The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing
—Oscar Wilde
Money destroys the ineffable, similar to how intertwining state and church affairs together removes the Divine from the religious domain, and how gender equality destroys femininity. 1 It would seem on the surface that the ability to put a price tag on everything would, over time, reveal people's preferences, and would create a world shaped to what people truly want.
In practice however, what happens is that such a system does not end up being a benefactor for the flourishing of human beings and cultures, but merely what appeals to the ego, which in turn builds and maintains the system.
This is because quantity, and in general literal forms, do not have any quality in and of themselves. We can say that this or that product is priced at fifty dollars, that your body needs these nutrients and this much energy per day, but who is to say that anything is actually good for you? Only a conscious person can actually know what "good" is, for it is not a literal answer found in the self, but a conscious experience. The most important aspects in life, love, beauty, joy, tranquility, growth and death, just to name a few, are 'outside' of the grasp of literal language. 2.
On a basic level, the lack of quality of our world isn't hard to see. Even teenagers on social media frequently talk about how capitalism is aligned with the quest of profits, even if its outputs are utterly empty of any real value. Titillation sells more than artistic depth, which is why superhero movies dominate, why so many people watch porn, why fiction is filled with plot-driven stories in the form of science-fiction or fantasy, at the expense of character-driven ones, why addicting video games are the norm, why short-form content dominates, and why most people cannot bear to be in silence. 3
Few people are interested in getting to the root of 'capitalism' however. This isn't merely a mistake in thinking, because the reason why people are blind to the root of the system, built and maintainted by the ego, is that their own ego is clever enough to foresee the threats of being consciously perceived, as that would amount to its own death. This is why people are so incredibly good at blaming other people and complaining about everything, but so rarely take responsibility for anything. Not just individuals, but collectives, which manifest in what we call democracy, or for our interest here, the forces of the market.
It might be devastating to hear about the destruction of the Amazon forest, the spread of microplastics in our food and water, the pollution in our air, the landfills which are bigger than small villages, but what can an individual do? Essentially nothing, which is why the system keeps moving in the same direction: more growth, no matter the costs.
Ego, the self-informed self is irresponsible, blind to quality, blind to itself and its insensitivity, and obsessed with comfort, especially in our times. Pain and death must be pushed away at all costs. There must always be a myriad of possible distractions to be plastered on top of dull moments for me not to be bored. And I deserve the right to have people deliver things to my house, and even do anything remotely complicated for me, without having to leave the comfort of my own home.
This is the modern world, the world built by ego, an era where cowardice, convenience, numbness, apathy and plain old boredom reign. How could anyone see this and say confidently that the market gives people what they want is beyond me. The market gives what the self-informed self wants, but this is not the world that our heart and soul know is good.
One of the common defenses of the system, and the destruction which results from markets forces, is that such a world is a reflection of who we are as a species. That in essence, we are a bunch of selfish, pleasure-obsessed, greedy, anxious, violent hairless apes, doing anything we can to avoid pain, difficulty and death, in order to own as much as they can, be as safe as possible from consequences, and fuck people and nature over and over, just because we are hardwired to do so.
Human beings certainly can be selfish, insensitive, or cowards, but within sane environments, this ego is kept within check, and we eventually learn that the Universe does not revolve our petty desires, and that the most beautiful experiences all involve a self-softening, so that I can truly see my lover in her eyes, or pay attention to the wonderful clouds and the blue sky above me which I have taken for granted, or closely listen to the singing of the birds, or delight in the subtle pleasure of stillness and silence.
Our insane environments on the other hand provide no such lesson. Everyone must be pampered to, which is why people remain so childish, and why quality is so incredibly rare. Even if we have the technological means to do so, building churches and creating beauty feel like an activity of a remote time, done by people who are almost alien to us now, because we have little to no sense of the transcendent, something to devote our work and time to. 4 Work is now drudgery, a sacrifice for the insane God of the market, and something we try to avoid as much as possible, because it now alienates us from connection.
And perhaps aliens we have become. Alienated from the simple reality in front of us, instead befuddled by the power of convenience that money offers us, which makes us lose sight of the unique qualities of the present moment, and instead create a world of mere fungible things, all atomized from one another.
Money is definitely not "neutral" as most would suggest. Even if its only role is convenience, such a convenience also has its downsides, as anyone who had a period of their life where they were just too comfortable would know. Discomfort and even pain by themselves are not unbearable, but pain as an alienated self is, especially in a world without any deeper connection, which is why the modern world tries to eradicate pain as much as possible. 5
Put a price tag on everything, and you have a world of atomized, discrete things, with no value in and of themselves, and which get reduced to their price tag. Perception is shaped by our environments, and as such money and the entire industry of consumption cannot be said to give people what they "want", because they systematically make them more egoic. It's like saying that zoo animals "want" to be there because they do not try to escape. Of course they don't, because they have been domesticated so as to be unable to live in anything but a zoo.
The zoo-world we live in is not just problematic because we are unable to build churches anymore, or because office work feels meaningless, the much deeper problem is that it is utterly unable to understand and address its own alienation. It can only interact with Reality through effable representations, which makes people believe that it is all that there is to life, such that they spend their entire life chasing a phantasm which can never give them the satisfaction that they truly want.
This is why the Divine is so important, because we thirst for connection with something broader than our self, even when we cannot articulate what it is. We shouldn't be surprised then that our soulless world leads to systematic insanity, it's like being stranded in a desert and being told that there is no such thing as water, that your condition of perpetual thirstness is how life is. But still, you wade through the desert, and find yourself chasing mirage after mirage, and the real thing feels ever so out of reach, because it is beyond this world, beyond the desert.
1 One side is more material, more effable, whereas the other side is more intangible, ineffable, which always ends up losing if the two sides are combined into one. It is the state which ends up winning against the church, not the other way around, because money and power corrupt religious affairs, whereas the Divine does not tend to keep in check the pursuit of power. More controversially, men and women are not equal because they are qualitatively different, which is why it makes more sense to have them work in different domains. They are compatible, not equal, and what "equality" does in practice is force women to work in the domains of men, because femininity is completely useless to the technological system.
2 I put 'outside' in scare quotes because it would suggest a spatial relationship, but space and relations are also part of the self and the literal language it uses to describe the world. For more, see 'Self and Unself' by Darren Allen.
3 Or even watch an entire movie in one sitting.
4 "To work is to pray" —John Singer Sargent, one of the great American artists of the 19th and early 20th century.
5 See also: A Painless Hell by Darren Allen.
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2026-02-19