The money-convenience trap

 Introduction

One of civilisation’s objectives is to minimise the level of danger its people are exposed to. The degree to which it succeeds in this determines its longevity. In other words, one of civilisation’s primary attractions is its promise of a safe, predictable environment in which its people may flourish. 

But, as we grow accustomed to civilisation’s low-risk environment – relative to what we ‘civilised’ like to think of as The Wild – we culturally forget survival and self-sufficiency skills as time passes (understandably enough). Consequently, our cultural need for a safer environment exacerbates itself in a positive feedback loop from generation to generation. 

We could argue that moderns have now become almost hysterically allergic to any indication, however slight, that Danger Approacheth, Danger Might Possibly Approacheth!! Our danger-sensitivity dials seem permanently set to 11 in a world where no meaningful day-to-day danger exists. Things like distant wars and variously lethal viruses don’t count. Indeed, assuming virology is correct and what it calls viruses are pathogenic, what is the probability you might die of, say, ebola? Even squalor and poverty don’t fulfil the same function as organic danger in the sense adopted in this article; they grind away at us relentlessly, too abstract to attack or run from, holding us forever at one crushing remove from the respect from others we need. (And if you are unlucky enough to be in one of those distant wars, their danger levels far exceed what humans are biologically constituted to healthily process.)

Nevertheless, our long-disregarded instincts have a powerful say in how we behave. Distracted by other concerns, we fail to interact with our instincts consciously, manage them unwisely if at all, misunderstand them, demonise them. Consequently, they are now like psychotic, hyperactive infants running the show from the shadows, fractiously incoherent, desperately ignored.

In light of this observation, is it reasonable to suggest we’ve become too accustomed to manufactured convenience as a palliative for the constant anxiety we suffer in our ‘tamed’ world? Is there a tension between that palliative convenience on the one hand, and our reflexive allergy to danger on the other, a tension that, among other things, sustains money beyond its natural life?

I’m beginning to suspect this is so, that this article’s subject matter – money’s apparent resistance to changing circumstances – might not, as I once suspected, be anchored in the false dichotomy of abundance and scarcity, but primarily in one of spiralling convenience, the habituated effects of that spiralling on cultural expectations, and in our worsening allergic relationship with reality’s correcting, but healthy, vicissitudes.

We’ll examine whether money – scarcity’s perpetuator –  is now civilisation’s endemic surrogate for the dispatched dangers of The Wild, note that it doesn’t make a very good fist of it, and learn that we appear to be, thanks to money’s overly aggressive performance in this regard, culturally incapable of transcending it. 

The ouroboros of money and scarcity → convenience addiction

A few millennia ago, money formally entered the scene. Not in any way as a response to any detected lopsidedness regarding danger and survival instincts, of course, but as a needed tool of societal control and civilisational expansion. As money increasingly became a creature of market-based price discovery, however, it slowly began to plug the hole created by our over-sterilised, over-tamed environment of diminishing biodiversity in which the full, magnificent range our biologically attuned senses and abilities became far too underemployed. Ignored and undervalued, our biology has more influence on proceedings than we want to know, including addicting us to stuff we neither need nor want.

We all Just Know™ that Life’s Not Fair, that There’s Not Enough To Go Around. But these pat truisms in which ego loves to wallow – and all others like them – are not the organic fruit of our intimate, day-to-day experience of what we might call “natural forces”. Rather, they are ego-cultural surrogates born of man-made laws dressed up as natural forces, e.g. “The Law of Supply and Demand”. 

Peering through the lens of money, we intellectually perceive a seemingly organic transition from The Wild to Civilisation. There are scarcity, exchange, preference and risk in rain forests, we astutely observe, just as there are in free markets. So it looks for all the world as if money functions as both conduit and bridge between the two worlds by enabling ‘progress’ from the former to the latter while efficiently keeping civilisation’s feet on the ground by holding its lofty, cerebral ambitions in check. 

My argument, however, is that money makes life artificially hard because it requires scarcity; only when products are scarce do we need money, as price, to distribute them efficiently. I say “artificially”, because humans spent the vast majority of their existence in conditions of abundance. It is thus not a species-level need that life be hard in the particular sense of scarcity and perpetual competition, but hard somehow (if at all). 

