I think we got to this place because real wealth and real work were substituted by money.
Money has been around, you can find coins from Roman times in India, you can find coins
from pre-Christ eras, but money was always just a means and you knew very well it's
a means to another end, the end has to be valued in and of itself, but over time what
happened was money took over not as a means but as a measure of wealth and slowly it started
to displace the real wealth creating capacity of people and it also started to displace the
real wealth creating capacity of nature because those are the two places where actual things
are produced, nature gives us wood by growing the trees, it gives us all fertility by renewing
the fertility through microorganisms, it cleans up the air with the carbon cycle, that has
been an amazing production system but a distancing took place from the real world in which real
lives are led and money started to become an overwhelming state of measurement.
At the time of the wars governments had to mobilize more money and therefore they had
to make people believe that the real money, the real objective of money was to be able
to finance the war so looking after children, making sure people had food, all of that became
secondary and the very measurement of the gross domestic product and the gross national
product is if I produce what I consume I am not producing which means that if I am self-reliant,
if I'm actually productive I get knocked out, a woman who runs an entire household feeds
her children is not a producer, it doesn't count, a peasant building self-reliant food
economies, food sovereign economies doesn't count, it's only when the Monsanto's enter
the scene and the cargo's enter the scene suddenly food gets measured in terms of money
because now it's being bought, those who grow it have to sell it, those who eat it must
buy it and the cycle of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, sovereignty starts to get broken and this
has been taken one step further by new instruments being created like the derivatives, like the
securitization and we saw what that reckless construction of money out of money through
fictitious instruments has given us, it gave us the September 2008 Wall Street collapse
out of which countries haven't come out and it wasn't limited to Wall Street, it's taken
away real livelihoods from real people because the entire world economy was ruptured and
as a result of which real economies have suffered deeply and the $3 trillion of bailout has just
helped the banks make bigger profits, ordinary people have lost their homes, have lost their
jobs, are losing their lives and I do believe the alienation of our consciousness, the alienation
of our human experience from real well-being is at the root of it, that's why I'm so
pleased that a tiny nation like Bhutan decided to give up GDP measures and went for gross
national happiness, in fact they've invited me later this year to come and attend a conference
to take this issue further that what we need to measure is well-being and happiness and
not just of human beings, I remember the 60th birthday of His Holiness, I had to give an
opening speech for the celebrations and of course I talked about what concerns me deeply,
the patenting of seed, also about making money, the genetically modified crops and at the
end of it His Holiness just wrote a little note saying, every being has a right to happiness,
all of us have an obligation and universal responsibility to protect that right and I
think that needs to be the basis of the economy unless we have that ethics, economy has destroyed
ecology, economy has destroyed culture, economy has destroyed economic security because economy
became a measure of money rather than a measure of planetary well-being and human well-being.
