I think the real issues go much deeper.

For instance, Western culture is very linear and goal/object oriented, while Eastern culture tends to be more contextual. Yet the reality is the dichotomy between nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems.

Organisms have to synchronize their various internal clocks, while ecosystems have to harmonize their various clocks and metabolic systems. So that rather than one single focus, all the various components seek out their own niches in the larger system, rising and falling, yet networked into the larger system.

When we take the view that everything has to function as one, it does become a rat race, for the sacred totem, in this case, money.

The fallacy is that markets are circular and cyclical, so money has to circulate, while people, being linear and goal oriented, see it as the signal to extract and store. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted.

Since most money functions as a contract, with the asset backed by a debt, this religion of wealth accumulation requires an economy designed to manufacture debt.

Which creates this centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. As money and banking serve as the value distribution system of society, this is analogous to the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.

The Ancients used debt jubilees to reset this dynamic. Michael Hudson's recent book, Forgive Them their Debts, makes the argument that Jesus's original message was about re-instating debt jubilees, but when the the Romans co-opted his followers and created the Catholic Church, it was changed to, Forgive them their sins, as a way to guilt people into control.

The fact is that money is the quintessential public utility and needs to be treated as such.

Its functionality is in its fungibility, so we own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies.

Econ 101 says it is both medium of exchange and store of value, yet a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, while fat is a store. Roads are a medium, while parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, while the hall closet is a store. The average five year old can figure that out, but economics is part of the system, not a neutral observer.

Now that the solution to every problem is just printing more money, we are about to learn the dangers of turning tools into gods.

You can curse the gods and you will be ostracised, but mess up the tools and you starve.

There isn't the investment potential to save what is necessary, so eventually the commons wil have to be resurrected, as a store of value and not just resources to be mined. Including their own, local, organic monetary systems.

The irony of this individualulistic ethos is the resulting atomized society is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system.

Networks matter as much as the nodes inhabiting them.

There was a time when government, as the executive and regulatory function of society, was private, but as monarchs lost sight of their larger social function, of protecting and sustaining the social organism, they were usurped. Now private banking is having its own, Let them eat cake moment.