People often say that “everything takes its own course,” that you cannot simply remake people, and that everyone wants the same things anyway: to be rich, strong, and so on.

But that is not entirely true. Human beings are not just animals. They are guided mainly by two things: habits, and the values or points of reference established by society.

The actions and motivations of entire social groups are built around such shared orientations. One of the most important is respect: what a society considers worthy of respect.

Today, in this highly concentrated post-capitalist era, money is what people respect. That is a serious problem, and not a simple one. It is complicated, tangled, and “sticky.”

Money is not a true measure of a person’s quality, nobility, or worth. There are plenty of rich scoundrels, while many brilliant and genuinely valuable people simply never draw a winning ticket. Often the opposite is rewarded: the greedier and more shameless someone is, the more they manage to grab. The system then scales up this dead-end cult of wealth.

But respect can be changed, corrected, and redirected. Society does not have to admire billionaires and millionaires just because they are rich, and in the long distance it will not. It can learn to respect other things, and to respect them for good reason, because short-term profit is not what gives true value and balance.

This shift already happens on its own, but slowly. Respect is one of the basic forces holding society together: it is a shared point of orientation that moves masses of people and changes the world. We can change what we respect. It is cultural things, not just money. Is money not part of culture too: a culture of exchange?