Suppression, Monopoly and Media of Payment

While the concept of media of payment, closely related to the willingness to accept them, starts to develop, the basics of how to exploit it to suppress start to develop as well.

Five centuries Before Christ, in his famous speech, Roman politician Menenius Lanatus Agrippa compared society to a human body, in order to highlight how just as a body survives only as long as its organs cooperate, society too survives only as long as the individuals in it cooperate.

This comparison holds true for exchange, too: products exchanged flow between people providing them survival just like blood circulates to provide all the cells with oxygen and nourishment, so both each individual or cell can go on contributing to the general survival with its specialized product.

Monopoly enters this scene with its factors of power, scarcity and suppression: When an individual wants power over his fellows, whatever use he/she wants to do of that power, as to society it can be summed up in either help or suppression. Now, one can observe how power is based on scarcity: exercising power means controlling, and if done to the detriment of the controlled means dominating; domination is exercised by a means, and the means is as effective as there's some kind of scarcity, and the scarcity is based on want. Example: if you did not want to live, or if you had infinite life, and someone threatened you with a weapon to rob you, where would you tell him to shove his weapon up? Example: if someone tried to dominate you by force, and you had unlimited force, where would you shove his force up? As one can observe that scarcity is more or less suppressive anyhow, therefore someone willing to dominate you will have a suppressive effect over you anyhow. The scarcity of food, energy, houses, transports, etc. is a problem. But when you live in a civilisation where there is abundance of the means to produce those things, the fact that somehow they end up being scarce for most of the people stinks particularly badly of suppression, isn’t it?