A recent talking point re-emerges in another light....

[Joseph Tracy]

Interesting shit. Tough to treat empirically.
For me the question isn't how to deal with or understand  money  or shit . The real question is what is wealth and what is needed for a happy life and is wealth fundamentally private or is it fundamentally a complex shared interaction of communities over many generations.? Can wealth be stolen or is theft just a desecration of  the abundance  of a healthy community and the reduction of total wealth for everyone?  
Will the final thief with all the shit piled high establish the perfect Darwinian prototype for the ideal human civillzation?

On Jan 25, 2012, at 4:02 PM, David Morris wrote:

> Gold ain't shit, but it's the next best thing:
> 
> According to Freudian theory the human infant passes through a stage
> –the anal stage- as a result of which the libido, the life energy of
> the body, gets concentrated into the anal zone. This infantile stage
> of anal eroticism takes the essential form of attaching symbolic
> meaning to the anal product. As a result of these symbolic equations
> the anal product acquires for the child the significance of being his
> own child or creation, which he may use either to obtain narcissistic
> pleasure in play, or to obtain love from another (feces as gift), or
> to assert independence from another (feces as property), or to commit
> aggression (feces as weapon).  Thus some of the most important
> categories of social behavior (play, gift, property, weapon) originate
> in the anal stage and –what is more important- never lose their
> connection with it.  When infantile sexuality comes to its
> catastrophic end, non-bodily cultural objects inherit the symbolism
> originally attached to the anal product, but only as second-best
> substitutes for the original (sublimations).  Sublimations are thus
> symbols of symbols.  The category of property is not simply
> transferred from feces to money;  on the contrary, ***money is
> feces***, because the anal eroticism continues in the unconscious.
> 
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
>> So in the end the value of money depends on trust.
>>  Like so much else in this world.