Revalue things
Philosophy
2021
Money cannot and shouldn’t buy you everything. Love for example! Or democracy, or life itself. What is a the value, the price of democracy, or life?
Trying to value invaluables reveals the absurdity of us humans trying to put a price of something that really shouldn’t have a price. We can’t do it and our economy with its market can’t do it. Even if we human can use economy to help allocate resources to what ends we find important we shall always be aware of the limitations of our knowledge and money as price tag.
Value arises from what we think is important under certain cultural goals, contexts and norms. The confusion of exchange value and use value have put us in many parts of the world in a zero-sum status race where we pay more for diamonds than for water. However put three amigos in a desert and the value of water becomes priceless and the diamond worthless .
We have to realize that we cannot and should not value everything in economic terms. Putting a price on irreversible ecological damage will not undo the devastation and doing so will probably entice our appetite for destruction.
How we value and treat e.g. democracy, human rights, human life, entropy, asymmetric flows of entropy, the preservation of ecosystems belongs to a another sphere than economy. Economy cannot handle it and we as humans have to be brave and deal with our cultural peculiarities and find out what we think about these more moral questions and start valuing life and the life-supporting systems for their own sake.