Transactional Values Will Be the Death of Us

Ray Katz
4 min readSep 17, 2024

Unconditional love is not only possible. It’s essential.

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

Everything seems to be a deal. Even personal business seems to be business.

We talk about success and consider it to be synonymous with money. In this strange clueless world, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and even Donald Trump are considered the most successful and, often, the most admired.

What do you consider to be admirable qualities in a human being? Who best exhibits those qualities? If you really ponder this, and are honest with yourself, you know who are successful as human beings. And if you are morally honest with yourself, you recognize that it is their goodness, their aliveness, their ability to rise over the nonsense and have a robust and positive relationship with the physical world and those living in it.

Those people, those who see through the thin veneer of our misguided civilization—they are our clue and our guides. They may be flying high or laid low by our transactional world—but they stand out because they see and feel and behave differently. They never think of people as a means to an end—especially not to a financial end. To them, people and their lives are an end in themselves.

The notion that you need to be useful and productive, otherwise you are nothing, is a terrible, terrible moral code…

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Ray Katz
Ray Katz

Written by Ray Katz

Internet pioneer. But I’m most interested in stabilizing the Earth’s climate and promoting our common humanity. WeAreSaners.org

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