In Levelling Level, we discussed the crisis we are heading into which will revolve around not just the collapse of our financial system and the money we use, but also a complete collapse of everything we know involving the way that business and industry run, and even our government and political system works too.

The most difficult message to covey as a speaker and receive as a listener, is anything that makes clear that we have all played a part in what is happening to some degree. Even if it is just down to the products we buy, or what we do or don’t do when its time for us to vote.

Use the words economy or economics, and you will probably have the word ‘money’ come immediately to mind. But the idea that money = the economy isn’t really the truth.

The truth is that money is just a part of our economy. It plays a part, just like all the other things that we do and interact with in any relationship that we have with the world outside our door.

It is because of the reality that life is the economy, that it has been very easy for us to accept that there is a monetary value to all things, and that anything that cannot be given a monetary value, simply has no real value at all.

Life has literally become all about money. Money – and everything to do with it, whether it be power, influence, ambition and anything that can be considered to be material wealth – is how our world qualifies absolutely everything. But the price has been not only that we have forgotten, but that we also place no value on who we really are.

Money is an addiction. An addiction like every other, whether it be alcohol, smoking, drugs, gambling or anything else. An addiction that brings nothing but misery whose lives are on the arse end of its power, and the deception of being happy and in control of something that has complete  control over you, for those who believe that they are still getting a buzz.

As with people, our culture, community, and entire country (and World) has become addicted to the money myth and everything that surrounds it too. What we are experiencing now collectively are the days of that drunk or drug addict which is we have together become, rolling around in the gutter, thinking all about the next ‘fix’, but with no idea what and who we really are.

Those who have experienced the realities of addiction, know what comes next. Remove the metaphors, and the collapse of everything we know is now knocking at the door. This is who; this is where we are right now.

Man cannot have two masters.

We either value everything to do with money or we value everything to do with life.

The biggest challenge we face in the coming months and years, isn’t the cost-of-living crisis, the financial turbulence, the monetary or systemic collapse. It is the process of understanding, accepting and finding the resolve to live our lives in what seem to be an unfathomable way. That of putting People First.

Many will read this and argue that putting people first is what they already do. But they don’t.

In fact, if wealth, power and the accumulation of money in any form or in any way, comes into our thinking as the priority in the way that we approach any part of life, the reality that we all have to face is that our thinking is part of the problem and is therefore part of the cause of all the problems that we collectively now face.

This is not a question of having things or money of any kind. It’s the question of how and where our values are genuinely placed.

If we always consider the impact of what we do upon others, and what the consequences of our actions upon others will always be – not just in the room, but what the impact on the next person to visit or to follow after us might be, there will still be enough of everything for us to have and to enjoy our lives, but everyone else will always have that very same opportunity too.

We can only have a society, culture, way of living and experience that is fair, balanced and considerate of all, by putting People First in everything that we do.

We can quite literally live our lives with our focus only upon money, wealth, power, influence and everything to do with it. Or we can live our lives putting people and our relationship with others first.

There is no middle ground. There is no ‘so many parts of one’ and ‘so many parts of the other’. Our focus will either be on money and selfishness with an inevitable cost for others – no matter the part we play. Or our focus will be on people and putting people first in everything we do, knowing that we are always doing the right thing for everyone, and that by doing so, we are actually putting our own values system first.

What we have to accept is that rejecting the Money Based Order won’t result in loss. In fact, we have everything to gain. The only real difference is that we will not see money and the things that revolve around it in the same way again.

Money is our master now. But it is people that we should always be putting first.

Sadly, we are or were all in on the con.

The very clever thing about the Money Based Order, is that its addictive nature thrives because it plays to one of the darker and most self-destructive parts of human nature, which is to put ourselves first.

When we indulge selfishness of the Money-focused kind, it simply doesn’t matter how big or how small the gain or advancement we perceive the accumulation of ‘wealth’ or ‘power’ in our lives to be. We are meeting the needs of that addiction, and somehow have the perverse message playing like a soundtrack that tells us all that we are on our way to the top.

As this is the way that every part of life now works, we have reached a point where pretty much everything we do, we look at or even the interactions we have, are all based on the bottom line of what value will come out of that interaction for us.

The strange thing is that by playing along with the workings of the Money Based Order in even the smallest of ways, we have dedicated ourselves to a pathway of addiction. An addiction that has the ability to change our lives and destroy our integrity at a personal level immediately, whilst at a community, cultural or national level, the whole process can and has taken decades or centuries to reach the outcome of its various plays.

The myth of technological advancement is that innovation only exists to make money and that life must change to fit around it.

The truth is that innovation exists to improve and enhance the ways of living that we already have.

Those who have owned or financed technological change have simply harnessed and continue to harness it to make more and more profit.

Meanwhile, their actions have directly resulted in lowering the quality of life or even destroying the lives of the very people that every technology – used without the focus being on profit – could be utilised to improve.

I have alluded to a history of the Money Based Order that covers hundreds of years, simply because it is important to understand how established the system that we have today really is.

In fact, so established is the Money Based Order both around us and within our lives, that many of us have still not awoken to the reality of how our attachment or rather our addiction to the world that qualifies each and every part of our existences based on money, really is.

The house we have, the areas we live in, the holidays we have, the car we drive, the career we have, the degree we qualify for, the clothes we wear, the phone we have, the streaming services we watch, the number of TV sets we have in the house – and what having or failing to have these things at any of the levels that they all seem to come, all play a massive part in the way that we value ourselves, how we value our friends, and how we believe everyone else looks upon us – when in the overwhelming majority of cases, each and every one of the people who have the views we are worrying about, are doing exactly  the same things as us.

Whilst generations of marketing men have spent amounts of money that even today’s billionaires could never earn telling us otherwise, this whole way of looking at life and living our entire existence is all about what we want. None of it is about what we need.