I'm not sure it's about money, per se. Consider all the societies that had money and didn't get as "successful" as the current one, not anywhere close.
The culprit is the scientific method, and in particular it's ability to give people repeatable, inhuman action-at-a-distance that amplified moral hazard 10000-fold.
The longer the distance between extraction and consumption the more fucked your civilization is.
As horrible as that sounds, there is a beautiful symmetry: science gives hope to spread life beyond Earth, and yet it is also provides a real path to the destruction of Earth, our only home.
It's very curious to me, the connection between science, mind, learning, and economy. They are all optimization processes; narrowing the gap between the model of the world and the actual world, with science being a method of modeling and validating models, a method of learning. Minds are collections of learned models, and economy is the actualization of those models to accomplish the acquisition and use of resources.
I used the word "machine" before, and also the word "superorganism". I get this creepy feeling we're part of a cybernetic superorganism more akin to a slime mold, digesting the world not with funky stomach acids, but the humming sounds of a million bulldozers, pile-drivers, hammers breaking down and building up again. And now, in the 21st century, some kind of Star Trek computer sounds as the digitized stock market whirs away at a speed incomprehensible to these little pink-gray bundles of nerves prone to chemical stimulation.
All of those learning and optimization processes are harnessed, in bulk, towards the economy--harnessing the energy and mineral resources of this planet to create "wealth" for the value system of that machine. Even as just a software person, being light-years away from a bulldozer or a harvester, everything I have done inevitably feeds into making that machine more "efficient". I am rewarded, so my little life is improved. (I guess I shouldn't complain, the machine has made me relatively wealthy so far!?)
Well, you and I are just two tiny specks of the traveling wavefront of "Life" that started some billions of years ago, and which includes everything currently living, on every timescale. (another way to think of it is that every individual is characterized by the 4D path of its center of mass, describing a world-line totally unique in the lifetime of the universe, and that these paths intersect and when you zoom out, speed up time, the network becomes invisible and you just see something like a time-lapse of slime mould growth. It's as beautiful an image as it is disturbing, for some.)
One element of the world which is clearly already a "cybernetic organism" is the everyday "Corporation" - it is an actual fusion of humans and machines to achieve a goal. Corps have many emergent properties, none of which have their root in any individual person or machine. And note that this was true pre-information revolution! (And note: corps ALSO have a center of mass! Although this usually isn't the most useful characterization, its accurate.)
The culprit is the scientific method, and in particular it's ability to give people repeatable, inhuman action-at-a-distance that amplified moral hazard 10000-fold.
The longer the distance between extraction and consumption the more fucked your civilization is.
As horrible as that sounds, there is a beautiful symmetry: science gives hope to spread life beyond Earth, and yet it is also provides a real path to the destruction of Earth, our only home.
Clearly Nature thinks the gamble is worth it.