The hardest part of addressing any kind of addiction is crossing the Rubicon to accepting that we are addicted.
And for as long as we have not accepted that our state of addiction exists, we continue blissfully unaware that everything that we once considered to be important has itself been usurped by the fake importance that has taken over our direction at the centre of our lives.
As a society and culture, we are addicted to a lifestyle that revolves around money, the accumulation of wealth, influence, power, advancement and self.
It’s all part of a worldwide malaise that would most accurately be named a Moneyocracy.
The value of money is the benchmark of our values system. It relates to everything in life.
Money and everything linked to it comes before everything important, including the consideration we have for other human beings.
The problem is, we don’t see it.
Or rather, we do see it. But for as long as even the smallest benefit that this bogus system provides us appears to outweigh the disadvantages, we are completely hooked into it and blind to the damage that it is doing to everyone; not least of all ourselves.
This malign and all-encompassing value system has taken over everything so comprehensively, that we cannot imagine a future without whatever benefit we each prize so highly being available to us each and every day. Even though it is the behaviour that exists in all our lives that has created and allowed the Top-Down Moneyocracy to exist, take over and progressively thrive.
We refuse to accept that there is a way of living our lives that can and will be better for us all in so many different ways. Because our addiction to this System tells us that there is nothing better than the hit that we get, in whatever way each of us may get it, and the wilful blindness that accompanies our addiction obscures the reality that each and every time we take it, in whatever way it may be, it is our own behaviour that is this cultural problem’s cause.
We cannot take any of the causes of the problems that we have today with us. Because we will otherwise not be moving forward or leaving everything that’s causing so much harm to everyone and the world we live in, behind.
However, what is regrettably clear, is that we will not relinquish our collective hold upon the Moneyocracy and the harm that it is doing us, until events force us to view the mechanics of our lives in a very different way.
Wars, financial system crashes, pandemics, shortages, civil unrest and many other unsavoury experiences that too many of us had until recently been happy to believe had long since been left behind, could all lead or contribute to the end of the Moneyocracy and a way of living that in the terms of all that we should be valuing, has already come at an incalculable cost to us all.
Adam Tugwell 