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Revaluation fantasy
Corresponding author:
Fabian Muniesa, Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Mines Paris, 60 Boulevard Saint-Michel, 75006 Paris,
France. Email: fabian.muniesa@minesparis.psl.eu. https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.8098
Fabian Muniesa
Mines Paris at PSL University, France
“NESARA/GESARA” pops up easily when one searches for the financial element in
conspiratorial, millennialist fantasies today. The acronym, NESARA, stood initially for National
Economic Stabilization and Recovery Act: a rather fringe policy proposal ideated in the 1990s
by Harvey F. Barnard, a consultant and founder of a NESARA Institute established in Greenwell
Springs, Louisiana. The initiative, which took the form of a proposed bill but was never
introduced before the US Congress, consisted in a systematic monetary and fiscal reform
aiming at “general prosperity” (against the “contrived scheme” put in place by “power brokers
in Washington, DC”) and included things such as the restoration of gold as constitutional
currency, the end of the Federal Reserve System, the elimination of national debt, the abolition
of compound interest on loans, and of income tax. The 2000s saw the acronym evolve, now
standing for National Economic Security and Reformation Act and referring to a rather esoteric
version of the plan, soon acquiring a planetary dimension, in the form of a Global Economic
Security and Reformation Act, GESARA. Shaini Goodwin – a spirituality and investment
consultant known as the “Dove of Oneness” in New Age internet circles – spearheaded this
new conspiratorial interpretation. The “global currency reset” and the general “revaluation” the
reform called for were considered to be in fact underway, although in a secret, occulted
fashion, with an adverse league of political and financial elites conspiring against the changes.
NESARA/GESARA also started to carry a distinctive spiritual, prophetic element, with the
restoration of the fair, original, real value of persons and things being connected to the
equilibrium of energies – at once planetary, cosmic, mystical, psychic, extra-terrestrial,
interdimensional, divine, and economic.
Myriad GESARA groups, seminars, publications, and tutorials exist today all over the
world. First-hand accounts provide a remarkable wealth of details on the webs of hope, fraud,
legend, and disarray that the GESARA syndrome is made of: from online shops in which one
can purchase cheap Iraqi dinar or Vietnamese dong in anticipation of the imminent GESARA
rollout (and then make a fortune when the time comes), to convoluted revelations about the
functioning of the Quantum Financial System (the nexus of banking software and hardware
that sustains the GESARA project), the secret war between the Alliance (a global confederation
striving to implement the reform) and the Cabal (the corrupt defenders of the old financial
order), the crucial role played by the Chinese Elders of the Royal Dragon (a set of ancient
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families working covertly for the restoration of the gold standard), and much more. It is, in
other words, an elaborate fantasy cluttered with elements of conspiratorial thinking, mixtures
of antisemitic tropes and spiritual visions, and also ideals of political reform and economic
salvation at the heart of which lies a theory of value.
The NESARA/GESARA syndrome certainly corresponds to established patterns of
conspiracy thinking identified by scholars of North American culture (Knight, 2000; Barkun,
2003; Fenster, 2008). It also points toward contemporary forms of populist extremism. Mike
Rothschild (2021), for example, identifies the NESARA narrative as a key precedent for the
QAnon paradigm: a complex, improvisational assemblage of conspiracy thinking and political
populism that has gained important traction today, in the US and elsewhere. NESARA/GESARA
connects indeed with the development of ‘sovereign citizen’ movements all over the world and
their particular legalistic inventiveness and secessionist radicalism. But it also connects with
the distinctive blend of New Age spirituality described by Susannah Crockford (2022).
Crockford explicitly addresses NESARA – and the fantasized materiality of gold – in her
examination of the cosmologies of money found at work in North American communities of
spiritual investment practice. More broadly, NESARA/GESARA exhibits a mundane version of
the economic eschatology implied in financial discourses on the future (Geiger, 2020;
Samman, 2022), as well as a sense of community at work in everyday speculative practice
(Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2022).
Is it possible, then, to situate this syndrome within the perimeter of ordinary financial
imagination? It is tempting to locate NESARA/GESARA and comparable phenomena in the
periphery of the financial order, situating them within a delusional space found at the margins
of judicious concepts of money, finance, wealth, and value. A different approach is possible,
however: one that takes paranoid finance – short for conspiratorial, millennialist
interpretations of banking, money, wealth, and value – as an extreme, radical appropriation of
a logic that is inherent in finance (Muniesa, 2022). In other words, we can observe how the
immanent critique of finance these movements rely on falls squarely within what Horacio Ortiz
(2014: 38) calls the “limits of financial imagination”. This financial imagination is a worldview
that thrives on the ideal of ‘free investors’ gauging the fundamental value of things in ‘efficient
markets’ and navigating the occasional ‘crisis’ this valuation insight meets. It is also a
worldview controlled by the notion of a ‘future’ (the investor’s future) that will generate value,
but only if it is defended from the threat of degeneration in the present (Muniesa and
Doganova, 2020). And it is also, perhaps even more fundamentally, a worldview dominated by
a fantasy of ‘value creation’: true, veracious, real, transparent, legitimate value that ought to
be protected from the sacrilege of false value (Muniesa, 2017).
Value fantasies such as the one considered here certainly carry the mark of delusion. But
they also carry the mark of overinterpretation: an extreme, literal interpretation of the ordinary
conceptions of value inherent in ordinary financial imagination. NESARA/GESARA’s imagined
world is a world populated with liberated souls freely transacting on account of a redemptory
currency that makes value transparent at last. This is a radical version of a moral and political
imagination that is at the core of actually-existing finance. Indeed, the revaluation fantasy is
loaded with capital’s paranoid unconscious: it is a fantasy of infinite yield deriving from a
source as yet unknown, of a mythic, never-seen treasure that should be reclaimed from the
enemy. Current, unresolved debates on the still patently mysterious nature of money – the
logic of its creation and circulation, the link between currency and value, the meaning of ‘fiat’,
and the significance of gold – demonstrate that paranoid finance enjoys plenty of fertile soil in
the ordinary world of finance.
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Muniesa
Nigel Dodd (2014) has convincingly mapped the cracks and loopholes that beset any
attempt at establishing a univocal foundation for the value of money. Within the discourse of
paranoid finance, the notion of value proper operates as a fetish. It pursues a critique of
finance that is focused on ideals of real value creation and contrasts this with the false,
spurious and abstract values that it encounters in reality. Building a fetishism of value in the
manner examined by Postone (1980), paranoid finance transforms the critique of finance into
the political hallucination of a dark conspiracy against the promise of revaluation.
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