A friend of mine who got sore throat at a conference told me that he got better the next day without taking any medicine. After mocking him about the state of his room mini-bar pharmacy, I replied that that his cure surely is much better than taking homeopathic medicine, as I do – it does help me, but only over a couple of days or more. The only disadvantage, he replied, is that you need to believe that homeopathy helps in order for it to work. To which I replied that I am ready to believe in it as long as it works better than the alternatives – as it seems to in my two decadeslong experience. Homeopathy: the cure as a matter of trust.

Which reminds me of money. Since abandoning the gold standard as superfluous superstition of little use as a link between any material value and its worth, money has been out on its own. Its only value is as the expression of trust into the repayment for the banknotes we carey in ourmwallets. The banknotes are of very little value in themselves, and there is even less material value the weak digital signals representing our money today. in digital context even the trust seems superfluous. Money today is, if we can simplify, just an expression of faith and trust in the basic decency and stability we need to survive. I guess that is, in the end, the most valuable relation we have in the modern societies after all. It might be scary to think that we place so much value innaked trust without any strong material backing. That is, no backing besides the creaky old legal systems in which we place ever less trust as the years go by and ever less as the social transactions around it seem to be speeding up.

There we are, so many people shivering under the cold rain without shelter, our only hope the trust in the others, invisible in the dusk.