The measure of wealth
Privileging money over life has justified multiple waves of genocide, enslavement, and ecosystem destruction.
Dear friends: as many of our fellow humans go through a(nother) summer of heat and fire, I hope that you find yourself in a safe and healthy place - the kind of place I wish for all creatures.
This past week or two, I’ve been lucky to watch lectures on the history of indigenous peoples and the urgency of climate justice. One preliminary conclusion:
Somehow, in the massive shift from creator to consumer economy, we were all suckered into believing that “wealth” measures only how much money we have.
And now, we believe the wealthiest people are the ones with more money than they could ever spend. We also believe that the potential for unfettered acquisition of money is the primary motivation for creativity and innovation, and that without it, we will no longer invent or discover technologies that save lives, or save the planet.
But money is an abstraction. You can’t eat it, or sleep under it, or plant it in the ground. It doesn’t nourish our bodies or quench our thirsts. It is a token system, a way of simplifying exchange. Massing huge amounts of it - in digital representations, an abstraction of an abstraction - does not, in and of itself, make life more joyful, more healthy, or more meaningful.
We’ve transformed money from a system of exchange to a symbol of success, and in so doing, we’ve made it an obstacle. Without enough of it, we cannot purchase safe housing, nourishing food, medical care. Without enough of it, our communities are fair game for colocation with toxin-spewing chemical plants, poisoning the air, land, and water - the only true, irreplaceable wealth.
We’ve made the abstraction of the abstraction of money more important, more valuable, than the literal survival of our species. “How can we afford to transition to clean energy, protect our air and water, provide climate justice?” we lament. “It costs too much!”
Think about that for a moment: we have constructed an economic system in which the survival of our species is perceived as too expensive.
The roots of this system go deep into the Western, European mindset of dominion over nature. They grew into attempts to erase the human understanding of being within nature, within the landscape, within community. Privileging money over life is the source of our toxic beliefs about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality; it introduced an owner-owned dynamic to our relationship to our planet, which then became the justification for multiple waves of genocide, enslavement, and ecosystem destruction.
For centuries, creator economies found ways to thrive in harmony with the planet. The moment we substituted money for wealth, humans took a massive leap toward self-destruction. And now, our addiction to money causes our addiction to fossil fuels, to toxic chemicals, to plastics, to racism, to the demolition of human rights, to exclusion, to despair.
To be clear: I am not advocating a return to some imagined, halcyon past in which everything was fine. The past is not safer, the future is not more dangerous - unless we fail in our human calling to care for one another and our planet.
In reality: it is never more expensive to privilege life over money. Our addiction to money might, in fact, cost us everything.
Thank you, as always, for sharing this journey.