Money as Fetish, Money as unreal.

Money is, in itself, a central problem. It isn't real, and instead it is an index for what you have access to, whether resources, political power or  the ability to co-opt others to do your bidding. It separates us from what we are actually doing in the real world, so a coal mine operator is justified in everything he does, no matter what, because of profit. The same is true with environmental and social destruction, whether mines, peat bog extraction, or pornography. When the central justifying reason  a society operates is money, then anyone can justify what they do by profit, or co-opt others with it. So, a mine, destroying thousands of acres for millenia, is justified by "economics". Miners get paid, the state gets tax revenue, etc..etc. The problem is this separation from what is actual, or real, does not account for the true cost of resource extraction, or what it does to human beings. We call it progress, but is it really progress to destroy 10,000 acres to create a false profit and livelihood, change the climate and leave a mess for the future? Our system, because it operates by an artificial index, does not account for the damage it does; it destroys several places for oil, several for other raw materials, then extracts fish from the oceans and protein from precious soil, and is able to ignore the long term consequences because it indexes money rather than resources. The same is true for pornography; money is the reason, but it is really about co-opting others to give the most intimate of human acts for access to resources. Another example is the conversion of rich soiled farmland to suburbia; it is done because it is more "valuable" at the time, but in reality it is an artificial value. Subsidized by other human activities, it creates an artificial "boom", separated from the physical reality of removing land from production and using resources from other places to create an artificial auto network and import resources from other places by using fossil fuels. In short, it destroys more and more. Economists have created more complex indices, incorporating the "externalized" costs. But until society itself creates a new central index incorporating the other more important values and makes them central, we will still suffer from the essential problem, the separation of the real from the consequences.