How Money Devours the World
Societies that live by the dollar, die by the dollar.
The Christian Bible says, “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10.) That may be true for individual evil. But at the social and global level, it’s not the love. It’s the power of money that corrupts everything and fills the world with trash.
People invented money, but money soon transformed into a force of its own. We don’t own it; it owns us. When people learned how to turn money into political power, money became an addiction or social cancer. It spreads into every aspect of life –work, education, spirituality, relationships, and the natural world — and changes them to suit itself.
How money changed from our tool to our master
Money is so useful and convenient and fun to have; how could it be bad? It’s like all addictions, (think of sugar) in having short-term benefits that only later reveal their destructive side. Money’s evolution into all-consuming growth has gone through four stages.
Stage 1 — people invented money to make exchanging things easier. This had obvious benefits when it came to trading stuff, but it had the deeply dysfunctional effect of giving everything a price.
Since it can be exchanged for almost anything, money itself becomes more important than beauty, health, food, time (“Time is money”) or, frequently, life itself. Billions of living things are killed every year because their dead bodies (as building materials or meat), or their living spaces become a source of money for powerful people. As ecologist Derrick Jensen wrote, “If monetary value is attached to something, that thing will be exploited until it’s gone.”
In Stage 2, money takes over the natural world, when buying and selling spreads to things that never should be bought or sold, like land and people. In this phase, money becomes the most powerful force in the world.
As philosopher Charles Eisenstein wrote in Sacred Economics, money has literally become our God, an invisible, incomprehensible, all-powerful force that makes everything go. It is the “invisible hand” that orders nearly every aspect of our existence. With it, you can do almost anything; without it, practically nothing. No wonder it’s addictive.
Enshrining money (or more precisely, money power) as God explains how the rich can simply ignore the well-being and conditions of those without money. The working classes, the poor, and the non-human aren’t connected to Power the way wealthy people are. We do the work that makes rich people rich, but the God of Money has abandoned us, so we are not worthy of consideration.
Consider the history of hunting. People have always hunted for food, but usually didn’t kill more than they needed, because they recognized animals as our living relatives, and because they knew they had to leave some for next week’s hunt. But when it became possible to hunt animals for money, creatures like the passenger pigeon, the bison and many others were hunted to extinction or near it for their salable meat or skins.
Slavery goes back thousands of years, but it really took off when human slaves could be bought and sold for money. Whole races could be turned into property, permanent slaves, abused and worked to death, their children sold off to other owners.
When people started owning land and profiting from it, they closed the land off to others. They started changing the nature of the land, e.g. from a marsh to farm land and from farm land to suburbs. Stage 2 is already life-threatening, but worse was to come.
In Stage 3, money metastasized when it attained the power to make more of itself. Interest-bearing loans grew into compound interest (charging people money for owing money.) Interest was so destructive of old societies that the Bible warns against it, and Islam forbids it completely.
Then came stock investments, insurance, and ever-expanding financial instruments such as derivatives. Now money can grow on its own and take control of more and more of the physical world. This is why rents and real estate prices are soaring; finance companies using their government bailouts and compound interest to buy up all the property and rent it out.
Corporations were formed with the sole goal of making money, not a purpose of doing anything in the world. Automakers become financiers; oil companies become plastic manufacturers. They will do whatever makes the most profit. Their vast sums of money give them power over humans, living things, and land. Numbers on a video screen are now more valuable than tangible real-world things.
In Stage 4, money takes political power. This is the deadly, brain-eating phase, where money takes control of governments and starts running everything to increase itself. Money is power, and power is addictive. Those who have lots of it crave more, and everyone else has to do with less.
A few (of many) characteristics of Stage 4 (terminal) rule by money:
● Building new things is good. Maintaining old things is bad. Infrastructure (e.g. pipes, cables, buildings, bridges) collapses because nobody profits from keeping them in shape. Old elevators become unusable because companies stop making parts for them. Old apps stop working because companies no longer support them. Poorly maintained railroad tracks break and cause daily train derailments. Apartment towers fall into disrepair or are abandoned, while a million people are homeless.
● Health insurance is profitable, actual health care is not. Expensive, invasive, technological medical care is profitable; cheap generic medicines and preventative care are not. So, medical care gets more expensive, more people lose access to care, and people get sicker.
● War is profitable; peace is not — When arms corporations make foreign policy, wars will never end. As Sri Lankan philosopher Indrajit Samarajiva wrote, “An arms company being against war would be like an umbrella company being against rain.” All those weapons sent to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, all those American bases and operations keep expanding because people profit from them. While still fighting current wars, they’re already planning the next ones.
