Metaphysics aside, mysticism discarded, and religion dispossessed; the power that most seek, the talisman that most people hold sacred, and the substance of creation that rivals the Eucharist of choice, the defacto God worshiped that has many a false idol erected to it and by it, is Money!
Supplication to the almighty dollar has replaced meaningful faith in a higher power and replaced it with a worldly power. This is the sad truth of the modern seeker. Virtually every modern frame of reference for assessment and reasoning has been put in context of “what it costs?” But sadly, we have monetized the notion of costs and thus diluted the whole notion of value with the artificial assignment of some worth as defined by a currency.
Try and eat a stack of dollar bills. Or shovel some coins into your throat. If you don’t actually choke, or become poisoned by the toxic materials they are made of, then hopefully you will realize a fundamental fraud…that items manufactured from our abstracted ideas and motives that we label as “Capital” as in capitalism: financial and industrial; are NOT AT ALL EQUIVALENT in real nourishment value as natural resources!
Put in terms of Realist Economics rather than Idealist Economics, the equation would be Capital and Source Elements are NOT substitutes for one another. You cannot drink oil, yet we pollute, or outright waste, fresh potable water. You cannot eat a $100 bill, yet you presume that the animal or vegetable matter you ingest originates in a supermarket rather than on the fields of living soil interacting with the food chain. It is has dire implications to acknowledge that the educational systems have “successfully” deluded most of the children in First-World countries into believing that their food actually originates from grocery stores rather than farms. They have been taught to believe that money, not Nature is the vehicle which brings them nutrition. We have conditioned them, and thus trained them, in Magical Thinking.