You are the last human being on Earth. Around you: vaults filled with gold bars, ten-figure stock portfolios, ultra-rare NFTs stored on servers still humming away. By every criterion our civilisation has patiently constructed over three centuries, you are the richest person in history.
But if debt is a promise of future extraction, your fortune is the proof of past extraction. The soils are dead, the rivers are dry, the pollinators have disappeared, the food chain has collapsed in silence while markets were breaking records. How much is your gold worth now?
This is not an apocalyptic metaphor designed to frighten — it is a logical test. And it reveals something fundamental that our economic system stubbornly refuses to integrate: we have inverted the hierarchy of values.
We destroy "tomorrow" in the name of "today" in an exuberant quest for immediate gratification. We glorify gold — a clichéd symbol, yet still current — without understanding that what underpins its value lies in the good health of the world around it.
Gold or life: a question that should never have had to be asked
The maxim is simple, almost obvious once stated: a planet in good ecological health will always feed humanity, even in poverty. A ruined planet will feed no one, no matter how rich.
Being a billionaire in a ruined world is beside the point.
And yet our entire economic architecture operates against this evidence. For a simple reason: we have not yet grasped the impossibility of decoupling, and economists have still not integrated ecological and social costs into their reasoning.
Our money is created through debt — that is, through the promise of future extraction. To repay, one must produce. To produce, one must extract. To extract, one must destroy. The system has no neutral gear. It only moves forward. And forward is the wall.
Meanwhile, what actually keeps us alive — soil fertility, air quality, climate stability, functional biodiversity — has no value in our accounts.
Tragically, what cannot be counted does not count.
These goods have no price because they have no owner. And what has no owner does not exist in the grammar of the market.
This is what I call the inversion of value: the ethical displacement by which a civilisation comes to despise what keeps it alive and to sacralise what destroys it.
The bug is in our heads — but it has an explanation
Why are we so stubbornly incapable of correcting this trajectory? The answer does not lie in our collective malevolence. It lies in our neurobiology.
Neuroscientist Sébastien Bohler, in The Human Bug, documented this with precision: at the centre of our brain sits the striatum, an archaic structure inherited from our vertebrate ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago. The striatum manages the reward circuit. It releases dopamine. And it was selected by evolution in a context of permanent scarcity.
In that world of scarcity, five behaviours were rewarded: accumulating food, multiplying partners, climbing the social hierarchy, conserving effort, and consuming new information. These five instincts ensured the species' survival for hundreds of thousands of years.
The problem? The striatum has no satiety mechanism. It does not know how to stop. And its dopaminergic neurons do not activate in response to what was expected — only to what exceeds expectations. To keep feeling pleasure, the human brain demands an ever-increasing dose of stimulation.
Transpose this mechanism into a world of industrial abundance and you get: fast fashion, recommendation algorithms, mass pornography, overeating, and the financialisation of everything. Capitalism has plugged our archaic striatum into an infinite stimulation machine. Produce, consume, obtain gratification, recognition, seduction.
If our brain allowed us to win the lottery of evolution, this very same mental software is today driving us to ravage the biosphere for dopamine hits.
The physical reality of the plunder
The physical reality of this plunder is rarely made visible. Let the figures speak.
A pair of jeans. 7,500 litres of water to manufacture. Cotton cultivation, representing just 3% of global agricultural land, absorbs 16% of all insecticides used on the planet. A garment you may wear ten times before discarding.
A smartphone. 200 grams in your pocket. 44 kilograms of raw materials extracted, refined, transported — rare earths, cobalt, lithium torn from conflict zones or ecological disasters. More than 80% of its total carbon footprint is already consumed before you switch it on for the first time.
Global agro-industry. It has tripled its output since 1970. And it has destroyed one third of the planet's forest cover to do so. The resulting loss of soil fertility is estimated at 10% of global annual GDP — a cost no one pays, no one records, and that nature absorbs in silence until the moment it no longer can.
Economic growth resembles a building onto which ever more floors are added without understanding that each new floor requires removing bricks from the foundations. While construction rises, shareholders applaud. So far so good… until the day everything collapses.
Our only chance: deprogramme our gratification logic in relation to value.
Are we condemned by our own brain?
No. And Darwin himself gives us the key, in a book few have read: The Descent of Man (1871).
Darwin demonstrates there that natural selection did not only favour claws and teeth. It selected social instincts — sympathy, altruism, group cohesion — because collective survival outweighed individual survival against the forces of nature.
