Money Is The Root...

(Yes, I know, the actual verse goes "the love of money is the root of all evil.)

I stumbled on this essay today and the Bells of Agreement commenced to sound a carillon in my cranium. Rarely do I run across an article that so exactly captures my thoughts, beliefs and emotions. 

The doom-and-gloomers will tell you impending collapse has been a long time coming. And they're more right than they know. It started right around the time humans got the ridiculous notion they could "own" land.

Natives don't think like that: the idea of owning a piece of Grandfather Earth, to them, is so ludicrous and sacrilegious as to be practically unthinkable. But us "civilized" folk have better ideas, don't we?

From land, we moved on to...everything else. We've had to: as this essay explains, it's implicit in the very nature of the financial system we've created. Its goals are implacable: to separate us from each other and to commoditize our lives. We pat ourselves on the back because we've abolished slavery. We haven't abolished slavery, we've just made it a little less blatant. 

 Practically every aspect of our lives has been turned into a commodity to be bought and sold. As Eisenstein puts it,

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item.

When the economy cycles down, what happens? We revert to a more "primitive" lifestyle relying on family and friends instead of strangers, making our own entertainments...doing things a little closer to the way they were done for tens of thousands of years. The things that worked just fine.

Sometimes I think what we call  "civilization" is an aberration, not the normal or natural state of things. Much as I love the 'stuff' it's brought me, I'm uneasy at the price I've paid to belong to this club. They say "the best things in life are free" (and "the best things in life aren't things")...it's maybe a symptom of how far gone we are that there's an ever-shortening list of free things.