A Logical Process to Understand True Wealth

I have tried out the following intellectual filtering procedure with both multi-thousand general public audiences and with audiences of only a hundred or so advanced scholars and have never experienced disagreement with my progression of residual conclusions. I proceed as follows: I am going to make a series of analytical statements to you, and if anyone disagrees with me on any statement we will discard that statement. Only those of all my statements which remain 100 per cent unprotected will we rate as being acceptable to all of us.

First, I say, "No matter what you think wealth may be and no matter how much you have of it, you cannot alter one iota of yesterday." No protest? We've learned some lessons. We can say that wealth is irreversible in evolutionary processes. Is there anyone who disagrees with any of my statements thus far — about what wealth is or is not? Good-no disagreement-we will go on.

Now, I'm going to have a man in a shipwreck. He's rated as a very rich man, worth over a billion dollars by all of society's accredited conceptions of real wealth. He has taken with him on his voyage all his stocks and bonds, all his property deeds, all his checkbooks, and, to play it safe, has brought along a lot of diamonds and gold bullion. The ship burns and sinks, and there are no lifeboats, for they, too, have burned. If our billionaire holds on to his gold, he's going to sink a little faster than the others. So I would say he hadn't much left either of now or tomorrow in which to articulate his wealth, and since wealth cannot work backwardly his kind of wealth is vitally powerless. It is really a worthless pile of chips of an arbitrary game which we are playing and does not correspond to the accounting processes of our real universe's evolutionary transactions. Obviously the catastrophied billionaire's kind of wealth has no control over either yesterday, now, or tomorrow. He can't extend his life with that kind of wealth unless he can persuade the one passenger who has a life-jacket to yield that only means of extending one life in exchange for one crazy moment's sense of possession of all the billionaire's sovereign-powers-backed legal tender, all of which the catastrophy-disillusioned and only moments earlier "powerfully rich" and now desperately helpless man would thankfully trade for the physical means of extending the years of his life; or of his wife.

It is also worth remembering that the validity of what our reputedly rich man in the shipwreck had in those real estate equities went back only to the validity "in the eyes of God" of the original muscle, cunning, and weapons-established-sovereign-claimed lands and their subsequent legal re-deedings as "legal" properties protected by the moral-or-no, weapons-enforced laws of the sovereign nations and their subsequent abstraction into limited-liabilitycorporation equities printed on paper stocks and bonds. The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semidemocracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe.

I now go on to speculate that I think that what we all really mean by wealth is as follows: "Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives."

Is there any disagreement? Well, having first disposed of what wealth is not we now have produced a culled-out statement that roughly contains somewhere within it a precise definition of what wealth is. Now we can account wealth more precisely as the number of forward days for a specific number of people we are physically prepared to sustain at a physically stated time and space liberating level of metabolic and metaphysical regeneration.

We are getting sharper. Inasmuch as we now are learning more intimately about our Spaceship Earth and its radiation supply ship Sun on the one hand and on the other its Moon acting as the Earth's gravitationally pulsing "alternator" which together constitute the prime generator and regenerator of our life supporting system, I must observe also that we're not going to sustain life at all except by our successful impoundment of more of the Sun's radiant energy aboard our spaceship than we are losing from Earth in the energies of radiation or outwardly rocketed physical matter. We could burn up the Spaceship Earth itself to provide energy, but that would give us very little future. Our space vehicle is similar to a human child. It is an increasing aggregate of physical and metaphysical processes in contradistinction to a withering, decomposing corpse.

It is obvious that the real wealth of life aboard our planet is a forwardly-operative, metabolic, and intellectual regenerating system. Quite clearly we have vast amounts of income wealth as Sun radiation and Moon gravity to implement our forward success. Wherefore living only on our energy savings by burning up the fossil fuels which took billions of years to impound from the Sun or living on our capital by burning up our Earth's atoms is lethally ignorant and also utterly irresponsible to our coming generations and their forward days. Our children and their children are our future days. If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever we are cosmicly bankrupt.

It is not the artificial concept of wealth we have invented, but the resources we use to combat the forces of entropy and survive.