Posted September 10, 2019
The great deficiency of materialism is that it kills everything that isn't greed-based. It renders everything a commodity, including life itself, and this is why we cannot overcome problems like human trafficking, ultra-extreme economic disparity, or war. People who have power care nothing about human rights because life has no innate value. It's value, like every other commodity, is determined solely on the basis of how much it can be bought or sold for, or it's usefulness. So hobbyists have the exact same value that human subsistence does -- none.
Some thoughts for you on human value & the price of a Kant.
Human use symbolic models to moderate their perception of the non-linear universe we live in. Models are generalizations and all generalizations are wrong. A generality is a heuristic that abstracts universal trend and obscures detail; since nothing is universally true there is always a contrary fact to any generalization, so the observation is only good for prima facie determination and not for an absolute reckoning. Fritz Perls established (1951) the concept of Gestalt mindfulness (be alive to every minute in your physical world; don’t live in abstractions).*
Or, to put it another way, it’s like General Rommel’s famous Fingerspitzengefühl ability (his instantaneous battlefield cognizance), rather than a deliberate legal assessment. A coup l’œil where one conceives a reliable snapshot of a given situation, which is what Gladwell (2005) identified as a cognitive “blink”. (This is much of what differs in human cognition from the artificial; we have a chunk of cerebellar wetware that processes perceptions in parallel to determine situational awareness.)
Since no generalization is perfect, the sociological argument against money exposes the frayed edge of commerce. (A fractal boundary between the real universe and virtual creation that exists both within and between human shared (un-) consciousness.)
What I mean is, the human cognitive abstract represented by money does not work in particularly extreme specific cases. As @richlind33 noted, a human life has no monetary equivalent (Kant's moral imperative), yet the commercial scale is flexible enough to easily accommodate any and all additional commodities, should a human be determined by their utility price.
Money is perfectly fungible; it is vastly more useful than a barter system, the main weakness of which is the incommensurable nature of specific items. Because money has no intrinsic value except that which is ascribed to it (i.e., by agreement), it is frangible and can be used as a proxy to exchange goods of indeterminate equivalence; since the price of commodities is based on the agreement between the vendor and the buyer, each arbitrage transaction can be calculated independently and every fair transaction is, ipso facto, acquitted to the mutual agreement (if not total satisfaction) of both parties, and hence determines the incidental fair price.
So money is a singular technological improvement, but it is not a magic wand to convert the complexity of our universe into a neat human preconceived idealized confection.
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*Also, confer Gavin de Becker (trust your intuition, rather than technology, to protect you from violence), Cialdini (know the techniques of psychological influence to avoid becoming their victim), Kahneman (“we can be blind to our blindnesses”, the assumption that WYSIATI “what you see is all there is”), & Mlodinow (the unconscious dictates much of our conscious decision-making).
References:
Fritz Perls (1951), Gestalt Therapy: Excitement & Growth in the Human Personality;
Robert Cialdini (1984), Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion;
Gavin de Becker (1997), The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence;
Malcolm Gladwell (2005, Blink: the Power of Thinking Without Thinking;
Daniel Kahneman (2011), Thinking Fast & Slow; and
Leonard Mlodinow (2012), Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, who quotes Dr Carl Jung wrote: “Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
