THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

ick wall with his forehead, he was getting worried again and fan
depressed about all the bump he kept collecting. So he went to see a
Psychiatrist.
The Psychiatrist told him to lie down on a big couch, and stated
asking him a lot of questions - how he got along with his father, with
his mother and his brothers and sisters. After he answered all these
questions, the Psychiatrist told him that it was very normal that he
was depressed, and asked him to come back every week for some indepth
treatment about all that.
One day, much later, as the Man with the Near-Seeing Glasses came
back from Ms appointment with the Psychiatrist more depressed
than ever, he bumped against the little five-year-old granddaughter
who was waiting for him in front of his house. He was very happy to
see her again, and they went into the house to play together.
As the little girl was playing horsy on her grandfather's knees, she
suddenly grabbed at the horse's bridle and ripped off ma Near-
Seeing Glasses from her grandfather's nose. Just as suddenly the Man
discovered that he could see much further than his nose after all. His
granddaughter's smiling face was clear. The green door he'd smashed
into last week was clear. He even noticed that the red brick wall
needed some repairs where he had hit his heed. Seeing things beyond
his own nose before bumping into them made a lot of sense after all.
We can now rephrase the relationship as follows: interest rates
create a built-in tendency to disregard the future, to create a worldview
with ‘near- seeing glasses'. Furthermore, the higher the interest
rate, the more that tendency prevails.
We have seen in Chapter 2 how interest rates are deeply woven into
the very process of creating money in our prevailing money system.