of money today in our economic system, it is very useful to make an analogy with the blood that circulates inside the human body, because it makes us understand how and why money currently risks "bleeding" our economy, subtracting resources due to the payment of interest on all the currency we use.

Enjoy the video.

The path we are starting today aims to increase our awareness on economic and monetary issues, but it also allows us to identify concrete and feasible solutions to get out of the economic crisis. Only in this way can we plan and create a better future for us and for our children, allowing everyone to achieve equitable and sustainable well-being.

Because THEY won't give up easily, but WE WILL NEVER give up.

The currency will be owned by the citizens and free from debt.

© Fabio Conditi – President of the Positive Money Association

https://monetapositiva.it/

Article 1 ° step – The elephant in the room: the coin comes from ScenariEconomici.it .