Furthermore, while it is true, no doubt, that the abundance ‘primitive’ peoples know has nothing to do with consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses, and while it is also no doubt true that this basic abundance is punctuated by bouts of scarcity, it is clearly abundance nevertheless, much the same as that enjoyed by, say, bonobos. To be clear, not excessive abundance of everything, nor an infinite amount of anything, but more than enough of most things most of the time; what I think of as organic, homeostatic abundance. A biosphere that functioned otherwise would be dysfunctional, I suspect, in much the same way the human body becomes dysfunctional when there are insufficient nutrients and calories to sustain its health.

In pithier form: We moderns have somehow come to Just Know™ that life is very hard and very unfair. But this reflex is a cultural phenomenon coincidentally anchored in money. It is a perversion of an organic, species-wide knowing rooted in our biology via intimate day-to-day experience of a richly biodiverse wild over great tracts of time.

There is thus a profound difference between hunter-gatherer and civilised social modalities across this very axis: the gulf carved between us by money. Systems shaped by structural scarcity from their fundament up promote socially corrosive competition over resources, and are also institutionally constituted to require perpetual growth, the kind that takes larger and larger bites out of The Wild and manufactures them into the conveniences we insatiably demand. “Insatiably” because we are highly manipulatable, via advertising and propaganda, precisely on account of our underdeveloped relationship with and awareness of our instincts, our bodies, our biology.

Modernity’s ‘need’ for what it misunderstands as a Hard Life is thus unlearnable rather than hardwired, albeit, I suspect, only after deep system shock.

All that said, it is true enough that Life Is Hard from the ego’s perspective. Ego is self-oriented and fear-based, obsessed with control, and paranoid. The question we should put to our egos is: To what extent and in what quality should life be hard? Must a hard life be squalor for most of the planet’s human population, prison ships, endless profit-seeking wars, holding down three jobs for the ‘fortunate’ poor, violent crime, continual state malfeasance, corrupted justice systems, perpetual anxiety and cynicism, etc.? That kind of hard? Or perhaps acquiring wisdom through courageous risk taking, weathering the ups and downs of life, painful friendship disputes, broken romances, love and loss, the challenges of parenthood, etc? What’s wrong with that kind of hard?

Convenience eats its young

We’ve lived with systemic scarcity – and its temporary palliative Convenience – for longer than we can remember. It’s a struggle to imagine anything else. Star Trek once touched on the idea of a moneyless future, but has since dropped that ‘dream’. Most of what now passes for future-oriented fantasy depicts reality just like today, only with fancier clothes and vehicles. That said, technological convenience is catching up so fast, there’s now little to distinguish between fiction and normality. Drenched in scarcity and mass-produced plenty, we’ve become cynical and uninspired. We’re dimly aware there were once dreams of doing things very differently, but, well, they all fell painfully on their noses, I seem to recall, and anyway, I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve got better things to do with my scarce spare time, like watch videos of cats falling into fish tanks.

But look at how we are. Look at what we’re doing to each other, to our own children. How many of us want to raise our young by making life as hard for them as we can? Does grinding hardship make children wise, happy, healthy? How about a grey, Kafka-esque future governed by ever watchful bureaucratic machinery reaching into every sphere of their lives? How about a culture of endless pornographic spectacle as far as the eye can see?

Consider the other living beings we share this planet with: Do their young require endless hardship to flourish? Or do they perhaps need Just The Right Conditions for their flourishing? 

We know bitterly that Life Out There is tough. We are obliged to prepare our children for it, toughen them up, make them attractive to future employers, raise them high enough above their competitors (their fellow travellers). This process, we believe, requires routine discipline and rote learning of sterile lakes of information that spill from dull text books about this, that, and other unrelated things. I know it’s boring, darling, but you need it to get X, and you need X to get Y. Maybe after Y you’ll start to enjoy life. I know, I’m not a particularly happy adult, and none of my ‘friends’ are either, but you could be if you work hard enough! Besides, the alternative is far, far worse. Now, do your homework like a good girl!

