Growth is needed to pay interest on money invested to make more money.
monetization
In order to grow, monetized societies especially capitalist societies appropriate more and more resources and human activities to be traded for money. Common land, forests, wildlife, water and the rights to them acquire monetary value.
Newly minted rights are growth industries. Things that were free like water and parks increasingly become commodities.
Things we used to do for each other are now branded, packaged and sold for profit. Instead of sharing an idea we are increasingly likely to patent or make a religion of it and sell it.
- we used to raise our children now they are in battery care
- we used to cook now we eat out or takeaway
- we made our clothes now we shop for them
- we use to grow fruit and veg now we buy them
- we used care for our elderly now they move to age care homes
- we used to be able to birth now birth is medical
- we used to support each other counsellors and advisers do this now
- we made our houses now we pay them off
- neighbours helped with repairs now we have insurance
- we used to know how to die dying and death are industries.
Each new service is time saving, convenient, efficient, exciting and revolutionary at first. However the quality is never quite the same and it usually degrades as making money gradually becomes more important than getting it right.
Generations of us have not experienced being parented, designing, building, growing or cooking and are uncertain how to relate to neighbours. After our skills and knowledge have been turned over to experts, will we still be able to look after ourselves when the power goes off or money goes bad?
shopping
Like church, shopping provides personal encounters, meaning and satisfaction that maintains our idea of who we are. The same stories week after week.
a monetocracy
Money made civilisation possible but now that it is essential for our survival it puts us at risk. Money turbo-charges war, poverty and disease when they become a source of profit especially when failure pays as well as success.
Light bends around large sums of money. It is corrupting. It dissolves common-sense and the evidence of our senses and can over-ride law and custom. Community interests are usually ignored if there are prospects of profit. Lobbyists extract massive benefits for their clients from governments for comparatively modest political donations.
CEOs cripple enterprises by pumping up immediate profits at the expense of the longer term business health to boost their contracted personal incentive payments.
Charities with polished media profiles mine the public purse while the problems they are solving get worse and worse. Cancer fund-raising and research industries sideline well known, effective and unprofitable diet and life-style changes that reduce or prevent cancers. Cheap and effective pharmaceuticals
International aid agencies feed the starving while they erode subsistence culture and family. Health services profit from the diseases caused by food, chemical, military and drug industries.
Multinational corporations run prisons and detention centres for profit to house criminals and refugees produced by poverty and trauma. Security companies protect property as the gap between the rich and poor widens.
Full time monetized child care estranges children from their extended families and circle of friends Their preparation for their community is less intimate with less opportunity to experience being loved and develop empathy and understand who they are.
More jobs for environmental scientists are as regulators or advocates for polluters to rubber stamp pollution. Money can buy the right to pollute.
These counterproductive activities add to Gross Domestic Product along with war, crime, sickness, espionage, subversion, bombing, the war on drugs, pollution and unused luxury cars, houses and yachts and the diplomatic trappings of power. They all increase GDP.
Money prioritizes social and industrial activities, determines what is built and what we do. A monetary system takes the power to make decisions from families, tribes and nations.
Monetized nations gain control of tribal economies and extract their resources. They subvert or destroy their political systems. They use subterfuge, violence and money to install puppets and borrow the money back from them to fund further ventures. And they often devalue or reappropriate those borrowings.
For anyone who values the commons or private property then money is theft. A way to alienate individual access to clean air, water, health and life.
I doubt many people set out to destroy nature but money as it is structured now provides the incentive and the means. It is currently short sighted and amoral, blind to nature and it doesn't care about anyone’s grandchildren.
Kings sometimes looked after their land and their people because they owned them and needed them to survive. The motivations of money are narrower and shorter term.
In a monetocracy governments looks mostly for financial solutions to problems as their power is almost only financial. But money is often the problem and spending it often makes things worse. While money is the focus the wider picture including simple solutions are invisible.