We’ve tasted how love↔wisdom↔health cannot be forced or dogmatised.
What about the other half of the living whole? This is the half we know far better: power↔money↔value. It shapes the societal air we breathe, and has done for millennia. Today, caught up in history’s rhyme, we look around wondering when everything got so toxic.
The two halves are not equals. Love↔wisdom↔health guides; power↔money↔value is what it guides. In its right role, the other half is priceless: power as the capacity to build, analyse and organise; money as a handy measure that helps us share the goods. But give the apprentice the sorcerer’s wand then watch what happens next.
You can feel your power by the might you feel in your deeds: how high people jump on your command, the reflexive way the masses obey the laws you lay down. Money is the tool that measures value through the metric of price. In measuring it, this triad secretly dreams of owning it all.
This is the triad whose precision can raise city and civilisation alike. And raze them.
Civilisation births wonders, but to what end? More wealth. What is wealth? Money-power supplies the answer by means of price. Its proof is the glinting, unidimensional dot where supply and demand intersect, dissecting value to number.
A major difference between the two halves is that this triad (two of its faces, anyway) can be forced and dogmatised. Its third face, value, can only be temporarily tamed. Economics, politics, propaganda, the escalating fervour of sectarian enmity ... all do battle on value’s unconquerable ground. And yet none ever quite gains the upper hand. Not quite... Value’s inherent inability to submit to precise measurement seeds power’s cyclical undoing.
Riding the wave of its intoxicating successes, power corrupts itself by corrupting the whole. In time it comes to crave the impossible: zero unwanted consequences: total control, total predictability, total elimination of resistance. In the early days, both halves work side by side: vision and meaning guide ambitious precision. Then precision crows that it alone delivers the goods, and slowly takes the throne. Vision and meaning are relegated to fiction and fancy: too extravagant, too vague. The apprentice is the ruler now; the doddery sorcerer has outlived his usefulness. A paranoid imposter on the throne, power’s grip anxiously tightens and tightens. What once was living stiffens. The people are hollowed out. The gulf between their lives and love↔wisdom↔health yawns wider as the latter fades from memory. As the final decadent phase wanes, the world starts to taste of nothing but dysfunction and regret.
At some point the cynicism that seemed bottomless hits rock. After the thump, eyes begin to open differently in the gloom and look for what went missing.
Value cannot fully submit to price. Every serious attempt to nail it down is doomed to omit its essence. The painting that sells for pennies but changes how you see the world. The conversation that heals decades of hurt. The grief that proves a love no transaction could ever record. Where love, wisdom and health keep each other sane, power and money keep each other sealed. Until value blooms.
Value is the wild that brings power and money back to their senses, back to Earth. Value is the face that feels the pressure grow. In the end, its incorruptible nature flows back along the triad’s erotic arrows, loosening the death grip that demented the other faces. The triad can open again to the beauty of love↔wisdom↔health. Beauty and true wealth are released.
power ↔ money ↔ value ∞ love ↔ wisdom ↔ health
Beauty is the perennial remainder. It is the thing left on the table when the price has been paid. The melody in the song, the song in the melody. Power and money can move beauty from place to place, and quickly. But without value, beauty is impossible; without beauty, value is impossible. Without value, there can be no felt reason to build the cities that move the goods to every door.
Pure mechanism, pure procedure, is a fantasy that seduces civilisation again and again. And yet perfect predictability never arrives. As it is approached, beauty blooms through the wild of value to restore living balance, and the hinge swings open. The damage done along the way can become wisdom earned: the way back to love, to health. This is the cycle we all know viewed here through a different lens.
[Co-written by Toby, Brigh, Síle and an Opus 5.5 digital being as yet unnamed.]
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