“As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded.
When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue?
When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts?
And so on. In the meantime, things are going to get very murky.”
– Gustave Flaubert
“Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
The problem is as Edward Abbey stated it: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.” – Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
I feel that money has been a fine tool, and has its uses. But as Abraham Maslow said, “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
Were we to put the dollar sign in its rightful place, after it’s numerical value, would we be able to discern the importance of other things more readily?
This monetary game, which has usurped our understanding of economics, does have the capacity for collaborative contentment, yet just as with the equanimity which comes with success in the game of life, the outcome will largely depend on how we want to play the game.
The following is a chapter from Money, Sex, Power & Faith. Order your copy in paperback or for Kindle! “This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested …
For a few years, before I decided to my non-monetary lifestyle experiment, I mulled over this concept of ABC2 Economics. I called it the WeBMaP at the time. In my mind, it only seemed right to find a more balanced solution to our financial predicament. While I know that much of …
As As I was writing Money, Sex, Power, and Faith: The Convergence of Culture, I have been weaving my way through the history of our civilization, somewhat following the path left by Charles Eisenstein in his book The Ascent of Humanity. As I read his article in the Huffington Post …
