Genius of Money - Post III - Interview with Wangari Maathai

I am deeply moved by her endeavor, which pursues to endorse the power of planting trees. At the beginning, she simply wanted a viable solution to resolve the soil erosion issue while generating new sources of firewood for the local residents. However, the simple act of planting trees surprisingly evolves into a political movement when the government came to intervene, escalating the thinking of environmental concerns officially into a protest against the government.

Wangari therefore realizes that the environment sphere is closely linked with other spheres such as economics, politics, cultures, and spirits. I never imagined how difficult planting trees could be. In Kenya, it requires a license to plant trees and there is a complicated administrative process to go through. Wangari, faced with all the challenges from the external institutions such as the local government and the internal insecure forces such as such local leaders of schemes, managed to get through and made the entire world heard her declaration.  

No matter what kind of circumstance one is in, I guess there is always one thing to keep in mind, as stated by Wangari, “if I’m only a drop, I want to be a full and effective drop”.

Genius of Money - Post II - Chapter 7

In this chapter, the author discusses the value of cultural experiences. Every time individuals attends cultural events such concerts, music festivals, and shows, they pay for a certain amount of fee to get the right to be present, but the fee they paid does not guarantee them to witness brilliant performances. However, the experience, in a sense, is invaluable, because it is transpersonal, which will become part of the witnesses.

The same argument also applies in the realms of reading and education. Someone once asks a wise man why people still read books even knowing that they are going to forget what’s being told in the books anyway. The wise man answers that they are not going to remember the specifics of stories indeed, but the story already becomes a part of who they are. It’s the reading experience that gradually cultivates how they think and who they become eventually. As regard to education, educators say education is what’s still left inside people, after they don’t remember anything in the textbooks.

Summary of the Genius of Money for Chapter 9 &14 from part 1

Chapter 9

This chapter focuses on the relationship between money and death. It introduces the topic by focusing on a painting, the Dance of Death, portrayed by a German artist, Hans Holbein. The picture depicts a man sitting in a cell-like room with the wealth he accumulated his entire life. Next to him sits a skeleton, which represents the death itself.  The image aims at showing spectators human’s connection/relationship with money, death’s appearance, and the death process.

Greediness leads to people’s insatiable appetite for wealth so as to seek seemingly eternal security for themselves. However, it is the very same act that destructs their life because they are exposed vulnerably to variations due to the belief that that simply having money on their hands and/or in their safety box would ensure absolute security and save them from death. Death, in a sense, is no longer a biological transition that people undergo, but more accurately, a lessen that enlightens people so that they could be more sympathetic with their real needs and return balance to that human sense of well-being.

Chapter 14 
In this chapter, the author introduces two metaphors - labyrinth and touchstone - to illustrate the functionality of money in the modern society. Even though these two items seem far-fetched, the writer made a strong case by discovering the rule that they both connect the visible world and invisible world. Coincidentally, this particular trait also exhibits itself in the medium of money. Money expresses a social technology which makes the invisible visible by quantify the value of material goods. It is also linked to human’s material needs and participation in economic life, which can also be taken as a reference to the human experiences itself, a journey about self-exploration, similar to the purpose of labyrinth. 


Yet, money has changed in recent years and has become much less connected to the human experience as exemplified by the touchstone and the labyrinth. It has essentially jettisoned all physicality and been reduced to electronic forms such as credit cards and electronic purses.  As a result, money, as a medium of exchange, gradually loses its function of making the invisible visible. Touchstone is no longer needed to measure the quality of coins; the physical journey with the iconic exchange of paper money becomes extinct. However, the author argues, the essence of the labyrinth journey remains, but just chooses to manifest itself in a different form. Given that the moment of purchase could be almost simultaneous with the thought of the purchase in the human brain, the spiritual self - desires and needs - will be completely visible in the economic self that buys, sells, invests, and gives, which corresponds to an old saying that “we are what we do”.