The Money Paradox, or the illusion of value

A tourist arrives in a small, struggling village and enters the only hotel. He places a 50€ bill on the counter and asks to reserve a room, saying he’ll return later to confirm. Since no rooms are available yet, he leaves the note and disappears for a while.

The hotel owner, desperate and in debt, grabs the bill and rushes to pay the butcher what he owes. The butcher does the same and rushes to the baker. The baker uses it to pay the local prostitute, who in turn brings the 50€ note to the hotel to pay for services previously rendered.

Just as she sets the money on the counter, the tourist reappears, says he’s found another hotel, picks up the bill, untouched, unchanged, and leaves the village.

No money was exchanged in the end. No services rendered during this moment. Nothing tangible produced. And yet, through a brief illusion of liquidity, the entire village has paid off its internal debts. The pressure of crisis dissolves, not by creating new wealth, but by letting value circulate.

Hocus-pocus! The economy is “fixed”.

The illusion we are living in

This story is more than clever. It’s devastatingly true. Because in it, we glimpse the uncomfortable reality we all live in: money is a symbol, not a substance. It is belief, agreement, shared fiction. And yet we treat it as if it were a force of nature, immutable and scarce, when in fact it's as artificial as any religion or ritual. And I already talked some days ago about the illusion of wealth and the money we don't have.

The 50€ note in the parable never changed hands in any real, transactional sense. It wasn’t earned. It wasn’t even kept. It was borrowed faith, temporarily trusted to be there, long enough for the village’s economic system to unwind its own entanglements. What was needed wasn’t more money, it was trust, motion, and timing.

But we don't live that way. We hoard money. We measure ourselves by it. We live under its tyranny. We think in terms of what we “can afford,” even when the real limitations are time, resources, and energy, not coins in a ledger.

We are, in short, enslaved to an illusion we ourselves maintain.

Money is a promise, not wealth

Despite what we’re told, money is not wealth. It’s not crops, tools, homes, or knowledge. It’s a placeholder. An IOU. A token that we all agree to treat as real, and only because we agree to.

• Modern money (fiat currency) is backed by nothing tangible, only trust in governments and central banks.
• Credit, loans, and mortgages are promises, often built atop promises made by others.
• Most “wealth” today exists as digital entries in bank ledgers, not physical assets.

The parable works because the 50€ was never kept, only passed along. Its power came not from being spent, but from being in motion.

Debt is a loop, not a ladder

In the story, every villager owes money. But more importantly, they all owe each other. This is key. The crisis is not due to an external lack of wealth, but because value is frozen. Trapped. Not moving. The moment someone outside the system (the tourist) injects liquidity, even temporarily, everything unblocks.

This is exactly what central banks and governments try to simulate during recessions. Stimulus. Quantitative easing. But we’ve built a world where the people who most need liquidity never see it, while the wealth already hoarded by the top 1% is sterilized in investments and speculation.

We’re told the system is broken. In truth, the system is designed to work for those who already have more than they need, and to extract labor, creativity, and time from those who don’t.

And we go along with it. Not because it’s fair. But because we’ve been conditioned to believe that money = value, rather than a placeholder for value.

You don't work for value. You work for a symbol of it.

Money doesn’t feed anyone. It doesn’t fix roads. It doesn’t write books, build houses, or care for the sick. People do. Labor does. Skill does.

And yet, you can grow food and still starve if you don’t have money. You can be skilled and unemployed. You can be surrounded by abundance and still be denied access to it, unless you can produce the right numbers in the right column of the right database.

You can’t eat digits. You can’t build with credit scores. But society has made it so that we treat these things as realer than real, more important than the actual products, services, or time behind them. We chase paper while ignoring purpose.

Scarcity is manufactured

The parable teaches us something else: the scarcity of money is not the same as scarcity of resources. The villagers were able to survive. They had food, services, skills. What they lacked wasn’t value, it was liquidity. A way to unfreeze the system.

Banks can create money with keystrokes through lending. Central banks can inject liquidity on command. Trillions appear overnight in response to market stress, but only if you’re a corporation, a nation, or “too big to fail.”

For the rest of us? Scarcity remains the myth we’re forced to believe. We’re told to tighten belts, to save, to sacrifice, while the system quietly inflates or deflates the supply based on abstract policy goals.

The result? Anxiety, inequality, and stagnation. Not because we lack value, but because we pretend money is value, and that it must always be earned through suffering.

In today’s world, millions go without shelter while houses sit empty. Farmers dump crops while people go hungry. Skilled workers sit idle while jobs vanish. The problem isn’t absence, it’s access. Blocked by artificial shortage and economic gatekeeping.

This is why universal basic income scares institutions. It breaks the illusion. It says: “You don’t have to be afraid to live.” And that’s a dangerous idea, because fear is the fuel that keeps the illusion intact.

The true crisis: confusing symbol with substance

We built a civilization on symbols: flags, brands, status, and money. But when we forget they’re symbols, we start sacrificing what’s real to protect what’s not.

We sacrifice time, the one thing we never get back, just to accumulate digital numbers. We sacrifice community, competing with each other in a system rigged to favor those who started first. We sacrifice imagination, taught to dream within budget rather than beyond it.

And worst of all, we pass this illusion on to our children as if it were truth.

“Get a job. Save money. Climb the ladder.”
A ladder that only exists if you don’t look down.

Circulation is the cure

The parable doesn’t end with anyone richer. It ends with everyone free. Not because more money appeared, but because what existed was finally allowed to move.

In real economies, this is exactly how stimulus works:

• Checks to citizens aim to trigger spending.
• Low interest rates encourage borrowing and risk-taking.
• Helicopter money is a theoretical version of this, free currency, dropped into society just to get it moving again.

Money stuck in savings accounts or offshore vaults helps no one. Circulation is not loss, it’s life.

Every time we spend wisely, pay fairly, or invest in our communities, we’re not “losing” money. We’re making the system flow.

What the parable really teaches us

The story is elegant. But the lesson is radical:

• Money is not value.
• Debt is not failure.
• Scarcity is not real.
• The system works, but only for itself.

The moment we recognize that, we reclaim power. The moment we see that what we need is already here, food, labor, creativity, love, we stop asking permission to live.

The parable shows a society freed, not by wealth, but by motion. By trust. By letting go of the idea that everything must be earned through suffering.

Money is only real because we behave as if it is. Which means we can also choose to behave differently.