Have you ever thought (not without frustration perhaps) about how money is a construct, made up, this huge shared illusion?

Perhaps you’ve also considered the strangeness of how something that has no intrinsic value can have such a hold over the world and determine so absolutely the quality of so many hundreds and thousands and millions of lives.

Stranger still that it should affect a large number of people negatively, who nonetheless continue to participate within a system that is not concerned for their well-being, but rather evidently more concerned with exploitation.

There are dramatic gaps between upper-income families and lower-income families — according to the Pew Research Center, in 2016, those in the upper-income bracket had 75 times as much as those who were in the lower-income bracket.

What’s more is that the wealthiest one percent own a staggering 40 percent of the wealth in America, according to the Washington Post as of a month ago, who cite a paper by Edward Wolff.

It’s pretty hard to consider the system as anything other than rigged when considering facts like that. It is getting easier and easier to (cynically? perhaps, perhaps not) scoff at concepts like “upward mobility.”

Conditions like this prompt statements like the one made by C. Edward Griffin in his book “The Creature From Jekyll Island,” in which he states that money “is a form of modern serfdom in which the great mass of society works as indentured servants to a ruling class of financial nobility.”

It sounds like a radical type of assertion, but it is at the least interesting to consider in light of the apparent worsening state of affairs here in America.

It is a consideration, among many others from sources like Gandhi and Thoreau and various world religions, that influenced Daniel Suelo to simply give up the use of money altogether, a practice he has been maintaining since 2000 (though he’s had to recently come back from his nomadic lifestyle to care for his mother).

Of particular interest (to me, anyway) is that he has managed to do so here in America, within a country that is markedly capitalistic, materialistic, and generally besotted with money/greed.

Additionally, when reading interviews that he has done with people, and in reading the book that has been written about him, well, he doesn’t sound like a crazed conspiracy theorist or radical.

He continuously outlines his reasoning and thoughts behind his decision to renounce money, which developed from much thinking through the so-called truths and common threads that can be found within world religions.

One such thread, according to Suelo, is the renunciation of worldly goods. And aside from religion, Suelo looks at both nature, and how it functions just fine without money, and how well the monetary system seems to be working (which, it isn’t, or at least not very efficiently).

And sure, his decision to reject what he terms the “money system” does at face value appear rather radical. But, perhaps it seems so radical because we are so entrenched in a certain mindset that this is simply how things are done, and there is no alternative.

I was introduced to the figure of Daniel Suelo by a book called “The Man Who Quit Money,” written by Mark Sundeen. And while I don’t necessarily plan to renounce my possessions and the like, it was a very thought-provoking read.

And since it does seem crazy to do such a seemingly radical thing, I’d like to close by including Suelo’s response when an interviewer, close to the beginning of an interview, situated himself and Suelo by pointing out that Suelo “came from a good family and has been to college…is not mentally ill, nor an addict”, etc., to which Suelo says, among other things,

“It would be nice if we lived in a world that considered it crazy to cause harm to ourselves, others, and our environment or to praise those who do cause such harm. A sane society would consider it crazy to kill living things and destroy food and water supplies in order to amass something that nobody can eat or drink, like gold, silver, and money.”