We live in an age of dazzling wealth but true richness has slipped through our fingers. In this first essay, I trace how language once linked richness to virtue, nobility, and wisdom, before being reduced to “wealth” and possessions. From childhood boredom with Monopoly to my later disillusion with modern economics, I show how our culture confuses “having” with “being,” mistaking the glitter for the greatness. Like science lost in abstraction, economics has detached itself from lived reality, forgetting that money ultimately represents energy, technique, and values. Today, wealth parades in the emperor’s clothes, propped up by advertising, tourism, and spectacle. But richness, like good taste in food, remains a matter of discernment: a toast that gives meaning to the table, a style of being that refines abundance into grace. This series aims to recover those sources of richness and reframe economics through their lens.
Along these articles I include many cartoons from diverse sources, (i.e. El Roto, etc.) because as Nietzsche already pointed out: “I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as fitting, the most cheerful” (Will To Power, 91)
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We live in an age of spectacular wealth. Rockets graze the Kármán line, influencers rent Ferraris by the hour, and the glow of a skyline passes for moral authority. And yet, for all this dazzle, richness -the thing people actually want when they chase wealth- still remains poorly understood.
When I was a 11 year-old kid, some family members invited me to learn to play the classic `Monopoly´ and in about half an hour I felt extremely bored, not because I was winning or losing, but because I had quickly unveiled the nature of the game´s rules and was no longer motivated by such closed loop of acquisition and extraction. I didn’t have the language yet, but I sensed a gap between bankroll and being.
Since such realization I became poorly impressed by people´s wealth, money, and during my teens was much more fascinated about nature, computing, drawing, biking, engines and people´s skills. So for some reason I still don´t understand today I tended to focus much more on power at a physical level, beyond all socioeconomic and political configurations. Ultimately I was fascinated about the problem of discovering what defines actual power and which its purpose is.
Many individuals become multimillionaires and such accomplishments can be very often explained by a combination of drive, growth mindset, networking abilities, ambition, access to financial support and business acumen. Apparently there´s no mystery here. Yet it must be firstly clarifying that this article is not devoted to unveil the sources of `wealth´ but the sources of `richness´.
Language already knew better
English blends “richness” and “wealth” like a smoothie, also mixing it to expressions such as being affluent, well-off, well-to-do, prosperous and high-net-worth. However, this blurred set of Anglo-American concepts acquires a first insightful etymological refinement in Romance languages that descend from Latin, such as Spanish, Italian, and French... For instance, in Spanish still prevails terms such as rico (rich), pudiente (a person with power=poder, Latín potens, potentis), acaudalado (a person with caudal=capital, Latin: caput, “head”, capital), opulento (a person who lives amid material abundance, Latin: opulens), adinerado (a person with a lot of money=dinero), and finally `con fortuna´ (a person lucky in business, Latin: fortūna). This isn’t a fussy linguistic gripe. When we reduce richness to wealth, values flatten. Possession gets mistaken for presence. Glitter gets mistaken for greatness.
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By etymologically digging a little deeper, the word “richness” is also linked in Indo-European languages to virtue, nobility, wisdom, strength (moral, physical), royalty (Latin: regius, rex, royal; Sanskrit: rajan; German: Reich, reich) symbolically allying to the eagle, the sun, and many other polar symbols (i.e. axis mundi). The biblical notion of right-eousness is also etymologically very close to the Indo-European reich/regius notion and its insightful to consider as well an important transition that appears in the Bible: whereas the Old Testament considers `wealth´ a blessing, the New Testament condemns it.
This brief linguistic approach shows that the concept of `richness´ historically ranged from inner personal expression to external material expression; from being to becoming; from spirit to matter. This inversion acted through many generations, and it´s today so sturdily in-built in the deep recesses of our unconscious that it’s extremely common to assume that the owner/s of massive amounts of wealth are extraordinary personalities, and whether this assumption is factual or not the case is that it´s believed. This is a fact, a cultural fact.
Based on these linguistic nuances, it’s misleading to claim that people today “want to be rich”. Virtue, nobility, freedom, and wisdom rarely pay off in a society that –as ´ve shown in a former article- is built on standardized behavior, cultural homogenization and the promotion of debt. It’s far more precise to say that most people want `to have´ either a lot of money or a lot of things.
Notice the shift: the verb having overruns the verb being. We’re persuaded to believe that, just as owning a piano or violin is the first step to play the music we might cherish in our spirit, possessions are the first step to richness. But in the traditional Indo-European sense, richness flows the other way: from top to bottom. Instruments don’t produce music; music produces the instruments.
In effect… A person who is truly rich -virtuous, noble, free, generous, wise- carries a spirit, a kind of inner “music” that magnetically attracts the necessary experiences, friends and means (wealth, money, capital, technical means, situations, opportunities, etc.) required to affirm such inner “music” in any conditions whatsoever. As if living in a constant state of bliss, such person finds delight in every circumstance, not because conditions are always ideal, but because the truly `rich´ can perceive the “light”, the source of richness within very complex situations. This delight renders `richness´ something real. It is not an unrealizable ideal nor the pursuit of a political-economic blessing granted from the outside, but something deeply in resonance to the creative power of the cosmos; something not turned into an alienating abstraction.
