On Money, Manic Depression, and Greed.

I could think of nothing more horrifying than the contemplation of the current global predicament. We have all of the necessary resources to feed, clothe, insulate and shelter everyone. We have for the past fifty years or so. The only barrier is, as it was in the Great Depression, the institute of money. What was money if not, as Watts pointed out, a merely abstract measure of wealth? The Great Depression was a quandry I could never understand. There had always appeared to have been something schizophrenic in its nature. Alan's explanation was that it was a "measure of wealth". Yet the absurdity of the Depression was that we had all of the necessary resources to pull ourselves out of it. He explains the absurdity of the situation by analogy to the construction of a house: Imagine that you wanted to build a house one day, but someone came around and told you, "Sorry. You cannot build this house today. No inches." The country had all of the necessary lumber and nails to construct this house, but there was a shortage in inches.
My personal take on it is this: The Stock Market was nothing short of a gambling system. Its very presence had struck me since childhood as being at odds with the notion of ethical and moral commerce; it relies upon one's skills, essentially, in gambling. I still stand by that, fully vigilant of the counter-argument that our economy would collapse without this giant entity. There is no question that it would; it did. And human beings were so dependent upon this system that they could not begin to say to one another: Well THAT didn't work. Let's try something else. Instead they said: Well THAT didn't work. Let's starve instead.
I have been told that money is necessary as an incentive for people to work. The chief contention is that there is a greater gap between a Nietzsche and the average human and a super-chimpanzee and the average human. The altruistic impulse is rare; empathy and insight rarely develop in most people. Yet was Maslow not right in that all people have the actualising principle? Is it not astronomical to venture a guess that, should we eliminate the need for people to work forty-hour weeks just to survive, more would transcend their deficiency needs and experience the joy of excess, which has as its distinguishing characteristic a glorious charity? Is it not when we are most involved in the intrinsic joy of work that we enter into Cziczentmihaliy's Flow state, and is it not in THIS state that we truly transcend the sense of separation that is created between Us and Them -- Subject and Object -- by the mires of self-consciousness?

I have been called Manic Depressive before. But is that not the most appropriate response to Life at this moment? The contemplation of human potential and the direct experience of its fullfilment in my own life fills me with an unfathomable joy and ecstasy which prompts me towards service for others and the Collective Humankind. Yet the remembrance of the actual suffering of others, while it may dampen my spirits, does NOT numb my senses. As Smith put it, "Happy and sad come in quick succession. And I'm never going to become/ What you became."

I have been told that it is Greed that will perpetuate the monetary system. Yet greed is not intrinsic necessarily to the human being. Greed may owe more to the civilised institution of money, which NECESSITATES it, than to human nature. I can never know that hunter-gatherers were greedy. Joseph Campbell attested that primitive people felt a sense of "Thou" with all of Life. Does greed, conversely, not dictate an "I-It" relationship? Are we not misguided in anthropomorphosising animals and merely equating ourselves with our distant ancestors, presuming their experience of Life to have been identical to our own? Greed cannot be justified by Necessity; Greed is a tendency to hoard a Surplus, and surplus was the product of Agrarian society. But at any rate, the time seems ripe for us to transcend it; it seems essential that we do. As an aesthetic, Greed is miring to the artist. As an ethic, Greed is stifling to civilisation. I do not need to cater to anyone's thirst for empirical evidence of these things; they are either readily apparent or incommunicable to those who have not seen them to be true. If Greed is what is preventing us from living in what earlier civilisations would have envisioned as a Utopia, and if its simply self-perpetuation is what keeps all human beings in bondage, either to another or towards themselves, then it is high time that we dispense with it.

dm.A.A.