The Cost Of A Cashless Society
When I was growing up, every Christmas break from school my family went to Florida for vacation. (Yes, there used to be Christmas break before it became politically correct Winter Break). The routine was that we flew to Florida, rented a car at the airport and stayed at the Barcelona Hotel for 10 days. One year, in particular, remains remarkably vivid in my memory. Standing at the Hertz counter at Miami International Airport, luggage in tow, my father couldn’t rent the car to get us to the hotel because all he had was cash.
I recall my father filling out the rental form, reaching for his wallet and placing the deposit for the ten day rental on the counter, when the Hertz agent said, “Sorry sir, but we cannot take cash.” Of course my father thought she was kidding. He tried to continue the transaction but the agent reiterated that she could not take cash, only a credit card. My father was a self-made, successful entrepreneur who paid all his bills on time. He didn’t, as he would often adamantly state, “believe in” credit cards. His parents had lived through the Great Depression and he had vivid memories of those difficult times. His reaction to those memories was to never be without enough money… “cash” as he saw it.
So, being denied a rental car with cash to show for it at first amused, then confused and finally angered him. At one point, I distinctly recall him saying to her, “You won’t rent me the car. Fine. How much is the car? I’ll buy it.” He meant it, too. He always traveled with a ridiculous amount of cash! The agent replied, “Sir, we don’t sell cars, we rent them.” To which he replied, “Apparently you do not.”
We got a cab to the hotel.
My father subsequently applied for a credit card simply so that he could rent a car when he needed one. When “rewards” became a thing, he’d purchase a new Cadillac every year and use his credit card to pay for the purchase. Then he’d pay off the card during the next month’s billing cycle and get thousands of rewards points which he’d then use to…wait for it…rent a car from Hertz.
He was always amused by that story.
The reason my father liked cash so much is the same reason most people do. It supports privacy and anonymity. You don’t have to be a member of a drug cartel to want either, or both. Every citizen of the United States is entitled to both by nature of our citizenship. But in the public and private tech rush to control, monitor and manipulate everything from our smoke detectors to our political preferences, moving to a cashless society exponentially increases the loss of privacy and anonymity.
China is certainly on the move in this direction. They are now assigning Social Scores to every person based upon their choices and their behavior. Choose wrongly and your score is diminished, which then limits where you can go to school, where you can shop, where you can work. We expect this from Communists. What we are blind to is that it’s happening here. Loss of liberty is a slippery slope…but a slope it is.
We are moving to cashless. There are stores and restaurants that already refuse to take cash. Surely Amazon will come in first among the tech giants at the cashless finish line. Simultaneously, some companies have already implanted chips in their employees that “make things easier”…like opening doors, accessing locked computers or purchasing lunch in the cafeteria.
Easier is often not necessarily better.
In case you haven’t noticed, or don’t want to know, you and I are the frog in the nice, cool water that is slowly being heated to the boiling point. By the time the water is hot enough to cook us, we won’t be able to get out of the pot.
In Judaism, the Book of Zohar teaches there are 50 levels of consciousness, with the 50th level being the consciousness of a rock. Pretty much no consciousness at all and definitely immobile. It is taught that the Jews of ancient Egypt had become so enslaved to Pharaoh that they were at the 49th level. Had God not taken them out of Egypt in the hurry that he did, there would have been no saving humanity from permanent enslavement to materialism.
If you think the Bible is “just a story,” stories can be instructive.
Ancient Egypt had nothing on us when it comes to enslavement to materialism. I am fairly certain Pharaoh would have given anything, even his first born, to be able to track the expenditures, travels and preferences of his work force. Well, Amazon, Google, Facebook and the U.S. government are living his dream. Moving to a cashless society guarantees that whatever little autonomy we have left will be relinquished in the move toward “greater ease.”
Perhaps we should collectively pause for a moment, check the temperature in this pot and get out while we still have enough consciousness to make that decision.