Exchange, Honesty, Ethics, 4

For instance, it has been acutely observed how part of this counter−educational influence is that a danger inherent in money in finance is even elevated to the rank of certainty, being indeed the very substance of finance itself: “It substitutes for the natural inalienable right of the worker to the produce of his toil a vague generalised claim upon the totality of the fruits of the community’s efforts – a highly indefinite quantity, which opens the door to every kind of abuse. On the moral side, it divorces the conception of wealth from the dignity of labour”.

Some say that speculation is gambling. So, let alone that usually it is played with marked cards, for the sake of completeness let’s say that when speculation further degenerates in gambling, real or fake, the only difference is that randomness replaces cunning, while probably deception does not change much. But what really counts does not change at all: what one earns is what someone else loses.

Labour, production, fair exchange: survival. Deception, speculation, out exchange: suppression. We will delve ahead into how this is decidedly the case with that specialised form of all this that has been labelled moneypulation.

Back to pre−monetary basics, one began to realize that one is not just “self”, nor one merely “has” a group; one “is” one’s group, community, society as much as one is self. A key shift in one’s point of view: others are not separate from self any more, but become part of self.

Ethics is aligning efforts to a purpose, thus it is always associated to the purpose it serves. And its purpose progressively evolved from the benefit of self to the benefit of all.