When you think about money, at first it just seems like a normal object you can hold and possess and use as tender, but in fact it’s a little more complicated than that. Money is also an idea that needs to be followed on belief and faith that the object holds value, or it just becomes a piece of worthless paper. As the people of the Yap island believed that the large stone rocks called fei held value in their society, so does the United States with dollars. When the Germans put black x’s on the Yap people’s fei they believed they had lost value and went from rich to poor, just as the U.S. believed they lost wealth when they took gold and marked the drawer it was held in with the label “French.” Both societies believed they had lost wealth even though they still possessed the objects. It was all because of the fact that the people believed and had felt value was taken.

The concept of money being valuable is based on the belief that it is worth a certain value and can obtain you materials and needs you want by giving the money to purchase another object. We could just as easily think that a chicken has value. It can lay eggs to be used as food and be cooked and be eaten for its meat, so why don’t we go to the local wawa grab a sandwich and hand them a chicken in return for the sandwich? The simple fact is that our society doesn’t see that as a normal form of payment, but we could all just as easily be paying in chickens as we do dollars though. As long as society saw a chicken as value that could be used as tender and everyone accepted it then it would be fine. It would take time to accept the chicken as valuable, but as one set of people started to accept it, then another group would, and then another and so on. It could continue until it was stopped or grew into how actual source of tender and value. People follow by example and if one person is doing something then they may try it too, until it slowly grows into something much larger and could take over dollar bills as tender. Is this likely? No, probably not, but it shows how easily if people grew to think of a chicken as value and could be used as tender that it’s just as easily to be the way we pay for things as dollar bills. It all matters on the acceptance, use, and belief of the people of the society to determine this.

It’s the same way as in faith and how we believe in god, or any other almighty being that a religion believes in. We can not see god, but we have objects we use to worship him with and praise and pray to him. It’s similar to money in the fact we can’t see the value of the object, it’s just a stupid piece of paper, but we believe in the value and that’s what’s important. People believe in an almighty being and worship to objects of him as in case of Jesus on the cross, or the statue of Buddha. Then we take a dollar bill and believe oh yes I have value of one dollar to buy something with when all it happens to be is paper. you can not see it, but you certainly believe in it as strongly as when you see a bike and think there is a bike. It just becomes natural and second nature to everyone. Money is just an object with a strong belief behind it of its value that developed over  time and became a natural and usual concept to everyone living in the United States, just as the Yap did with their fei rocks. People just need to believe, use, and accept the concept of the value of money and becomes nothing out of the ordinary, but when questioned you can see just how easily value could be put on anything else over time and used as tendered as long as the society followed those three concepts of acceptance, use, and belief in the objects value.