If you really want to understand the basic equation of all the problems that we, our communities, our country and the world has, it is this:

We value money more than we value people, our humanity and a good existence or life.

OK, so there are plenty of ways that we tell and convince ourselves that we live and experience good lives. But have you noticed how pretty much 99.9% of the time, our happiness or how we feel about something or an experience we are having, all comes down to using something that has been paid for or bought?

The money obsession or conditioning that we all have, means we place a financial value on everything.

We look at every part of life in terms of what the direct or indirect material value of everything is. The only exception to this is the relationships that we have with people we genuinely care about and what those relationships mean to us.

We are, in effect, completely absorbed in the way that we now live and how we perceive everything. This means that we are blinded to the alternative way of life that exists, which would be better for us all, in every healthy, balanced, fair and just way that is imaginable.

We don’t see that money or the lack of money, is the common factor with all the problems that we, our communities, the country and the world has. That there is never enough of it. And as more is created, the disparity between those with less and those with more gets wider and wider as the value that either rich or poor possesses also gets further and further apart.

For as long as material wealth continues to be the value set or benchmark that makes this world work, because of the belief that we all place in it, the number of problems that society has will continue to grow. There will be fewer and fewer solutions available to solve the growing number of problems that society has.

The alternative to this system and the hurt that it is causing those who believe they benefit in some way, is the complete rejection of the money based order and The System as we know it.

The solution to all our problems is the adoption of a people first economy, that places the value on people, humanity, community, our environment, the legacy and the responsibility that we have to all others, above money either being a benchmark for life, or being considered in any way to be and be valued as a ‘thing’.

The way this will be achieved is through the adoption, implementation and assurance of The Basic Living Standard.

The Basic Living Standard equation or formula is this:

All individuals will be able to support themselves fully on the equivalent of the lowest paid weekly wage, in a basic and healthy way, without debt or the need of support or help from any 3^rd Party.

All laws, regulations, administrative and business practices shall reflect this basic requirement that underlines the basis of a truly just, fair and balanced society, and how it will operate and thrive.

The reaction that you may have might be that ‘This is impossible’. ‘This isn’t the way that the world works’. ‘You are suggesting we go backwards and live in what we understand to be feudal times’.

But this is not the case.

What you are hearing from that excitable voice from within, is the resistance to change of a system that you have been convinced is still serving you well.

But The System isn’t serving you well. The System isn’t serving any of us well.

The System is serving money and everything to do with money very well indeed. And the cost to us as individuals, as communities, as a country and as a world, is much greater than anything that the lie which is money can buy.

Few will see or be able to visualise the shift that will exist once the transition from a money obsessed way of living, to one that is truly people-centric in every way, until it actually exists. And as we walk forward into the uncertainties that lie in 2023 and the years that lie ahead, this is indeed the biggest problem and the biggest obstacle to better lives, good health and the real happiness that so few of us consciously recognise as being what we are missing from our lives and that we so desperately want.

The choice, as always, is yours. Together, it is ours.

This is about people and values. Our abuse of people and values is what all the challenges we are now facing are about. This is the outcome that all the difficulties we must now experience are for.

In my last blog written towards the end of last week, I was making light of the reality that with my elderly Mum passing away on Christmas Eve, the anniversary of my Dad’s passing on 12^th Night had effectively meant the two of them had managed to sandwich the whole of the Christmas period inbetween.

Sat at the bar, in The Old Elm, Churchdown, as I was, I found myself talking to a local man I had seen out with his lovely chocolate Labrador. We didn’t talk for long, but in the time that we did, he mentioned that he was a volunteer at the local food bank, which is housed on Cheltenham Road East, at GL3.

Despite visiting Tesco pretty much every day since it opened about 8 years ago, and using the great Barber’s van that parks right outside the Hub every week, the fact that there is a Food Bank based there had completely passed me by.

I was more than a little disappointed, as I had donated a very large amount of in-date items that I had only cleared as I was sorting through my Mum’s things to what I thought was the closest Food Bank in Cheltenham – on that same day!

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which Food Bank donations go to. But as there is such an extraordinary and growing need for this kind of support – from not just those who we might expect, but from people we really might not think need to ask or go in search for help of this kind – it does of course make sense that any help that we can give should go to our local community and the people who are in need, who we might be passing in the local street each and every day.

You don’t need to be homeless, out of work, without a car, a phone or many other things to be going hungry – no matter what too many of our politicians or other out-of-touch people who have a public platform might so patronisingly declare.

What makes the unfolding tragedy of the cost-of-living-crisis even worse, is the way The System works, where people in positions of authority have made it so, that ongoing help of this kind requires those in need to create a very big official flag telling the world who they are.

Yes, there has to be a way to prevent fraud and abuse of charity and giving. But many people who need help are thinking twice, because of the problems that the knock-on effects of telling the world that they are struggling – for whatever the reason might be – will cause.