The anthropologist Patrick Tort theorises this shift under the name of the reversive effect of evolution. Natural selection, by selecting social instincts, ends up selecting civilisation — that is, a system of values that frontally opposes raw eliminatory selection. Civilisation protects the weak. It cares. It builds laws. It sets limits.
Tort's metaphor is that of the Möbius strip: culture is the continuous extension of nature which, at a certain point in its development, turns back on itself to present an autonomous face, governed by different rules. We are at that point.
And Tort introduces another crucial concept borrowed from biology: hypertely. In biology, a hypertelic organ is one that has developed beyond its adaptive usefulness to the point of threatening the survival of the species — like the giant antlers of the megaloceros, which prevented it from fleeing through forests.
Our material growth is hypertelic. It has exceeded its utility. It has become a danger to the very species that produced it. The intelligence of limits means knowing how to recognise hypertely before it kills you.
Merit in reverse
Our system also has a moral problem. We have built a civilisation on an ethic of productivist merit: dignity is earned through transformative and extractive effort. "You will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow." Those who produce deserve. Those who abstain are lazy.
The result: the person who clears a forest to sell timber is celebrated for their economic dynamism. The person who restores a soil or cleans up a river volunteers their time, because the market does not know how to pay for repair.
The Covid crisis briefly made this aberration visible. Society continued to function without most of the highly paid bullshit jobs. It proved dependent on those whom the market despised most: nurses, refuse workers, agricultural labourers.
The inversion of value demands reinventing merit — no longer measured by what is extracted, but by what is regenerated. No longer by performance, but by robustness. No longer by individualist maximisation, but by collective resilience.
Re-educating the striatum?
Here is the good news that neuroscience offers: the reward circuit can be redirected.
Brain imaging studies show that self-giving, sharing, and mutual support activate the same dopaminergic reward circuits as the accumulation of wealth. Altruism produces pleasure — biologically, not metaphorically.
Sébastien Bohler identifies the anterior cingulate cortex as a key lever. This brain region detects inconsistencies between our beliefs and reality. When the gap becomes unbearable — as with the imminence of ecological collapse — it triggers a quest for meaning, a cognitive reorganisation.
Making social status a vector of sobriety rather than ostentation. Our striatum seeks recognition — if the cultural norm valorises sobriety and stigmatises ostentatious accumulation, the striatum will work in the right direction.
Redirecting accumulation toward the intangible: knowledge, arts, relationships, skills — forms of wealth that satisfy our need for novelty without consuming physical resources.
Practising sensory slowdown: savouring a single grape slowly activates the reward circuit more intensely than gulping a whole bowl without attention. Less matter, more pleasure. The striatum can be fooled.
In other words, Homo œconomicus will have to learn to be attractive without a large car.
What NEMO IMS changes in the equation
The underlying thesis here is monetary. As long as money is created through debt — that is, through the obligation of future extraction — no philosophy of value can genuinely shape economic behaviour. You may wish to regenerate soils, but if your financial survival depends on a system that requires you to extract in order to repay, goodwill remains a posture.
The NEMO IMS system starts from a different premise: anchoring money creation in the regeneration of living systems rather than in debt. Money is no longer the counterpart of a promise of extraction — it becomes the counterpart of an act of restoration of biological commons.
This is not poetry. It is a mechanism. When the rules of the game change, behaviour changes. When regenerating becomes more profitable than extracting, the striatum follows.
The inversion of value is not merely philosophical. It must be institutionally encoded in the monetary architecture. Otherwise, it remains a wish.
Homo Philosophicus
Gold is a relic of extractivist archaism. A rare metal, fetishised for centuries, symbol of a wealth that cannot be eaten, cannot breathe, and does not grow.
A living planet, by contrast, feeds. It hydrates. It regulates. It repairs. And it does so without needing a bank account.
True civilisation — in Patrick Tort's sense, as the rational culmination of evolution — is that which has the intelligence of its own limits. That which knows how to recognise hypertely before it becomes lethal. That which substitutes predatory competition with cooperation for the preservation of planetary commons.
Homo œconomicus — overproducing to succeed and overconsuming to show others he has succeeded — is a model of life we must shed.
This shift is not ascetic. It is not punitive. It is logical.
We have the brain to achieve it. We have the institutions to reinvent. We have the monetary tools to refound. What remains is to stop dying for gold in a burning world — and to start living for what lives.
Homo Oeconomicus has had his time. Welcome, Homo Philosophicus.
Jean-Christophe Duval