Wealth
If wealth consists of things like food and clothing and shelter and fire to name a few of the more “wealth-filled” things, just how wealthy is a society like ours where most of the people spend their working lives creating goods and services which can hardly be called essential elements possessing wealth? True it is we have plenty of the wealth-filled things, an overabundance of them, but is it at any rate wise for so many people to be occupied in the work of making unnecessaries—objects which often only make more need for more work?
Are we in danger of, say, topping over because we have lost touch with what is our real base of wealth: food, clothing, shelter, fire, land? If we are so wealthy that we must manufacture a slew of unnecessary products to keep ourselves busy or simply to content ourselves, things of marginal but slight wealth-value, then why don’t we guarantee to everyone free the basic wealth? Since everyone is now over-motivated to work to make and acquire the “finer” things of wealth—the marginal things—there is no reason to supposed that, guaranteed the basics of wealth which practically everyone has anyway, they will lose their over-motivation. But even if they do—what harm?
But there is a point to be made here: most of what we make that we consider to be our wealth, that we identify for instance in our gross national product, is of only marginal value—marginal wealth. Yet it is what especially decoys us into thinking our day to be so many times better off than any pre-industrial time. The biggest difference is our wealth of questionable value, bought at a price to our environment and our pace of life that may be grossly high.
But we pay for it: perhaps because it has become our habit, our new tradition: perhaps we simply don’t know any better, and feel for reasons of our own that it is what we’re supposed to do—it’s progress. Perhaps, and this is the least fun thought, perhaps it is built into the industrial economic system that we must pay for and buy these things—or else risk the toppling over of the entire system, the things of basic wealth-value going down too.
But all in all the industrial civilization still looks best to us—because after all it has guaranteed us the basic things of food and clothing and shelter and warmth, not all of which people (say 500 years ago) could depend on continually (or perhaps in places even sporadically). But what exactly has industrial civilization done? It has enabled us to mass-produce clothing and fire and food to meet the needs of millions—to give the vitals to an over-populated earth. And because of this suddenly the population of the earth shot drastically up. Now industrial civilization meets the needs of billions. For food, clothing, fire and shelter the world is no longer overpopulated. It is even possible that industrial civilization may curb the “population explosion” with contraceptives. But to do all this has resulted in fantastic and sudden changes in the way we live and the things we have enough of to value and the speed of life and the responsibility thrust into our heads, and still, still we live on a greatly overpopulated earth for land.
We’ve had to think up new purposes for living, and new things to do, new ways to spend our time. We’ve had to reconcile ourselves to new work—to occupations and careers many times removed from what man has evolved for. And in all this there must be a sure loss in quality of life—for our environment, physically and mentally, biologically and socially, has become something we are not quite used to, something we can not exactly be at home in, something modernly alien.
