The world's system of trade and money constantly devours intelligence and imagination in its service. It can always renew itself in the face of change. If necessary it can even destroy and re-create itself. It has succeeded, in its terms, better than any other previous system in your history. Its creativity is limitless, like its cruelty, arrogance and intolerance of all that stands in its way. Other ways of thinking or of organising societies are swept aside, crushed, or consumed and brought into the service of this dominant system of exchange. By now it has no serious challengers.

Because the system operates by means of abstract tokens that represent numbers or patterns of computer data, individual acts are distanced from their results. The piling up of the tokens of power and property draws a cloak over the intimate connections between things because it becomes an end in itself.

So the individual who enters into an exchange for fuel does not see the wars fought over access to this form of energy, does not notice the changes in the planet's delicate living systems caused by using it. When people are blinded by numbers the acquisitive need seems abstract. Nobody can see this poverty caused by that wealth, this pain created by that pleasure.

The system tends to generalise and abstract things. The individual being is wiped away, forgotten, or seen only as a niche in the economic reality. Ordinary people become represented as the market or as labour or the state. Every aspect of the private life of the beings of Earth is turned into some form of commodity. In this way each being is saturated in the global culture of trade and accumulation.

You were born into a nation that is a central force in this system. Trading your intelligence and skills for power and position, you have been able to fulfill your desires. But your desires are entirely shaped by the system of business in which you are embedded. You are a figure on a hundred thousand balance sheets, a record in a global file. You are a ghost, a reflex response to the images of things and sensations constantly proffered in the planetary market.