Money has lost its moral restraints
I've spent a number of years observing the sheer, unadulterated madness of human behaviour, and nothing makes me laugh or despair quite like our modern relationship with cash.
We used to treat money like a wild animal that needed a firm cage of social etiquette and moral disapproval to keep it from tearing the community apart. Today, we've opened the cage door, handed the beast a megaphone, and asked it for investment advice.
It wasn't always this way. I'm old enough to remember when there was a lingering, distinct sense of shame attached to blatant greed. If you were a wealthy property speculator or a financial shark who squeezed every last penny out of ordinary people, you didn't get invited to the best dinner parties. You were tolerated, but you weren't celebrated.
There was a quiet, institutional understanding that accumulating vast piles of money without producing anything of actual value was a bit vulgar, if not downright sinister.
Then came the great economic shifts of the late 20th century, and the whole system went completely nuts. Suddenly, the people who actually made things, like tables, cars, or even books, were viewed as quaint relics of a bygone era. The new heroes of the age were the slick young arseholes in the City of London who shifted imaginary numbers around computer screens.
They didn't build anything, they didn't fix anything, and they certainly didn't care about the consequences of their actions. They just created vast, volatile bubbles of wealth out of thin air, and we were all told to admire them for it.
That's the exact moment money lost its moral restraints. The moment we decoupled wealth from human utility, we invited utter chaos into the living room. It's an utter farce because the financial world now operates on a level of delusion that would make the inmates of any asylum look perfectly sane.
We've watched global banks collapse because they bet on debts that didn't exist, only for the perpetrators to walk away with multi-million-dollar bonuses funded by the very taxpayers they ruined. If I'd written that into a satirical university essay twenty-five ago, my professor would've rejected it for being far too unrealistic.
Now, the madness is completely normalised. We live in an era where billionaires explain how their ruthless exploitation of the workforce is actually a profound form of philanthropy. It's a grand comedy of manners, except the jokes are wearing incredibly thin.
We've traded a society built on mutual obligation for one where the highest moral virtue is simply matching your income to your ego. I'm afraid we won't find our way back to sanity until we remember how to laugh these high-finance comedians out of the room, or at least until the whole ridiculous house of cards comes tumbling down around our ears.