It has come to pass that everything is about making money.
Everyone's doing it as aggressively as possible, pushing the limits as far as they can.
All over the world making money is the one thing in which everyone seems to believe.
There's an implied sense that if we all do it, war might be replaced by doing business instead of killing each other.
That perspective appears to remove the element of violence from social exchange.
Yet is that really true, and in the process with what have we replaced it? The enormous advantage of money is that it reduces everything to a common standard of measurement in which everyone in the world can participate, which has no morality with its variable cultural biases mixed up in it.
This view posits that we can avoid all the differences of perspective that morality imposes upon anything it touches; and our differences, and the conflicts they generate, cannot be resolved, but must be stepped aside and ignored in a kind of amoral truce.
Some historians even assert the notion that commerce in these ways makes friends of former enemies.
The problem with this belief is that the differences remain, out of sight perhaps, but still divisive-like a bad marriage held together by common commercial advantage, but with frequent back stabbing inferences.
There is no question that trading rather than sparring with our adversaries is a vast improvement.
But as a solution to the complexities of human difference and conflict, commerce operates from a cynical perspective.
That human problems will never be resolved, so lets make the most of it with profiting by making money function outside of morality.
Commerce used to function just a few feet away from violence when mistrust flared, as it still does when amorality becomes immorality-in blatantly criminal contexts.
Corporate structure now disguises the frequent amorality of doing normal business-stealing a competitor's proprietary information, concealing massive executive stock handouts, etc.
-mostly by spending billions of dollars advertising their honesty, fairness and customer care.
Of course if these things were actually taking place there would be little or no need to advertise them.
For better or worse, we have chosen to go down this path.
In the process cynicism, and its social ally, business, has become the sine qua non of current history so successfully that its jaundiced view of human values and spirituality is not even noticed anymore.
Why cynicism? Because humans are first and foremost spiritual animals.
Anything that's one-of-a-kind, like we are, has a spirit, meaning a special individual identity, even if we don't pay much attention to it.
On the other hand we can say that when all the chips are down it doesn't matter what we are as an individual; that we're just a cog in the business of surviving.
So why not enjoy it.
But it does matter.
Spirits crave special identity, encouragement and inspiration.
Otherwise what's the point of being one-of-a-kind? Without those essential spiritual emotional elements it's very lonely, and scary being individual-unless of course individuality is just the latest fashion, dance or tattoo, which it seems to be to lots of folks.
Hasn't the spiritual become kind of hokey, they say? It no longer represents the universal language it once was.
Except of course to those people who still seriously believe in God.
But like everyone else they're hustling for money, suggesting their God isn't as powerful as he used to be when He "always provided".
Though believing in God does cover the spiritual angle that the rest of us are treating as something that can be either ignored or tattooed.
For those of us who believe that God is just a big idea, an acknowledgement of the universal, etc.
, the spiritual has gotten pretty empty of inspiration in the sense of having something Big in which we can all believe-except for political causes, where agnostics have put their spiritual aspirations.
But social causes are very dry and lacking in emotional substance, except by intellectual inference, evoking mostly anger, instead of joy and inspiration-a pretty anorexic diet for a spirit.
But what else can we do? Science has put the magical dimension to rest, replacing it with cause and effect.
Nostalgically we've offloaded magic into entertainment, where we like to pretend we believe in cartoon superhero magic, which medical technology likes to assert is really possible.
When the strength of a bionic hero is measured not by its super-parts, as the movies pretend, but by its weakest flesh-parts.
So money has finally reached its highest fulfillment to become the Big Kahuna.
Everybody wants as much of it as they can get.
Rich has become the most virtuous thing to be.
Those who get lots of money are regarded with enormous esteem just for having done so, even if it was accidental-a largely unexpected consequence-as it often is.
But no matter, the rich and famous are profoundly envied by everyone, or at least by most of us.
But what is commerce morally and spiritually? Money is by definition amoral.
As we say, "it's just doing business"; meaning any moral or emotional issues are irrelevant to making money.
From an amoral perspective, the honesty of legality has been replaced with the avoidance of criminality and litigation vulnerability, making lawyers big business.
But those concerns are spiritually and morally dead.
Moral outrage, having lost its spiritual connection, has gone into politics, which makes that arena both potentially full of violence, and also very boring ...
unless we like anger, which is such an unhappy emotion.
For lack of a vibrant living spiritual foundation for morality, the amoral god, money, has become the great moralizer.
How much we have of it determines our value as a person, our right to command respect and admiration, and our claim to natural resources and the support of funded personal opportunity, not only for education, but also in pursuit of our life's dream, whatever that may be.
The rich have all that in spades, which is why we envy them so much.
Amoral means anything goes that can't get you sued or arrested.
Anything not covered under criminal law or property rights is open season.
Serious criminals constantly tell us that we're no different than they are.
To our great misfortune they're spiritually right.
A world when everyone's primarily trying to profit from everyone else is a dog eat dog world emotionally and spiritually.
What have we done? For better or worse we've put Machiavelli in the driver's seat! Yet maybe there's something to be learned from this experiment-which is all that any human effort can claim to be, no matter how institutionally entrenched we try and make it.
There is no question that profit taking is an utterly selfish thing to do.
Business people try and disguise that truth because selfishness is politically very unpopular.
We are currently highly conforming-loving of all things-in the social arena.
Meanwhile, simultaneously, the centrality of world commerce makes profiting very feasible.
So opposites do coexist.
If we could only admit it, and stop so vigorously pretending otherwise, perhaps we could learn to deal with political and moral ambiguities.
To parts of experience to contradict each other may be a natural phenomenon to which we have not yet learned to adapt.
And maybe a healthy dose of selfishness is essential to accomplishing that goal.
But selfishness will only be verified as an essential virtue when we make it available to everyone, bar none! If money continues to function amorally, in the sense that enough of it, to avoid life-angst, is available only to a very few people, self-interest will retain its bad name, and democracy will remain more pretense than fact.
An equality of resources is at stake.
We are sufficiently prosperous in this country to provide everyone with the security of a basic support-structure-food, clothing, shelter, warmth and fundamental medical care-among other things eliminating the disgrace of homelessness.
Money becomes a moral assertion of care and equality only when it's no longer the plaything of the rich, but exists in large concentrations only to support projects in which we all agree.
Is it possible that personal wealth should be no greater than a million or two ...
in order to fund such a humanizing and equality producing effort?