Modern Economics as Abstraction
Etymology already gives us a first clue: the path from richness to wealth traces a slide from quality to quantity. It’s the same slide that shaped science after the 17th century, a worldview where what cannot be measured is dismissed as unreal. Modern economics inherited this mindset wholesale. But here’s the question: if physics itself has been shaken by quantum theory in the 1900s and chaos theory in the 1960s, why should we assume economics has escaped untouched?
We live with the prejudice that “science has never been better”. The gadgets on our desks -smartphones, laptops, AI tools- seem to prove it. But the marvels of techno-industry are not the same as science as a human practice. The further science drifts into abstraction -multiverses, quantum paradoxes, endless peer-reviewed papers on screens- the less it connects to lived experience. Many of today’s scientists can debate quantum entanglement or Big Bang theories yet struggle to repair a fuse or read the behavior of their dog.
The same drift affects economics. Concepts like `richness´, `money´, and `capital´ are now treated as self-contained abstractions, detached from the concrete processes that once grounded them. Yet people would respond to what I´ve written: “What! Money is real, I can see my balance on my bank app!”… But that balance is no less abstract than the colored bills of Monopoly, both assume a world already built, furnished, and mechanized, without asking how the bricks, machines, or food got there in the first place.
If you throw a group of people on a desert island, their “economy” cannot begin with paper money or digital balances. It has to begin with wood, fish, sunlight, stone; with energy and matter transformed through technique. In other words: they have to relate very precisely to the cosmos through their direct experience. Ignore that, and famine is the inevitable result of inflation.
`Richness´, then, is not an abstract promise but a concrete relation: how well we harness energy, how we transform matter, how we shape our appetites and values to match what the world actually offers.
Due to the latter, economists are still reluctant to consider the following: the way we perceive the economic domain is culturally conditioned, or in other words: our views on economics are determined by our personal values. The operative practice of science I developed in Operative Traditions III shows that the technical mediations we employ in order to measure natural phenomena determine the selfsame phenomena, and the choice of these mediations is ultimately based on our personal values. In fact, the Challenge to Science project is rooted in this core epistemological notion, a notion that aspires to capture the exceptional, the qualitative, while filtering all the quantitative-mechanistic phenomena that surrender to laws. In other words, the challenge is about separating the rich from the poor.
When Wealth Wears the Emperor’s Clothes
As excellently expressed in Hans Christian Andersen´s tale The Emperor's New Clothes, all beliefs are founded on irrational grounds, beyond factual observation, and we´ve all verified the fascination induced in the people´s minds by someone who owns a Lamborghini or a large mansion, even if there is no evidence whatsoever of the type of personality that backups such wealth. Material context has become everything, in the similar way as how an ostentatious background (i.e. Tower Eiffel) in one´s selfie powerfully boosts “likes” in Instagram or how priests very often lose credibility by their parishioners if they don´t preach in a church replete of lavishly and dazzlingly element of decoration. Strip away the props -the marble lobby, the blue check, the stage lighting- and many modern idols deflate. What remains is often… thin air.
The historical transposition of the sacred character of `richness´ into `wealth´ has also transposed the selfsame concept of the sacred. French thinker Gustave Le Bon already outlined in the 19th century a very clarifying distinction between `acquired prestige´ and `personal prestige´. In The Crowd Le Bon cites Blaise Pascal´s assertion on “the necessity for judges of robes and wigs. Without them they would be stripped of half their authority”. As a result, the image of both authority and prestige can easily be ingrained in the popular mind by attaching adequate material complements to a given individual. The emperor doesn’t need clothes; he needs an audience that worships the garment. This material transposition acts then in the public as a halo of pseudo-sacredness that not only impregnates the appearance of judges who dress robes and wigs but also impregnates the appearance of wealthy individuals in general.
Though this halo is very much artificially induced it doesn´t impede that those uncommon individuals that equate with the primordial concept of `richness´ (this is, wisdom, nobility, wisdom, strength, Le Bon´s `personal prestige´) do actually have a powerful direct presence; by this I mean they emit “something in the air” that either encourages or intimidates the individuals who relate to them, and this irrational type of sensations are sometimes referred to as an “intense aura” by those who are sensitive to trans-physiological modes of energy. This presence phenomenon is nulled by the media technology that predominates in our times, and can only be technically replaced with a halo of a spectacular and entertaining atmosphere where presence is replaced by props. Excellent works such as Vance Packard´s Hidden Persuaders or Eduard Bernays´ Propaganda expose how such techniques play with the cognitive faculties of the spectator and with his/her deep layers of fear, insecurities, in order to transpose a halo of pseudo-sacredness, pseudo-paradise and pseudo-redemption to the possession of material wealth.
