Re: She's Alive... Beautiful... Finite... Hurting... Worth D
You are spot on with this statement Chico.
Money is a completely abstract idea. It allows us to do untold evils to Mother Earth and pretty much all of the non-human inhabitants as well as our fellow humans. How does this happen, after-all, we are all intelligent people aren't we?
We are ALL addicts, yes addicts, and we don't even realise it. We will even deny it to ourselves and get angry with anyone that points this out. And worst of all we are addicted to an abstraction!
Abstraction can be viewed as a good thing. It allows us to 'pigeon hole' our perception of the world around us. It allows us to attach labels to things that makes it very easy to think of them, and move on. We can think of a forest as just being some bits of wood with leaves stuck in the ground.....it's now easy to chop them down, after-all, it's just some bits of wood right? Well, it's a lot more complex than that. Look at all the other flora and fauna that makes up a forest............it's a whole eco-system that's taken many many years / decades to develop together...........but we can buy a new chair with our conscience clear because we have paid money for it. We have given it a human 'value'. I didn't chop the forest down so my conscience is clear.
If a stranger comes up to you in the street and offers you a watch - cheap, most of us would walk away because there's a good chance it's been stolen, and yet, we'll gladly go into a shop and buy the watch thinking that we've done the right thing..........but, hang on, where did the metal come from, where did the plastic or worst still the leather strap come from? Where did the highly poisonous chemicals for the batteries come from and so on. This is just one simple example........take a look around you and have a good long think about where all of these manufactured things originate from..........they all come from Mother Earth. But we can quite happily buy these things without our consciousnesses being pricked because we use money to avoid 'thinking' about what we are doing. Money gives us a clean conscience.
The next time that you fill your car up with fuel, have a think about where this 'fuel' came from..........yes it came from Mother Earth, but worse still, it is likely to have come from an area of the planet which has undergone severe oppression or even wars over the oil............but don't worry, money will take that guilt away for you.
I am as bad as everyone else. Yes I am a hypocrite. But at least I am now aware of what I am doing wrong, and I am trying to correct my behaviour. I am also trying to wean myself of my addiction to money. It's difficult, especially when everyone else around you is completely hooked and doesn't even see that there is a problem.
If you haven't read
The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein, then I would urge you to do so. He explains his theory of how we have got to where we are now, and also has some very good suggestions about how we might solve it