brilliantly put, as per.

there have been so many situations where the difference between life and death depended on having money, the most obvious and recent being that of jews trying to escape hitler before the pogroms, that i don't find it surprising that money is seen as prime mover of happiness in most peoples' eyes.

also children absorb values through the skin, and if they see their parents mentioning money and its magical powers to bring more santa surprises to a household, 'we can't afford it, darling', etc, it also doesn't surprise me that, until they learn better, that economic success becomes, and remains, the main driver for most peoples' lives, and symbolises 'success' to the point of insanity, expressed as glitz and flash ala las vegas.

this message is driven home even more cruelly through the teenage years, when positional goods become crucial to a young consumer's identity, and still young enough to be hyper-impressed by the lures of advertising, while also having the most disposable income demographically.

society abounds with cautionary tales about money not being able to buy happiness, but their hale influence is dwarfed by the 'sauce bernays' laid on so thick in a new media world, from their tv to their googlephone.

so, ignorant, spellbound, and armed with cash, they advance into an entitled adulthood only to learn that few get to have 'fuck-you' money, once they have to move out of home and manage their own funds.

in 1500 you had to die to find out if you were going to heaven...

There are no blank spots on the map any more, anywhere on earth. You want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind. Jon Krakauer

I'm less sure of the quality of cross-cultural comparisons, but the general ability of people to be deluded seems universal. Think of the (only somewhat overrated) hedonic treadmill concept.

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

In our culture, money is a religion or a cult.

No, in our culture positional status is a cult, and money is the means by which status is displayed and calculated.

The US constitution should really say 'The right to pursue status' because that has always been the core Anglo value. 'Freedom' correlates to the ultimate positional good, which is the utter lack of responsibility or personal accountability for one's actions.

Once you crack the code statements which seem hypocritical or irrational suddenly start to make sense.

Money = status = power over others = freedom from personal consequences = 'happiness'

Economics is really a kind of giant civilisation-wide Rorshach blot - it can't be about rational planning or resource management, because it's based on these unconscious irrational motivations.

What's really being calculated is intangible, socially defined and faith-based, which is why it has such a bizarre aversion to reality.

This is why pogressives get such a screaming hard time from the status fundamentalists - we have an insane idea that people should act responsibly to each other and to the environment, and that's the last thing the fundamentalists want.

When people including presidential candidates genuflect in front of America, or Wall St, or the City what they're really worshipping is the cult of power over others and over physical reality. When the Economist sneers at people who don't want 'reform', it's making a positional claim to being on the inside of the citadel with the dispossessed starving hopeless masses outside - and that's exactly how it wants things to be.

It's a completely autistic world view. And historically it's mostly been the norm, which is why it's unfair to single its current incarnation as being unusually bad.

What's unusual this time around is that there's a semi-organised intellectual narrative for cooperation competing with it - not just in theory, but in practice, supported by political actions.

It's taken a serious battering in the last few decades, but it's not dead yet, and might yet surprise everyone.

strung like beads on the string of a lifetime, they make a necklace of contentment.

it takes many little notes to make a great symphony.

for me happiness is when, for reasons usually unplanned and unknown, my consciousness drills down through the crust of the banal, and finds the motherlode.

the best kind is also the quickest to disappear!

the more i learn to control the animal response of trying to grab and hold it, the longer it stays.

the more i learn to accept it without remark or condition, the more often it flies into my lap.

i take this shit very seriously! unhappiness was connected to money fetishisation very early, which helped to vaccinate me against mammon per se, yet i can see how money has a place in a good life, though it took me a long time to understand the correlation/causation factor, jaundiced as i was from seeing so many fucked up dysfunctional family situations, where less money might have been a very good thing.

a whole lot more philosophy would have met the problems way upstream and made the money issue moot, but the cookie didn't crumble that way, alas.

so many suicides of children in my parents' world, that demographic called the upper-middle, or those who were aspirants to upper class, but doomed never to get there.

and yes money was the only metric they used for satisfaction, its power supplanted their own, they became defined by money...

There are no blank spots on the map any more, anywhere on earth. You want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind. Jon Krakauer