In traditional societies the individuals who embodied such “intense aura” (priestly castes, shamans) acted as beacons for guiding, empowering and enriching human life, yet the effect of the techniques pointed out by Packard and Bernays is so powerful that individuals are then intensively persuaded to be guided by mirages, specters and visually stimulating scenarios where is promised the redemption from the technical challenges of everyday life. Prophetically, Nietzsche already wrote: “The age of kings is past: what today calls itself the people deserves no king” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), and yet the novel techniques of cognitive alteration that emerged in the 20th century motivates me to update Nietzsche´s words and conclude even if a true king appeared, we’d scroll past him because he lacks a blue check and viral charisma.
Neither Packard nor Bernays mentioned the phenomenon of tourism, and yet I consider this phenomenon as very paradigmatic in regard to the transposition operated in the human psyche by the techniques these authors address. Such techniques have rendered the spiritual practice of pilgrimage (intended to develop self-knowledge through direct contact with other cultures) into the practice of tourism, a practice in which the diversity of other cultures are offered to the tourist as commodities, spectacle, exotics and souvenirs. It’s not that tourism is evil, it’s that it’s anaesthetized. A pilgrimage stripped of its difficulty is like an education stripped of struggle: entertaining, yes, but spiritually sterile.
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This degradation mirrors the broader economy: what once aimed at transcendence now settles for distraction. Ends become means, and the means multiply until they choke the ends entirely. Yet this transposition isn´t effective in practice without also reducing human goals to commodities -a process operated mainly by advertisement techniques- a reduction that is a consubstantial part of the brave new normal I referred to in a former article. In this context the economy becomes the destiny and all ends become means.
Vicious Means
The fact that all ends have been reversed into means well explains why very rarely in my literature I write articles on economy and finance. Ultimately the way we perceive the economic domain vastly transcends the economic sphere.
This realization makes me completely agree with Julius Evola when the Italian philosopher affirmed that in modern society predominates a “demonic nature of the economy” (Men Among the Ruins), that is to say, when aspiring to provide a meaning to wealth and money –which are means- it´s extremely common to end up justifying such means with pursuits such as happiness, competition, privileges, fame, sex, security or comfort. Little chances do the mind-conditioning techniques pointed out by Vackard and Bernays let us realize that the former are ultimately means, not ends, and that such means Historically derive from the bourgeoisie mindset that subverted the higher values of freedom, sovereignty and honor embraced by the warrior and noble castes that formerly guided human destiny.
We no longer ask “What is this for?” We only ask “How much?” But here’s the irony: the more we deify the economy, the more it enslaves us. We seek freedom in consumption and find dependence; we seek status in spectacle and find hollowness.
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The fact that economic means are today constantly justified by other means proliferates what in systems engineering is referred to as `positive feedback´ processes, a vicious cycle that triggers precisely such demonic aspect of the economic domain, to the point that such aspect takes over every single aspect of life. Wealth without meaning is a treadmill. Politics, education, and even healthcare get reduced to budget lines and quarterly targets. The logic of profit colonizes every domain. The economy becomes an idol that demands more offerings the more it grows. As an anecdotic case of the latter I recall a rather charismatic Spanish politician who once affirmed: “Of course we could do better politics, but they don´t pay them better!”.
So how do we resist? Not by smashing money or markets, but by reordering them. By remembering:
· Money is a servant, not a master.
· Wealth is a means, not an end.
· Capital emerges from values, not valuations.
Richness as Good Taste
My Indo-European roots and my passion for Mediterranean food and wine may have predisposed me to see the difference between richness and wealth as, above all, a matter of taste. In Spanish, when a meal delights us, we exclaim: ¡Qué rico! (“How rich!”). The word captures something more than calories: a qualitative allure that food transmits to the senses.
Industrial food production, however, is trapped in a thermodynamic race against time. Freshness slips away irreversibly, and the industry compensates with sugars, preservatives, and refrigeration. These measures preserve edibility, not richness. The result is a slow atrophy of our palates. Many can no longer distinguish traditional bread from preheated mixtures of refined flour and sugar dressed up as “bread”. Nutrition science has stepped in with its charts of calories, proteins, and vitamins, yet no formula replaces the instinctive discernment of taste. I’ve seen, in myself and others, that lasting health and vigor doesn´t begin with nutrient spreadsheets but with reshaping our appetites and those appetites, in turn, are shaped by our deepest traits of character.
What holds for food holds also for life in the economic realm. It is becoming ever harder to distinguish the rich from the merely wealthy. A truly rich individual gives taste to wealth. What’s the point of consuming endlessly if it leaves us bloated, vulgar, arrogant, and spiritually barren? The spectacle of the glutton -belching and puffed, even in a fine restaurant- is no different from the wealthy who flaunt abundance without refinement. True richness does not need chandeliers or Michelin stars; it resides in a style of being, in daily gestures of balance and grace.
This is why the simplest act, a toast at the table, can reveal so much. A rich toast elevates food beyond the plate: it gives meaning. Why are we eating together? To satisfy custom? To keep up appearances? To fuel our bodies with the latest scientifically approved nutrients? To save money by sharing costs? The rich toast answers differently: with elegance, purpose, and taste.
In the following articles, I’ll offer my own answers. Until then — bon appétit.
Continue to the Source of Richness - Part 2
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