What do we value? Money? Family? Love? Objects? Our labour? How do we signify that value? How do we acknowledge the value of your efforts? My efforts? Anyone’s efforts? And what is deserving of value? What do you value more? Family? Friends? The person who educates your kids? The person who cures your disease and saves your life? The CEO who increases the perceived value of your investment? And take note I said perceived. Life, family, these things are, beyond exchange. Money, valuables, cannot replace family, cannot change the facts of your mortality. Sure, riches can buy you comfort, can gain you things, experiences, but can money make you laugh? Can money bring you the joys of a life full of love and true trusting companionship? I suspect those who say it can have never truly experienced it.
What we think is valuable is far too often in our modern world illusory. Here today, gone tomorrow. What is money but a symbol we use to show that we have participated in a value exchange? Goods, or labour, for other goods or labour. That is the simple principle it was built upon. But then they made it complicated. Sophisticated. Complex. Synthetic Credit Default Swaps. A financial tool bastardised into modern finance that allowed value to be siphoned off by those who could, and paid for by those who didn’t know what was happening. How sophisticated and modern to create entire lexicons to screw people over for what they have earned through labour and skill.
Do we value the skill of those creating fortunes or those that create and nurture life?
Parents, educators, carers, nurses, doctors, surgeons, specialists, researchers, scientists. All those that strive to give the best they can to make sure others can live and thrive. Are they more valuable than a Billionaire? When it comes to your kids, who do you want caring for them, educating them, curing their ailments? The educators? The nurses, doctors, or some rich man who made a fortune by getting people to believe he has a way of making them richer?
What we value, what our system values, is not the same.
Our system values perceived wealth, not that some of that wealth isn’t real as our current system represents it, but so much of it is entrenched in a system that relies on the shared belief it is real, and if anything shatters that image, well, we all see how fortunes can fall.
But do we need the rich, or do we need the skilled?
When you are in need, when your life is in danger of being shortened, when your children need care, need knowledge, need guidance, I know who I would rather be there for them.
How about you?
-Marissa Klotzbucher, Thoughts and comments for public consumption