I’ve written about ‘Hungry No More’ – serving the people who share the area I live in today who need real help, because whether we need that help ourselves or are able to give it, every local Food Bank needs to be known by us all, for however long a need for them should regrettably remain.

If you are in Churchdown, Innsworth, Longelevens or Longford, or the wider Cheltenham and Gloucester areas and have the ability to help or even spread the word too, Hungry No More are looking for donations that in particular include:

• Long Life Milk
• Squash
• Tinned Vegetables
• Tinned Tomatoes/Passata
• Dried Pasta
• Noodles
• Jars of Pasta/Bake Sauce
• Pasta & Sauce Packets
• Tinned Meals
• Tinned Meat
• Soups
• Tinned Fruit
• Tinned Deserts
• Washing Powder
• Cleaning Products

We are all experiencing an uncertain world and might be surprised by how just easy things could change and for us all to find ourselves needing the help of people who aren’t really strangers, even for just a short time.

Please help Hungry No More if you can. Or if you are reading this from further away, please find or get online and search for your Local Food Bank, or check out orgainsations like The Trussell Trust.

Hungry No More can be contacted by phone on 07824 043895 or by e-mail at innsworthhungrynomore@yahoo.com The address is GL3 Hub, Cheltenham Road East – and they are opposite the Churchdown Tesco.

Thank you everyone – and especially all the local volunteers who are giving so much of their time.

For as long as the number of those addicted to the money and wealth, material value set outnumber those who have become aware or awoken to the unsustainable lifestyle that we have all been living, with the real damage that our money-based value set really does, the risk to us all is that we will end up overdosed and dead in the gutter.

We are picking up speed as we head towards this avoidable destiny today, because enough of us have not yet realised or accepted, then acted upon the knowledge and understanding of what the value of life really is and what the life we are living is really all for.

Through a process of surrendering moral and ethical values based on humanity and life, we have collectively sold our souls to the unsustainable addiction of a money and wealth material value set.

Being under the control of this all-encompassing mindset – as we collectively and most assuredly are – has led to us valuing everything that we do, everything we say and even everything we think being in or in some kind of financial and material wealth based terms.

Society has reached the point where the majority of people value their own success, their achievements and their own value as a person, based exclusively on the perceptions of others and what other people think.

Whilst we a conditioned to believe that addictions are suffered by and remain only the fault of the individual, this is simply not the case.

The addiction to money, wealth and a material-based values set operates at a much deeper societal level. Indeed, so embedded in ‘normal life’ has this addiction become, that it has taken on an intergenerational form, where for those that have and want more, the disease and the symptoms that accompany it have become hereditary and passed on. 

So nomalised has this money and wealth obsessive sickness become, that the behaviours which enable and facilitate it have not only become legalised and regulated, they have done so to the point where the damage caused to individual people, communities, countries and even the world itself, are not only considered to be legal and therefore right. They touch every part and every level of society to the point where this mindset or way of thinking dominates the world and mankind in a fully sanitised form.

The greed that underpins this whole process has never been sustainable. It is simply the case that with the way that time works, people are unaware of the damage that has been done over long periods of time, allowing any accurate analysis, translation and communication of the true causation of our problems to be ignored.

We were an agricultural economy long before a money obsessed one. So, why are the money people so desperate to divorce us from or destroy the basis and roots of who we really are?

By ignoring or attempting to destroy any part of the history that brought us to where and who we are, including the processes which enable self sufficiency right down to the level of growing basic foods, we may not just excise the lessons that led us to the opportunity of both being civilised and with humanity, we may also be physically contributing to the downfall of the basic ingredients of who we and who human beings really are.

Much is said by the commentators who recognise the cultural identity crisis that the UK has created for itself. Idealists have consistently worked over decades to erase the systems, processes, history and even the shibboleths – whether good or bad, that are a fundamental part or ingredient of who we all really are.

In an age where mental health is supposedly a watch word and clarion call for consideration and kindness, our understanding of mental health or rather the poor-health understanding that we have of it tends to be based upon something that is missing, hidden or not joined up in some way.

It is therefore massively ironic that when it comes to the treatment of everyone else, the same people who are so obsessed with the self, cannot see that the same ills experienced by the individual can also be visited collectively upon communities, regions and entire countries, in just the same cruel and destructive way.

We are the sum of our experiences, not only as people. But as communities, countries, continents and as a world too.

We ignore or try to erase the building blocks of our identity – whether personal or collective – at our own peril.

History, experience or what we should really identify and accept as ‘thought’ can be decapitated or have a hand, a leg or a vital organ removed from it, just as easily and in the same way that our physical bodies can.

Today, the obsession that we have with money, wealth and a material-based values system means that we have not only forgotten who we are. We are also passively acquiescing or giving our consent to the whims, desires and actions of anyone, when doing so means that everything we take for granted will be maintained, improved and most importantly, kept from risk.

The obsession with money, power, influence and everything that comes with values that surround wealth and material possession is a degenerative sickness that knows no bounds.

