From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth

25 YEARS OF TIKKUN T he proponents of individual greed have created a global economy headed for terminal collapse. Our financial systems are gyrating out of control beyond human accountability, extreme inequality is tearing apart the social fabric, Earth’s criticallivingsystemsarecollapsing,andpoliticalcorruptionhas rendered our political institutions incapable of effective corrective action. The time has come to rediscover our humanity, reclaim the power that Wall Street corporations and their global counterparts have usurped, rebuild community, and bring ourselves backintobalancewithoneanotherandEarth—ourlivinghome. It requires deep system transformation grounded in recognition that true prosperity and security are products of sharing and community. Thevaluesandinstitutionsofthetwentiethcenturyarebotha product and a source of false stories that have induced a cultural trance, a kind of cultural psychosis that leads us to reduce all values to financial values and all human exchanges to financial transactions for individual private financial gain. We have been conditioned by language and education to the illusion that money is wealth and that people who make money are creating wealth. Modern money is perhaps the most mysterious of human inventions . It is nothing but a number of no substance or intrinsic worth—a number created by a simple accounting entry when a bank makes a loan. Yet in contemporary societies, money determines our access to virtually every essential of life. Thedecisionsofthosewhocontrolthecreationandallocation of money determine the fate of nations and shape the boom and bust of economic life. They determine who will have food, shelter , education, and health care, and who will not, yet it is all just creative accounting. It is the most effective and undemocratic of tyrannies, because its inner workings are largely invisible and therefore difficult to understand and challenge. Money created out of nothing—unrelated to the creation of anything of corresponding value—is phantom wealth. Wall Street has built a whole industry devoted to its creation. It is a form of theft and should be treated as such. Real wealth is anything that has real intrinsic value, for example land, labor, food, and knowledge . The most valuable of all forms of wealth, however, are those that are beyond price: love; a healthy, happy child; a job that provides a sense of self-worth and contribution; membership in a strongcaringcommunity;ahealthy,vibrantnatural environment; and peace. None of these most precious forms of real wealth find any place on corporate balance sheets or in our calculations of Gross Domestic Product. We can create a real wealth economy in which lifeisvaluedmorethanmoneyandinwhichpower resides with ordinary people who care about one another, their community, and their natural environment . It is possible. Millions of people are engaged in living it into being. ■ David Korten is the author of Agenda for a New Economy , The Great Turning, and When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine. His new website is livingeconomiesforum.org. Visit www.tikkun.org for an expanded discussion of real wealthbyDavid Korten. FromPhantomWealthtoRealWealth byDavidKorten 52 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G W I N T E R 2 0 1 1 ...