11 Bean-counters will always win out and money is a precondition to happiness.
I hate to say this, but I've come to realize why the bean-counters will always emerge triumphant. If you choose to live in society, with any of the benefits of human toolmaking or technology it turns out that "exchange is a precondition to happiness." Unfortunately, this is pretty close to the same as "Money is the precondition to happiness."
The shallowest of barflies alongside me often declares that the secret to life is money, the precondition of all happiness, and I have held my tongue through a desire to maintain my nose as a place to rest my eyeglasses. Yet here I am agreeing with many such shallow nitwits.
The peel of this lemon is very thick and pulpy and supplies the concentrated lemon flavor for the cynic's lemonade (the stuff sweetened up with saccharine and colored with urine). It is a bitter peel for someone who would like money to go away, and all the people who live for money to be proven crass and selfish and wrong. I am sorry, for they will not.
Economic values and human values are so frequently opposed to one another, it is hard to believe that they are globally on the same surface.
Value is derived first and foremost from nature's requirements to stay alive - both satisfying our own nature and protecting against Nature's arbitrariness. After this, selfish value can be found in the social origins of groupthink - something is valuable which brings us to ourselves through other people. Something also is valuable if it helps us explore our own personal senses, or to bring us through ourselves to others.
If you keep this in mind and unpack the previous paragraph to its fullest, you will invent many a valuable new asset for civilization. And if you play it right, at a penny profit on a dollar's sale, you can sell your new products and services to global markets for millions. But remember where these selfish values came from.... and since you've basically got the whole world to promote your new human-based values to, look at where your pay-back is coming from. You are being paid through a whole different kind of value.
Human value or no, it is the communication of goods and services which is the crux of social value... and communication means creating relationships between people. And relationships are the realm of numbers, for this is all that numbers fundamentally are. The reality of money is like the reality of "numbers" like Pi and square roots. These are not "numbers" on your fingers at all, but real numbers which exist because they are names given to relationships of real things. THEREFORE, money in some form or other is at the center of the circle around which most of the social world will dance: for money (in some form or other) is the alphabet of economic communication.
It is not the reason for the communication -- we are -- but the figures which the bean-counters draw, and the description of reality using one or more of the alphabets of exchange is at the center of things for the majority of us.
Pinning relational systems to all sorts of things in this world can not be ignored, whatever game or language you choose.... and the almighty sawbuck or yen, the dinar or the groebel or the zafnung of exchange seem to be the ultimate accounting of value.
I will give you yet another ugly reason why the bean-counters hold the key to happiness.
Perhaps you happen to have a self-sufficient farm on a well-stocked lake - and you can make all your tools and spin all your cord and yarn by yourself. You could be happy. But if you had a family like most families... that argued about who washed dishes last night, and who has to take out the garbage tonite, it would help to have an accountant. For there is quite a lot of picking and planting and canning and gutting of fish, and carding of wool which you have planned for your happiness. Creative accounting practices to sort out and regulate the hundreds of tasks involved will soon gain the upper hand. Coming up with methodology eventually comes first... then comes the happiness.
We could do away with money by using credit cards and our computers to create a giant barter economy of our labor and all the goods and services in the world. But once we progressed this far into the future order of things (for indeed this is where we are going), the most creative accountants will define values and set the tempo for the rest of us. And since we don't have access to their means of creating wealth by having the right kinds of figures to balance, there will always be plenty of shorter ends of the stick for us to choose from. The bean-counters will still win.
So whether the bean-counters insist that compounding money over time is the closest thing to a universal language, universal principle, and the basis of all value.... whether they are representing the compounding of solar energy in living tissue, the seasonal fluctuations of fishing tackle, or the natural pulsing cycles of office space rental --- humans will continually put even more energy into the buying and trading of social communicative power. This means looking for ways to create relative power - creating of things and services and dreams which move other human beings to action. Creating new, sometimes false, human values. And this, by the way, is the realm of political power.
While what the bankers, political bosses, advertisers, and corporate executives do is motivated by their own individual human values, the whole is driven by numbers and accounting balances between different number systems.... and all this is driven by the fact that there are so many of us in this world.
So it unfortunately comes down to the fact that the beans do make truth --- smell of potential truth... truth emergent, if you squeeze us long enough. Even if this is a truth with a stink that many of us cannot bear to live with.