Nothing matters more than money.
Not forests.
Not clean rivers.
Not fertile soil.
Not a stable climate.
Not peace.
Not equality.
Not even the future.
At least not if you judge civilization by what it consistently rewards.
Business as usual
The world carries on as usual.
Investing. Expanding. Trading. Discussing interest rates, inflation, wages, savings and loans as if this way of organizing civilization is simply how the world works—and always will.
On the surface, everything appears normal.
Markets rise and fall. Companies are worth trillions. Governments celebrate economic growth. Economists debate the next quarter. Investors search for the next opportunity. Smartphone companies create their next smartphone.
Business as usual.
Shiny Surfaces
But look beneath the money. Beneath the shiny surfaces of Apple, Samsung, Morgan Chase and Citibank.
Climate change.
Environmental degradation.
Deforestation.
Soil erosion.
Polluted rivers and oceans.
Mass extinction.
War.
Poverty.
Crime.
Stress.
Loneliness.
Growing inequality.
A world on the brink of social and ecological breakdown.
No Connection
Yet we rarely connect these crises.
Climate is discussed over here.
Poverty over there.
Crime somewhere else.
War in another room.
Economic growth in yet another.
Every problem gets its own debate, its own conference, its own expert panel.
But almost nobody asks the obvious question.
What if they are not separate problems?
What if they are different expressions of the same underlying system?
Because the monetary system doesn’t ask what is best for humanity.
It doesn’t ask what is best for nature.
It doesn’t ask what will still work a hundred years from now. Or a thousand.
The monetary system is designed for only one thing:
Increase monetary wealth.
It asks only one question:
Can it generate more money?
If the answer is yes, the activity is rewarded.
If the answer is no, it struggles to survive.
That logic doesn’t only influence corporations.
It shapes governments.
It shapes scientific research.
It shapes media.
It shapes education.
It shapes our careers.
It shapes our daily decisions.
Even when we know the consequences.
We often speak as if environmental destruction, inequality and endless consumption are unfortunate side effects of an otherwise successful civilization.
But what if they are not side effects at all?
What if they are exactly what a civilization built around monetary growth naturally produces?
That would explain why every attempt to solve one problem seems to create another.
We become more efficient, and consumption grows.
We invent cleaner technologies, yet total resource use continues to increase.
We promise green growth while extracting more from the Earth than ever before.
The system keeps demanding more more more and more.
Not because people are evil or stupid.
Not because politicians don’t care.
But because the system reward expansion, competition and accumulation.
The tragedy is that we have become so accustomed to this system that we mistake it for a law of nature.
It is not.
It is a human invention.
And what has been invented can be reinvented.
The real wealth of humanity has never been money.
It has always been fertile land.
Clean water.
Healthy ecosystems.
Knowledge.
Technology.
Human creativity.
Cooperation.
Money cannot replace any of these.
It can only assign numbers to them.
And when the numbers become more important than the things they represent, civilization begins to consume the very foundations that keep it alive.
Because more money does not create more resources, more fertile land, clean water and clean air. Quite the contrary. More money only makes more people compete for the same resources, effectively creating scarcity where abundance was the starting point.
Perhaps that is where we are today.
Not facing a climate crisis.
Or an economic crisis.
Or a political crisis.
But a civilizational crisis.
One that cannot be solved by changing governments, adjusting interest rates or creating another financial incentive.
It requires something much deeper and groundbreaking.
A new foundation.
One where humanity finally organizes itself around protecting and intelligently managing real wealth instead of endlessly accumulating symbolic wealth.
It may sound impossible as we are so ingrained in the monetary system. It may seem impossible to get out.
No Choice
But what if we have no choice? What if our civilization is collapsing unless we get out of the quagmire of the monetary system?
Doing this demands vision. Enough people being able to imagine something else.
A Different World
This is exactly what has happened in the novel Waking Up – A journey towards a new dawn for humanity. Humanity woke up and started imagining a different world. A world that works for both people, nature and the planet.
And this is exactly the future the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels wakes up to in the story.
A world where money is no longer the operating system of civilization, because humanity has finally realized that life itself is worth more. Follow the bewildered billionaire into this world as he wakes up after 100 years of cryonic preservation trying to escape his cancer. He had planned to expand his empire, but instead he finds a thriving world without money…
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