The pursuit of wealth at all costs is a poor way to live. 

click to enlarge

As I write this, I am gazing through my window and basking in the greenery of our trees, the lively autumnal colors upon the distant mountains and the vast expanse of azure sky above. It is a calming sight—one that reminds me of how profoundly beautiful this world of ours truly is.

Amidst this beauty, however, I can't help but feel saddened by how many troubles currently poison and darken such a world. There are plenty of reasons and causes, of course, but one element lurks beneath so many of our woes, in my opinion: a malnourishment of our minds and souls through the instrumentality of wealth.

What do I mean? Take a look around and consider how much of our communities are built—or torn down, as the case may be—for the sake of money.

One is left to wonder just how many of our modern problems—from climate change, war and political extremism to poverty, racism and institutional rot—would dissipate if the lust for money and power were no longer our reigning forces.

"The definite result of all our modern haste to be rich is assuredly, and constantly, the murder of a certain number of persons [and animals] by our hands every year," wrote John Ruskin in Unto this Last (1860). "The choice given to every man born into this world is, simply, whether he will be a laborer or an assassin; and that whosoever has not his hand on the Stilt of the plough, has it on the Hilt of the dagger."

Lest anyone think for one moment that such a state of affairs is the natural condition of humanity, consider the countless examples of humans and animals who live life without the need for perpetual competition and violence, who do not heed the call to dominate others in order to be happy. We have all seen them and there are vastly more of those beings in the world than we have ever been led to believe. I would assert that we have long harbored this blindspot about our own natures because it is in the interest of our money-making systems to keep things operating on such a depraved basis.

If, for a moment, we consider that we don't need every convenience of life that could be devised (and hence the insatiable conquest for resources and life to produce said conveniences), then where does that leave the vast majority of the society we have erected? Humans have their frailties and foibles, to be sure, but are we inescapably consumers and predators?

The grip of our precious "market" has been so tightly riveted since the Renaissance that few if any of us can even conceive of a world that does not operate on the basis of preying upon one another, of transmogrifying cruelty, deception and selfishness into virtuous pillars of getting ahead, or of pillaging our planet for a quick buck.

To uphold and justify such a system, it has puffed up philosophies like rationalism, materialism and various forms of nihilism for all their worth while unleashing endless entertainment streams to satiate our emptiness. Significantly, it has enthroned the natural and mathematical sciences as the only possible points of reference to understand humanity and life's problems.

"Now, what I want is, Facts," Gradgrind the schoolmaster intones in Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854). "Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else."

Such a philosophy has vaunted itself as the only proper way of living in this world since the Industrial Revolution, and its effects have been utterly ravaging. Its alleged goals may sound great on a ledger, but they hardly encapsulate the beauty, mystery and life that suffuse our existence and permeate our inner longings.

It has vitiated our abilities to think, to imagine and to believe. Instead of producing wiser, well-rounded people, it manufactures miserable individuals too incurious and haughty after a while to even be bothered.

To such pupils, according to Dickens, "what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen."

I can only guess at how much devastation this evangel has wrought upon our arts, sciences, churches, governments and schools, or how deeply it has implanted into our lives that dark abyss of self-worship that so permeates modern living. Unbound by anyone and anything as we ceaselessly cry "freedom," we find ourselves with nothing to do but consume and consume and consume. Having been connected to everyone else through the internet and compounded by profit-driven algorithms, we receive and transmit nothing but what does not already reflect our narrowed fears and grievances.

Our social media has blunted our ability to recognize truth, our bureaucracies have erased our sense of responsibility to one another, and our conglomerates have eroded any actual governance or those democratic ideals we so cherish.

It is high time that we stopped hiding behind the labels and virtues of earlier generations and came to grips with what we have collectively chosen to become today. We are, in the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Geneva's bourgeoisie in 1764, "always occupied with your private interests, your work, commerce, profits; you are people for whom freedom itself is only a means toward untrammeled acquisition and secure possession."

The truth of the matter is that beauty still exists around us in countless forms, despite our efforts to block it out or to exploit it for profit. If we really want the world to heal from its wounds and to flourish, it's high time we threw away our daggers and picked up our plows.

Private Eye is off this week. Send feedback to comments@cityweekly.net