Bizarrely, we are surprised and confused when our children don’t thrive, when we see them suffering, dull and listless, uninspired by life.

The future we prepare our children for is increasingly doom laden precisely because money requires scarcity, intensifies competition, and makes for ever busier lives of ever diminishing meaning. It also straitjackets our imagination via its command of the value system, and hijacks our desires down narrowing channels loudly daubed with nothing more than garish bling. As a result of all this, we end up devouring our young in hot, collective pursuit of an easy life: aka convenience addiction.

We sense, don’t we, somewhere deep down, that these status carrots we dangle in front of our children’s open faces don’t really make anyone happy. They’re just a lot better than the stick of grinding poverty. Or maybe a little better. I’m honestly not sure anymore.

Conclusion

So exactly what amount of hardship do we need? Well, I think that’s the very wrong question. Such thinking makes us want to architect our lives down to the last detail, map out our futures with masterful precision, direct ourselves inexorably towards something certain, only to go crazy failing in that task, even when we ‘succeed’. 

We think too little too much, in the wrong way. We feel too little too much, in the wrong way. We are wan images of what we could have been, if only … if only something else were discernible. 

But I’m confident you can feel it. I don’t mean have emotional reactions to the horrible choices the future forces us to make, but feel, intuit, sense some Other Way where happiness and health are inside each other like exquisite Russian Dolls, equally sized, equally mysterious, different and the same and you can hardly tell which is which. Sadly – happily – this Other Way can only be hinted at. It is not clear, not easy to find, not easy to stay on. It is not mapped out. It is not just around the corner. It is nascent, untried, untrod. Each of us must develop the courage to want it. We have to dare to try with absolutely no guarantee of success. Except, of course, you are absolutely guaranteed to succeed if you really try. I know this is so because “success” is not what we think it is. Which is where the courage comes in, precisely that courage that terrifies the ego.

An easy life, an automated ‘paradise’ free of work, free of risk, clear-cut of the wild, tamed entirely, replete with glittering conveniences and consumer choice is not what I am talking about. Nor is it what we want. It is what we are conditioned to want; a fantasy utopia we have lost ourselves to, what our imagination has been curtailed by. It is money’s honey-trap dream, civilisation’s featureless finale.

I envision a life of meaningful risks and challenges, of rich interconnections and interdependencies, of living villages raising their young in love and openness and play, of boundaries blurred, dichotomies differently lived, a wild-wise mix of karma and dharma. 

I see money between us and it, money, that is, as a structuring design wiring our cultural reflexes to mechanical competition over scarce petty things of no real value, things we cannot take with us when we die. 

What we take with us is what we are: that quality we earn by living how we live. This quality, being quality, is immeasurable. Being made of numbers, money measures, quantifies. It is thus fake-karma machinery of oscillating, market-based rebalancing and sweeping rich-poor judgements that must forever remain incapable of directly advancing human wisdom beyond the narrow domain governed by quantity. Money conjures the very antithesis of ‘rich’ because it steadily strips reality of quality as the sun would turn the planet to desert – left to reign alone. It stripmines diversity in blinkered pursuit of efficiency. It mechanises the organic. It smells of ego, stinks of control. And, unsurprisingly, it is hotly defended, just as ego will always hotly defend its stuff.

The need (or function) I have here argued that money fulfils – a surrogate for organic danger and risk – is no triviality, though. Money has obviously been a fundamentally important societal glue given civilisation’s vector; its reign spans millennia. But it is nevertheless of its time, of its context. I cannot tell how long its reign has left; that sort of thing is far above my pay grade. I’m confident, however, we want it to end – “want” in the manner I suggest above. As convenience spirals out of control, as societal dysfunction lurches into allergic hysteria, we face the sorts of choices this article presents. As globalists install their desired technotopia of smart cities and AI control of human behaviour, as their programme unleashes more and more brutal, violent outputs and unintended consequences, as its freakish malfunctions become increasingly apparent, so the pressure to acknowledge these choices increases. Many will refuse to face them, come what may. Those of a pioneering spirit, on the other hand, will find the courage to take this challenge on, and indeed are doing just that. It is to them I speak in hope that they might listen, assuming my analysis accords with reality well.