Nuclear weapons keep getting built, when there is no conceivable use for them. ”The arms race” cannot stop, even if other countries stop racing, because money keeps it going. The same applies to gun violence in the U.S. All those gun sales make money for corporations. The 2nd Amendment and “gun rights” are marketing schemes.
● Anxiety and fear are profitable; peace and happiness are not. People living in a state of fear consume more out of anxiety.
● Consumerism is profitable; spirituality is not. Look at what’s happened to our holidays. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Fathers’ Day, Mothers’ Day are all celebrated by buying and consuming, making money for corporations. What happened to the meaning of those days?
● Work is good; enjoying life is not. An exception: enjoying life in expensive ways is allowed.
● The inequality chasm keeps growing until the system breaks down from too much poverty to sustain an economy. Millions suffer so thousands can live like kings.
● Stability and sustainability are not profitable; growth, chaos and environmental destruction are. Start-ups that “disrupt” established industries are celebrated. People living sustainably in apartments and riding buses or walking don’t generate nearly as much money as people living in houses and driving cars around on freeways.
How money took political power
Because money has become God, or at least taken on God-like power, those who have it come to believe they are ordained to run things. After a few centuries, they actually do run things.
Whatever kind of government people set up, money will seek to bend it to its will. In a quasi-democratic system like the USA, corporations can bribe officials (called lobbying,) can determine who gets to be an official in the first place (campaign contributions,) set up and fund educational programs in every school to teach how money sees the world, endow “think tanks,” and buy mass media that determine what we learn about the world.
Money can corrupt more authoritarian governments just as easily. Mid-20th Century German corporations worked closely with Hitler and profited from Nazism and its wars. Autocratic leaders are easy to bribe. Money allows rich countries like the US to control other countries, influencing or overthrowing their governments. Money buys weapons and buys people to use them. How many of those jihadists riding around Syria are poor kids enjoying their first time out of poverty?
The Earth and its people cannot stand up to the power of money. Say some rich company wants to mine gold on indigenous land, and the mining process will pollute the water and poison farmland, people, and jungle.
How could a foreign company make that happen? With money, they could offer to buy the land. They could promise jobs in the mine. They could bribe leaders or tribes with a share of the profits.
If that doesn’t work, they could pay and arm urban dwellers or rival tribes to drive Natives away. If needed, they could corrupt local or national governments to order the mine built and send in troops to enforce it. If local governments don’t go along, the corporation could pressure its home country to regime change the target country’s government or to invade.
All this might take years, but money can afford to wait.
Could we live without money?
Money isn’t going away. As economics writer Brett Scott says, we live in an interdependent world of billions of people, and, “Large-scale interdependence cannot exist without monetary systems.”
However, we could greatly decrease money’s power over our individual and collective lives. Making money more of a tool, less of a master could help people connect without killing ourselves off. There are gift economies. There are sharing societies and ‘buy nothing’ web sites. There are mutual credit organizations like credit unions. Small towns and groups have set up local currencies to avoid state-controlled money.
Even while money still rules, there are things we could do. A few of them are:
● A debt jubilee — Many ancient kingdoms had Jubilee years when debt was forgiven. We could start with canceling illegitimate debt, e.g. compound interest, most debt poor countries owe rich countries, legal and medical debt.
● Outlaw compound interest
● Pay a universal basic income, perhaps not in money but in housing, food, transportation, and health care.
● Nationalize the insurance industry, housing, and health care.
● In schools and religious centers, teach interdependence and the world as gift. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in The Serviceberry: Abundance and reciprocity in the natural world, people could realize that all wealth comes from the Earth, and we are here to enjoy it and to share it freely. We could understand greed as a social addiction and heal it.
● Focus on making and repairing things, restoring the natural world, and taking care of each other, not on making money for itself.
● Set strict limits on campaign funding and lobbying.
● Practice giving, every chance you get.
Some resources:
Books
Sacred Economics: Money, gift and society in the age of transition, Charles Eisenstein Evolver Editions 2011.
Endgame Derrick Jensen (or anything else by him)
The Gift : How the creative spirit transforms the world. Lewis Hyde 1983
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer PhD, Milkweed Editions 2013
The Serviceberry: Abundance and reciprocity in the natural world. Kimmerer 2024
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Friedrich Engels 1884
Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber PhD 2021
Web sites
Brett Scott Altered States of Monetary Consciousness
Mutual credit and local currencies
Articles
Unjust Debt Goes to the Heart of International Inequality, The Guardian
China’s Fortune Cookie vs. America’s debt economy — Michael Hudson
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