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| <back | home Money Cannot and Will Not Fix this Dying Planet by Frank L. Kahl “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” — Woody Allen, actor and filmmaker (1935-) In this brief essay, I will look at the role money and financial wealth or collective monies are playing in the creation of our sorry global predicament. First, let me lay out my path and the evolution of my thinking. For the past forty years, I have been a peace, social justice, and environmental activist, and I consider myself supportive of women’s and ethnic/racial struggles. As a college professor of economics for thirty-five years, I have given considerable thought as to how issues of money, wealth and our treasury fit into my activism. Until two years ago, my activist chant was “Another world is possible!” I held the vision of an emerging sustainable, restorative, and democratic global society. Today, I find myself in the company of Lester Brown, Gore Vidal, James Lovelock, Kurt Vonnegut, the Union of Concerned Scientists and scores of others holding a darker view of our situation. A long-held myth—especially among liberals and progressives, including myself—is that throwing more money at a social or economic problem would magically fix it. This assumes that all will be well once we redistribute income and wealth, creating a state with social and economic justice for all. Marx, of course, argued for a classless society in which peace and harmony would reign. However, the reality is that: Money cannot and will never BUY real love Money cannot and will never BUY true and lasting peace Money cannot and will never BUY lasting social justice Money cannot and will never BUY happiness Money cannot and will never BUY human liberation and freedom Money cannot and will never BUY personal security Money cannot and will never BUY freedom from “terrorist” threats Money cannot and will never BUY a global warming reversal Humans have experimented with a wide variety of economic, political and social systems and have conceived a plethora of philosophies and theological descriptions of the meaning of the good life. We have spent vast sums of money, time and energy in these pursuits and have created what can be called the collective human condition. Scientists, philosophers, visionaries, economists, politicians, theologians, social policy thinkers, poets, artists, and ordinary persons have brought us to the current state of affairs. Nothing seems to work very well. Institutions are stressed and sometimes seriously crippled. We wonder out loud “What kind of monster has humankind created?” We have created a system where there is judged to be no monetary profit in (A) clean air, water and land, (B) true and lasting peace, (C) economic justice, (D) social justice, (E) a racist-free society, (F) a sexist-free society, or (G) ending the arms race. Money rules and is controlled by the planetary money masters. Why are global indices of poverty, pain and suffering, social injustice and an impoverished environment at all-time highs? Why, in a period of the largest aggregate financial wealth and largest productive capacity in history, does environmental collapse confront us? Why, in a period when humankind has spent more money than ever before on collective educational efforts, have we failed to create viable solutions to these pressing global problems? Why, with a record number of Nobel Prize winners, is the planet dying? At this point, the only true hope and option available to humans is a massive, unprecedented and radical shift of consciousness at ALL levels of human experience in all places on the planet NOW. We have no history of accomplishing this on a scale of nearly 6.6 billion souls. The real question is: “Are humans capable of exercising the necessary collective willpower to make changes that would assure our survival?” With apologies to my activist communities, I have reached the sorrowful conclusion that we cannot and will not. It is too late! “The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, ‘Western civilization’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.” — John Gray, author of “Straw Dogs” <back | top^ |