Almost everything is pretend though, unless we’re talking about the basic laws of science (and even those change with context).
Language is “pretend”. Words don’t mean anything unless we all agree they mean something.
Valuing family is “pretend”. We all agree to give family importance, but plenty of animals don’t.
All laws are pretend. Country borders are pretend. Gender roles are pretend. Social position is pretend. Even my job is only my job because everyone agrees to give me responsibility in this role. Pretty much everything in society only works because of tacit agreement.
Not everything is “pretend” but what you have identified is that all societal rules are participatory algorithms, and that includes money and laws. Money, or really wealth and value, are effectively resource allocation and prioritization algorithms. It’s why the very idea of individuals, or even organizational entities largely decouple from societal benefit, having comparable allocative power to actual societal management structures is batshit absurd.
You should check out the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Humans have this amazing ability to make up all sorts of crazy shit, but it has huge advantages in our ability to organize.
One on one, a chimp would easily beat up a human. Ten on ten, the chimps still have an advantage. But 200 on 200, humans would win no contest. Our ability to make shit up allows us to coordinate with huge numbers people that we don’t even know, which is extraordinarily rare.
What differentiates humans from all animals including apes is our ability to cooperate & coordinate. Cooperation is what has allowed humans to dominate the world. I’m quite optimistic about the future simply because our innate sense of cooperation is all the good we have ever needed to conquer any and all evil the world has managed to create at any point in history all the way to now, and will continue to hold true forever.
I personally suspect that the belief that money is real is problematic, psychologically.
There are all sorts of experiments that show we treat money in our minds differently from most other things.
A famous example is that many people would think nothing of taking a ten cent pen from work, but would be abhorred at the idea of taking money, even ten cents, from petty cash and just keeping it.
An experiment has shown that, if you give people the chance to cheat for money, or to cheat for tokens that can be immediately exchanged for money after the experiment, they will cheat more for tokens, despite the fact that at that point, the tokens are technically a type of money.
So, this sort of thing makes me suspect that beliefs about money also influence our ethics and our mental proclivities. So maybe people who believe money is more real are more likely to hoard it or to have gambling problems.
If I steal a cheap pen, it’s because I wanted a cheap pen. There’s no deeper meaning to it. I’m not going to fence it for a fifteenth of a baguette at the bakery.
If I steal ten cents though, I break a much deeper taboo because money is by definition fungible. Why do I need the money, what am I going to use it for, and why didn’t I empty the cash register while I was at it? These are all worryingly open questions.
Furthermore I reject the premise that stealing 10 cents is functionally equivalent to stealing a pen worth 10 cents; if anything, the premise that these are equivalent depends on a very debatable modern consumerist idea that commodities are perfectly interchangeable for money and/or the belief in a “rational actor” that has never existed outside of economics classes. Sure that may have been be valid if I was in charge of doing a bulk purchase of pens (and even then people aren’t as rational as economists would like but I digress). These economics concepts are all too theoretical to apply to individual actors in everyday life.
That pen is “worthless” to my employer (at least in my mind) and simultaneously worth a lot to me; I wouldn’t part with it for 10 cents or even 1 euro because that wouldn’t be worth the inconvenience of not having a pen, or simply because the idea of someone wanting to buy something I own and didn’t intend to sell is offensive to me.I do agree with the basic premise that we treat money as special, but to me that’s a natural and rational consequence of its fungible and abstract nature. It’s much weirder to consider physical objects to be fungible IMO (even if it makes sense on an abstract level for commodities), and that’s why the sentence “you’ll own nothing and be happy” induces so much existential dread despite being based on theoretically sound economic principles. I don’t care if it’s actually cheaper or more resource efficient, I’m not buying a subscription to my woodworking tools or selling my house. I like the psychological safety of owning things.