At the very top of our leadership trees or hierarchies, this addiction and disease has ravaged minds so extensively that so-called leaders and the people who have all the power and influence today have forgotten who they really are. They genuinely believe that what is best for them is best for everyone, and that they can inflict the controlling solutions they have created to save themselves upon the world, without there being any real cost.

If they should succeed, what we only understand to be our freedom to think, say and do as we please in the forms that it comes in today will be lost. With it will go the route map, manual and directions that can remind us and direct us back down the pathway back to real-life and community, and along with it, the real basis and value set of who we are.

If you believe you are free to think, free to be, free to say and free to do as you please today; it is time to understand and to accept that you are not. You are not free to do any of those things, no matter how free to you, they might feel or seem to be.

Yes, you may have what appears to be the freedom to choose and do whatever you want.

But life as we know it has been created, is framed, dictated and even regulated according to someone else’s rules.

You may now be asking yourself how that could possibly be. After all, you don’t have to ask permission from anyone before you do whatever it is you want to do, say whatever it is you want to say or do whatever it is that you want to do.

So, ask yourself: ‘What is the value set that really governs every part of my life?’ ‘What is the basis of the framework that guides the system of life that I am living by?’ ‘Where do the rules come from that tell me how I must live, think and do all the things that I do, so that everything I know does what it’s supposed to and everything that should do, gets done?’

Think very hard. Because the answer is unlikely to be whatever you might immediately think it to be.

What most people do not realise, is every part of life is ruled by the relationship that we have with money.

Everyone who has an influence on your life in some way – beyond the people you love and interact with regularly, has a relationship with you based on monetary or material value of some kind or in some way.

For an increasing number of us, a rather large penny drops to the floor at this point. But it also continues to be very hard to believe, or rather to accept, that just about every part of life and the lives that we have is measured against a financial or material value in some way.

It doesn’t matter if it’s our job, our background, our education. The list goes on and on.

Every facet or aspect of life – apart from the real, human relationships we have with other people – are ruled by what it pays, what it could pay, what it will give us, how it will look, or most importantly, what it will cost.

We fail to see the role that we all play in The System, because we all give and take at some level or to some extent in exactly the same way.

Much in the same way that alcohol does damage to the health of the individual on different timelines and in different ways, the influence that the money drug has on wider society is classed as being non-existent. Because it serves someone else’s purpose for us all to think about and see the impact of it that way.

But just as our reaction would be to all non-legalised or partially non legalised drugs would be if they were legalised, the cultural embrace and legitimisation of money and the way the disease it champions insidiously works, we overlook or make allowances for all of the damage that the role of money in life has done and is doing.

The way that drugs and money destroy lives is the same. The only difference is the way they are managed and used, deciding whether they corrupt us individually or collectively. But the impact on the very basis of the human value system is just the same.

We do not and will not reject poison when offered to us, if we do not recognise it as poison and we neither understand nor see what the damage to anyone already is, or what it will do or what it will be to us if we take or embrace it.

When society tells us something is good, the damage has to reach its extreme. The majority of people have to be damaged by that poison before the tipping point of sense can override the control of the drug, and the people who are pushing that drug.

On a micro level, the money or wealth obsessed culture could easily continue to run in cycles, where some people would thrive, and other people would be destroyed with the control that the addiction has always had upon all those addicted writing the rules. This is what has been happening across many generations in time.

But on a macro level, the rot and decay of our system of morality and ethics that the prioritisation of money has had, would only ever be able to continue until money became the only thing that matters at the highest levels and those at the top have become blind to the consequences of what obsessive behaviour of this kind really does.

The process of disease and rot that the obsession with money causes has been slowly but surely underway for centuries. But its destructiveness reached its zenith and the points of implosion when those fully under its spell and in control of the system, simply went too far and over the top with their response to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and what followed, their response to The European Referendum & Brexit Vote in 2016, their response to the arrival and spread of the Covid Virus in 2020 and beyond, and their response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The implosion of the money, wealth and material-based values system is where we are and the world as we know it is right now.

It feels like everything is beginning to go wrong or is already going wrong, because it is.

Inter-generational addiction may not visit its consequences upon those who first created the addiction or upon those it has been imposed. It may be proven that in terms of what society deems acceptable at any given time, the illness could take many generations being passed from father to son before the real impact and damage has been disclosed. It is, however, the same all encompassing, all controlling disease all the same.

For as long as those addicted continue to see the reward as far outweighing any semblance of cost, they will do all that they can both to maintain and to increase their supply.

That is why, even in the final moments and the death throes of this terrible system, those who have abused the role and responsibilities of leadership and government level control that they were given on trust will do all they can to ensure that The System which supplies their own fix will continue to exist. No matter what happens or how that feels to you.

If you can see it, understand it and accept it, you will know that there has to be an alternative and with it, a choice.

The alternative is a completely different people first, humanity orientated and community focused value set, that can only come into being by making the conscious decision to change the way that we think.

That choice is now yours.