About time and money

Our modern society and its capitalist system come from 18th century British Philosophers** and their conception of work: people’s time is worth something, and the more qualified and uncommon you are, the more your time is worth something – pretty logical until there isn’t it? But the problem lies in the second part of this conception: resources’ worth is determined by their rarity and the ease to access them on one hand, and how much they are sought after on the other hand – that’s all. In other words, by the law of supply and demand. Thus, the price of something is the cost of the way to get it, or of the difficulty to get it: it has no value itself. Do you begin to see the problem?

In the 18th century, a lot of people believed that natural resources were more or less infinite. Pretty asinine already if you ask me, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Moreover, they had legitimate justifications at the time: we need to keep in mind that it was in the context of the dawn of the industrial revolution and of the vast expanses of colonial empires. Additionally, it was a philosophical construct: mistakes and limits of the theory when tried practically are expected. Furthermore, in a short-term point of view, in a limited society, it worked really well. That conception is not the problem: the problem is that at some point we seem to have lost the ability to think critically about it.

But today we still live by this conception when we know without a doubt that resources aren’t infinite and that the waste produced as a byproduct of work has a negative value, often even quantified, on the world we live in, and so on us. We just choose to keep it out of mind. To use it in a world as populated as ours is, and as a long-term position, is either crazy or suicidal, pick your choice.

Thus, the worth we give money seems to be wrong from an objective point of view. So, knowing that, how can we keep taking money seriously? It is only a collective delusion, (worst than an imaginary representation applied to a complex reality as a theory to explain the world, because we know its limits and why it’s wrong: it’s like we were still believing the Earth is flat while at the same time knowing it’s not), a delusion which keeps going because enough people believe in it.

That’s why ecology is all about money, and the environmentalist struggle can only be won one way: through education, and its main enemy is willful ignorance.

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*Marx

** I’m principally thinking about Adam Smith here, but I could tell 16th century over even 15th with the understanding that the theory of capitalism is built on Locke and Hobbes before it.