Money is not a tool in that way. It isn’t a sword, it’s a *communication tool,* people are social creatures, and they rely on communication with others to understand how others relate to their lives and time. When that communication becomes a lie, it should be obvious that they will react incorrectly if they have incorrect information.
You seem to fail to understand that money is one of the very few layers *below* culture in the societal stack, because money is a prerequisite to scaling beyond small tribes and families. In those small environments culture can be more reliant on trust, but at the scale of millions, our only option is to rely on money to signal values, because our other communication systems can’t scale or account for that depth of information.
It’s everything to do with incentives. None of this absolves the individual, but pretending that society can just ignore fundamentally broken economic incentives is a fairy tale. It’s not possible, our environment defines our limitations and the pressures that guide us.
A kind of silly, but still apt analogy:
Imagine asking everyone a simple question and then getting them to signal the correct answer by going through door #1 or door #2.
But then you block the entrance to door #1 with barbed wire, and then had someone handing out free coffee and donuts at door #2. Then afterward getting angry at how many people selected the wrong answer.
