Money is seen as a necessary intermediate goal for almost everything achievable in life. It is regarded a necessity for survival. How did that happen? Why do we believe that a life without money is impossible?
We consider us capable to make money. We believe that the money is able to keep us alive. And we believe that on our own, without money, we would fail to stay alive. How is that possible? Why can we earn money to stay alive but not live by our own strength? Or, to be precise, why do we believe that it is like that? We have learned that it is that way. We have learned to earn money. Beyond that we are surprisingly uneducated.
We are shaped by our environment. What can really keep us alive is nature. Our planet gives us air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, material to build with. But access to nature seems denied. Nature has been made unaccessible for us in many ways. Few have declared nature to be personal property and build a fence around it. We are punished, branded as criminals if we take from nature what we need. That is especially problematic when nature is cultivated by others, as it is the case with almost all land area of industrialized countries. Agriculture and forestry cover almost all area, the rest is often declared natural reserve. These areas are then inaccessible for us, they are in a way the territory of other conspecifics. Since most do not have their own territory, they must be supplied by those who do.
But there is an even more important reason why we can no longer keep ourselves alive with what nature provides. We have become estranged from nature. We no longer dare to trust it. We are presented with numerous threats that are waiting for us in nature, making us ill or killing us. Since we are no longer familiar with nature, it becomes dangerous for real. All places, including road traffic, are dangerous, if we don’t know their rules. First we must learn the rules, and then we can navigate a place with reasonable risks. To make things worse, we made nature more dangerous with the waste and pollution of our industries. As examples we can name air, water and soil polluted by chemical substances and factory farming as well as sick ecosystems caused by monocultures. There are many more factors impacting nature negatively and resulting in large parts of nature to turn inedible and undrinkable.
Many people have trust in water, when it is filled in a bottle or comes out of a tab. The tab however does not have a good image around the world, it is trusted in Scandinavia and central Europe. Other countries like Mexico and even parts of the USA do not trust tab water, but only drink bottled water. All other water is looked at skeptically. That goes as far as people not drinking from mountain streams in the alps while hiking. Only when the same water is bottled and certified, it becomes trustworthy and much money is paid to drink it.
This combination of nature made inaccessible or inedible by pollution, our fear of everything not sealed and certified and our reduced resilience due to an always sterile environment results together with lacking knowledge in a person unable to stay alive on its own. The air to breathe is the only thing left that we find in nature and are allowed to use, without asking for it to get certified and without paying for it. And that despite the air being polluted as well. Especially in countries with growing industry like China, but also elsewhere around industrial areas and big cities. In those areas we can already see the beginning of a trend to pay for air: people stay in buildings and vehicles with expensive air filtration systems, and avoid to be outside. They do not trust the air available in nature, and considering its pollution they are not entirely wrong.
So like this we ended up in a system where everything needed for life must be paid for. Considering that we started with a world where everything needed for life was available, this is quite a contrast. Everything became inaccessible, poisoned, and if it is still usable, we are taught to be afraid of it, so we avoid it. No surprise that a life without money appears no longer possible.
It is astonishing that most people just accept this without any complaints whatsoever. When we look at air we can still see that essential things for life are normally provided by nature. We see it also in the way that plants and animals keep themselves alive. But we find nothing except air. Everything else we must pay for. And in some areas we must also already pay for clean air.
The demand that clean drinking water and healthy food must be on the same level as clean air and not be made inaccessible by property and pollution, has mostly disappeared. And when the trust in air is also removed in the future, this will result in air to become accepted as a resource that has to be processed and certified, and obviously has to be paid for. That may still sound absurd to some. But when we look at the events in the early twenties of the twenty-first century, it is no longer so unimaginable how the trust in air could be attacked and removed. It has already been done with water and food in similar ways. One could say that air is all around us. But the same is true for water and food, unless you live in a city. Even in a desert animals and native humans find both water and food.
So we should ask the question: Do we want to go down that road? Do we want to live in a world like that? Or should we take destiny in our own hands? We have access to so much knowledge. We can learn the rules of nature. That may not be as common as taking a driving license. But there is so much more education offered beyond the rules of road traffic. There are countless ways to learn about nature, about the world. We can take those offers or not. We can rebuild our trust in nature and behave in a way so the fruits of nature become edible again. Or we can continue believing that nature can only feed us when it is put under the dictate of industry. For that we are given arguments that appear plausible at first: That we must control the environment where we get food from, or that there are so many people now that only the methods of modern agriculture can extract enough food from the soil.
On the other hand we should also ask the question: Do we want to live in a world without money? In a world as it was before the triumph of money, if we can even imagine how this world looked like? Probably not. But do we know what the world looked like, without money? Is money a necessity for culture and civilization? And, is it a necessity of money, that at some point nothing can be accessed without it? Does money inevitably turn humans into the slaves of money? Can we measure our freedom with the amount of money we have, and do we want to do that?
We have mostly accepted money in our economic life. But we are still engaged to keep it out of our social life. We do not want to pay our friends for their company, and we do not want to get paid for it. We want to give affection and receive affection in return, not money. We want to be a part of a group, because we are valued for who we are, and not because we pay for it. Those examples show clearly that money is not a part of human nature. We accept it, and we are often tempted by it, but we do not really like it.
We accepted the game that defines moneys as its goal and purpose, and we adopted the opinion that money is a symbol of success. But we can also see that it is not a good idea to make money the primary criteria for choosing friends. If we consider a person likable or not does also not depend on money. But still, we have high expectations for money, especially when we are discontent. We become jealous of people with more money, feel treated unfairly. Even if we are far from starvation. We can become aware that money is useless for the most important things in life that go beyond survival. Yet we make our happiness dependent on it. Doing so we shape the foundation for the power of money, which then becomes a reality.
We will probably keep using money in our economy for a long time to come. But how we handle the money, if we just use it, or if we end up getting used by it, depends on us. We cannot reject it completely, but we do not need to elevate it to the goal and purpose of our life, or consider it a symbol of success. As soon as we give more attention to life again and begin to understand it better, money will loose its importance for our striving and our self-esteem. The role that money plays today ist not the result of a natural, social or economical necessity, but the result of a lack of knowledge, orientation and fellowship.