Shifting our allegiance away from the God of Money

Worshipping the Wrong God

 “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

― Dorothy Parker

 

 Humans worship many gods and their legitimacy is relative entirely to personal views and values, but the most damaging deity of all is our adulation of the economy, a devotion which frequently displaces and so replaces critical human tenets upon which decency between fellows is grounded.

With the world facing a collision of calamities that has arisen from this perverse addiction, we need to mature beyond our child-like fascination with what is nothing more than a manufactured human construct and grow to a point at which we put people first and so relegate the profit and growth mantra, which has evolved from our market-driven society, to a position much lower on the hierarchy of importance.

Neil Postman wrote about the juxtaposition of news articles in his revelatory 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in which he discussed our inability to delineate a difference between stories included on our news coverage that jumped from death and destruction to cuddly animals without any understandable segue.

The news, national, international and local, has been given a sense of importance that few other daily conversations enjoy, but most news services invariably focus on matters financial and almost without fail end with reference to our socially legitimized international gambling casino, the stock market.

With our news services rushing to tell us about matters financial we are overwhelmed by this sense of importance attributed to an issue that when examined in isolation has nothing to do with the betterment of people, although the financial affairs of human existence are now so ingrained that it is beyond most to imagine a life in which human happiness and their broader wellbeing is placed atop those things in life that truly matter.

In fact, no research is needed to find that people, certainly those in the developed world that a person’s worth, in pretty much every sense, is measured by how much he or she has in the bank or what their potential is in terms of earning money. Rarely is a person celebrated for simply what they are; what they bring intellectually and emotionally to the discussion.

The collision of calamities the world is now confronting is a direct legacy of our addiction to economic matters – the drive to always put the economy first and before broader human wellbeing, has damaged earth’s climate; seriously depleted our finite resources; taken us past many planetary limits in that we are quickly exhausting our fresh water supplies; seriously overfished most of our oceans, which for centuries have been the larders of many nations; more people has meant more profits and so population numbers have never been seriously discussed; and the militarization of both language and behaviour has long been a cornerstone of profit and growth and so that has never been thoughtfully relegated in importance.

Naomi Klein in Sydney.

Writing in her 2014 book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate” Naomi Klein turns to one of Britain’s top climate experts, Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, who has “built the forceful case” that our growth-based economic logic is now in conflict with atmospheric limits.

Climate change has emerged as the most critical dilemma to ever confront humanity and there now appears to be at least broad rhetorical agreement that the world must contain temperature rise to just two degrees above pre-industrial levels if we are to avoid sliding into catastrophic climate change.

Considering present behaviour and our unrelenting fascination with profit and growth, we have to now, according Yvo de Boer, who until 209 has been the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, shut down the whole global economy if we are to have any chance of achieving the 2-degree goal.

Radical, yes, possible, no?

Yes, it is correct we need to de-throne the economic god, but the removal of its robes needs to be done with care, but of course we don’t have time on our side for the world’s climate system is quickly deteriorating and any changes we institute need to made in just years, most certainly not decades, but such a dramatic change will ricochet through world communities leaving many destitute as the rich huddle together, leaving the poor to scramble for the scraps in a world in which a disrupted climate system will bring weather that humans will find alien to their needs, meaning that starvation and thirst will desecrate communities.

The so-called “pointy end” of profit and growth is not going to be the nirvana so many imagine and to understand the mathematics explaining that is strikingly simple, contrasting sharply with the equations that will drive our ultimate demise they are not complicated and to understand them requires little more than primary school mathematics and nothing of the arcane, convoluted and bizarre intellectual trickery presented to us most every day by the ringmasters of the financial circus.

Representative of those countries that make up the G20 gathered in Brisbane in November, but it appears these obviously highly-intelligent people are locked into fantasy-fuelled belief that technology will rescue humanity from this collision of economic chaos, resource depletion, over-population, governance disorder and seemingly endless military confrontation. It won’t, we need social solutions.