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The Tragedy of Money Relations
- and the Alternative
by Jan Lundberg
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Money relations have not been explored or questioned as a force in our culture. The power of money accumulated to be used for influence and manipulation is well known, and many question it - especially when done by someone else.
However, as the dominant value in our materialistic culture is money, this affects every level of society down through the family.
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Humans evolved to what they are with the wealth of nature, not the wealth of money. But in the last several thousand years, the trend of wealth accumulation started and accelerates today at a high fever pitch. Such that, a relationship between two close family members in modern society is increasingly money based.
Parents protect and nurture their children, and children are taught to love their brothers, sisters, and other relatives, here and in Borneo or Brazil. However, sooner or later, in today's advanced Western global culture, daily living and dreams of a better life become identified with how much money a family or individual has. With the weakness of family bonds, as evidenced by divorce and theft of property within families (e.g., inheritance fraud), the individual in today's modern nuclear family structure sees material security usually as the only answer to his or her need for comfort, freedom, respect, power and sex. (Those needs could be prioritized, in reverse order.)
Thus, a would-be close family is often torn apart by the weakest link: a son may steal the family wealth from his dead or dying parent, at the expense of his sibling(s). Even if this all too common temptation is not perpetrated, relations between family members are colored by money relations. A family member may be judged unworthy and a disgrace just for not achieving material success and prestige, regardless of how fulfilled and ethical the family member may be in a low-consumptive or artistic lifestyle.
Money is needed for survival, and a child may demand money from his or her parents or older brother or sister as guardian. Or, instead of demanding, a loan is voluntarily made. If it is not paid, relations can suffer tremendously. Nephews and nieces may thus never get to know aunts and uncles - let alone learn from them or rely on them - when relations have been spoiled. Other things than money can spoil relations, but rarely so.
Outside of families, one's relationship with everyone may be based on money or on belonging in a certain economic group defined by money or the ability to pay, such as in higher education at institutions. Lovers may couple their lives together as a single economic unit, but the glue of money is weak and filthy compared to nature and community, two vital elements for living that are practically absent in the U.S. workers' average lot. Having a child heightens the money pressure, and the child's best upbringing in the commercial culture does not immunize the child to materialism and alienation.
Today, with so much stress present in society and in families over money, blessed be the childless couple, or blessed be the only child. This may seem like a solution to materialistic bickering and fallings out, and may assist when scarcity of food strikes, but it only hides the inherent potential for conflict. If adopted by too many, our species would die out as childlessness or one-child-only policies dominated. (Because of overpopulation, such policies are a good idea, and when human numbers may regain a healthy relationship with nature someday, a fertility rate of 2 could be resumed safely and willingly.)
Even for the childless couple and the only child, money relations can and usually do dominate. At first, with youthful innocence, there is much more to life than money, and living in denial of money's role and dominance is attempted, even successfully for a time. But in the absence of non-materialist communities so rare in the U.S. and Europe, people are forced to choose between going along with the mainstream value system, or joining a religion or anarchistic group operating on the fringe of society.
Such alternatives to a way of life based on money are urgently needed and may soon be more widely recognized as increasingly attractive. The opposite of competition is mutual aid. Solidarity of masses of people is kept at a minimum by a society ruled by the richest, who wish to keep apart the population that would seriously covet the wealth or who wish to redistribute or destroy it. Thus, class struggle emerges and continues.
Amongst activists and radicals who wish to feel they are above money, many of them are unconsciously taken over by concern over money, or cannot tolerate poor people in their lives. Thus, money relations dominate many of the best of us, and sometimes separates the posers from "spiritual" people who live their values despite the pervasive surrounding towers - great and small - of money power.
A collapse of the economy, perhaps in tandem with or caused by the upcoming discontinuity of unlimited oil supplies, may suddenly usher in cooperative living based on subsistence instead of separate economic household units trying to participate in industrial growth. Local environments' natural wealth must sustain life for all the interrelated creatures, and modern humans will have to suddenly learn how to live together without a system of generating surpluses for the few who rule and accumulate wealth and power out-of-control.
Until people return to or discover ways of living more fairly and peacefully, sharing rather than seizing, and as long as the market system dominates, people will be judged by their bank balances primarily. The few who do not relate well to this near universal tendency will be more and more marginalized, poor, and despised - until a new phase of history begins with the collapse of petroleum civilization. Love is the best long-term investment today.
- – Jan Lundberg
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Jan Lundberg, co-founded the Lundberg Letter, called "the bible of the oil industry," in 1973. Mr. Lundberg ran Lundberg Survey Incorporated for the petroleum industry, utilities and government. He founded the Sustainable Energy Institute (SEI) in 1988.
We promote and practice cultural change as key to sustainability. Does economic growth via fossil fuels and materialism provide real security? A sustainable society features car-free living and growing food locally. Communities must return to self-sufficiency for food and energy.
Culture Change and SEI:
P.O. Box 4347
Arcata
California 95518
USA
Telephone: (707) 826-7775
Fax: (603) 825-2696
E-mail: info@culturechange.org
Website: www.CultureChange.org
Published by Sustainable Energy Institute, a nonprofit charity 501(c)(3) California corporation.
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