• @DPUGT2
    link
    22 years ago

    It’s not clear how that could ever be the case. People want food, people who have more food (and better food) are wealthier than those who don’t. People want homes, people want better homes. People who have those are wealthier than those who don’t. Clothing, tools, hobbyist supplies. Vehicles. Land. You name it. All those things are wealth. You have to work pretty hard to come up with something that is considered wealth that people don’t want for its own merits.

    All these things are traded for money (rather than bartered) because money is so much more fungible. While I suppose I can imagine a world without money, that just makes those things more difficult to trade for… it doesn’t make the desire for them to go away. And so it doesn’t make the desire for wealth to go away.

    Psychologically, it might be true that those who feel as if they want this “driving force to go away” are those who are unable to mature. They want to return to a time when they were 4 years old and unaware of how anything was provided to them, they want to return to a time when every desire of theirs was magically fulfilled by parents.

    Supposing that this elimination of the desire for acquisition of wealth isn’t literally extinction for the human species, I can’t even imagine how sad and miserable those people would. They would have little and never even appreciate that they might seek more. Half-starved, freezing, unable to want a full belly or a warm bed.