The Want of Wealth: Discovering Real Worth

In this work, The Want of Wealth, I continue the project begun in Tyranny of Perfection. It is in this fundamental question of trust that all human happiness flourishes. Trust is the essential disposition for society and individuals, as it allows relationships to grow. It is, like the air and water in our environment, the bond that unites even disparate peoples. Sadly, the extent of national and even global mistrust has been especially compounded in the last twenty-five years. Political mistrust of a global nature, like the “Cold War,” has always existed, but not to the extent that modern social media has produced in our times. Religious wars, national interests, and political power have all used mistrust and suspicion as a means to dominate and control. Propaganda, the spreading of false or misleading information meant to subvert and politically manipulate, has been around a long time. The conflict between truth and lies and the use of deception and doubt are not new. What has changed is the extent to which social media and modern marketing can manipulate and misinform individuals and society on a massive scale. Also, many people lack the critical skills to analyze and judge the flood of so-called “news outlets.” Instead, politicians have opted, along with global corporations, to market an agenda by propaganda and social mistrust and unrest. Now, before one dismisses this as some kind of fantasy, one must ask first if it in fact is so, is it real? Only when we move to the question of reality -- what is – do we examine how we speak about reality.
In this Trilogy on Trust my premise is that trust is relational, and it is to reality that we are related. Reality holds a gravitational pull that grounds us, that proves our thinking and probes our living. The more we move from reality itself, the greater peril we encounter. Ideology and fantasy are the illusion of reality. A thing is what it is, as it is! It is not dependent on my concepts nor on my imagination for it to be real. On the contrary, reality is the grounding of our thoughts and actions. When society and human commerce were ordered to the cycles and seasons of growth in an “Agrarian Age,” or to the materials, production, and products of the “Industrial Age,” reality grounded life and gave us the confidence to trust. However, a tragic consequence of the “Information Age” is that reality itself is no longer gravitational, no longer grounding our thoughts and our deeds. Instead, ideology replaces reality, and we revert to a kind of Platonist disconnect – Reality is other worldly. Trust is possible only if human thoughts and actions, individually and collectively, are grounded in reality rather than in illusion.
As we saw in the first work, The Tyranny of Perfection, it was the “Masters of Suspicion” who have been employed to unhinge us from reality and instead settle for a domesticated version of reality. In my writing this second work and the next as well, it has become more apparent that the remedy for our social mistrust is everything, in their proper order, that draws us into reality, into the really real. The Ancients had a saying, “first live, then do philosophy” (primum vivere deinde philosophari) which I might translates as “first enter into existence, then you can talk about it!” Trust, as we see, is about reality and our relationship to the really real. Our modern dilemma is that we think our words make reality, whereas words can only suggest what might be real. First enter into Existence, then you can talk about it!