Definitions
Money: Humanity’s great invention for making value fungible and liquid. It lets us take something abstract—like the worth of a product or service—and make it exchangeable between people.
Value: Created through productive or sacramental processes.
Secular Value: Born from productive processes, it is measurable and often tied to money. Think of things like goods, services, or skills that can be traded.
Sacramental Value: On the other hand, exists outside the economic system. It’s the kind of worth we find in things like faith, traditions, or personal relationships—things that resist being turned into a dollar amount.
Secular value is easy to map onto money. Money creates a universal measuring stick that allows value to be swapped between people and across markets. It’s what makes trade, economies, and global exchange possible.
But here’s a tricky question: how good is money at measuring secular value? Does a billionaire hedge fund manager provide value to society proportional to their wealth? Money simplifies complex dynamics, and while it can measure some forms of value well, it often misses the bigger picture.
Sacramental value operates outside the world of markets and money. It’s the value we place on things like a family heirloom, a spiritual ritual, or the bond between close friends. These things don’t translate neatly into dollars and cents. They resist being absorbed into monetary systems altogether.
Relationship between the two types of value
Society
Every society balances secular and sacramental values differently:
Too little secular value leads to poverty.
Too little sacramental value creates a kind of spiritual or relational poverty, where all interactions become transactional.
The tension between these two forms of value is constant. Institutions push to expand their reach, either pulling sacramental value into the economic domain (e.g., financializing hobbies) or defending it from monetary encroachment.
Here’s a thought experiment: imagine a pre-monetary society, one where sacramental value dominates. How would we even begin to evaluate their well-being today, living as we do in a world so deeply entrenched in monetary systems? It’s hard to think about value on a large scale without looping back to money.
Time
Time is perhaps the one universal denominator that connects secular and sacramental values. In the secular world, time is money. Your work hours have a wage attached, and productivity becomes a measure of your time’s value.
In the sacramental realm, time is something else entirely. It could be the hours spent in deep meditation, building relationships, or pursuing hobbies for their own sake. Interestingly, even sacramental activities are increasingly viewed through a secular lens. For example, people often feel pressured to monetize their passions—turning hobbies into side hustles and robbing them of their original joy.
Irrational Decisions
Not every choice fits neatly into the productive model. Consider the surfing culture in Santa Cruz, where access to certain waves depends not on money but on local identity. Outsiders who break these unwritten rules may even face retaliation. From an economic perspective, this behavior seems irrational. But it’s driven by sacramental or cultural value, which doesn’t need to make sense in monetary terms. There are countless examples of decisions that seem irrational when looked at through a secular lens.
Secular value is slowly eating into sacramental value
“end state of markets: all that is solid becomes liquid, all that is sacred profane” - Karl Marx
The financialization of everything. The modern world is steadily absorbing sacramental value into the economic sphere. Financialization has us assigning monetary worth to everything:
From a young age, we’re taught to value hobbies only if they’re productive. (“If you’re good at something, don’t do it for free.”)
When hobbies become careers, something gets lost—most often, control over your own time. It’s no wonder weekends feel so sacred: they’re the rare moments when you own your hours.
Even human life gets a price tag. Insurance companies and actuaries calculate the “secular value” of life through metrics like the micromort (a one-in-a-million chance of dying).
As sacramental value gets absorbed into the monetary system, we risk losing its unique essence. Can we even measure sacramental value? To answer that, we’d need a framework outside the current system of productive value. But creating such a framework requires consensus—agreement among people about what matters most—and in a fragmented world, that’s easier said than done.
Side note: there are some interesting experiments on index wallets being run as well.
Modeling out Sacramental Value
Imagine a “value space,” where individuals and institutions act as gravitational forces, pulling value towards themselves. Just as massive planets bend space-time, powerful entities shape the contours of value.
Institutions as Attractors: Large institutions, like governments or corporations, dominate this value space, consolidating power and reshaping how we understand worth.
Emergent Values: Sometimes, new attractors form, sparked by cultural shifts or unexpected events. These can challenge existing systems and create fresh frameworks of value.
Over time, value tends to cluster around a few dominant forces, but the system is never static. It’s constantly being perturbed by the emergence of new ideas, technologies, and movements.
Now, consider taking the derivative of this "value-space." What emerges? A value gradient—the directional flow of "value" as it converges toward specific attractor agents. Much like relativistic space-time, where mass clusters ??? sporadically into stars, planets, and other celestial bodies, value-space naturally tends toward consolidation around institutional hubs. These clusters periodically shift with the emergence of new attractors.
This derivative represents a projection into the future—an indication of where the "gravity wells" of value are pulling us. Powerful individuals and institutions shape the definition of what is valuable. By observing who or what is accumulating "mass," we can infer the trajectory of this system.
Under a simplified two-dimensional "sacramental/monetary" model, one might explore intriguing questions such as:
How and when do new attractors emerge that can form independent value "solar systems," distinct from the gravitational pull of existing clusters?
Are there inevitable long-term attractors—teleological destinations—in value-space? Do values converge toward certain outcomes over time with deterministic certainty?
Admittedly, this is an abstraction. When mapped back onto the constraints of physical space-time, the material world imposes boundaries on value-space. Consider resource limitations, geopolitical dynamics, and other material factors—how do they shape and restrict the evolution of this metaphorical value landscape?
One final question: is there a long-term trajectory for value? Are we moving inexorably toward a future where everything is financialized, or can sacramental value survive? Perhaps the answer lies in mapping this abstract “value space” back to the real world. Physical constraints like resources, geopolitics, and cultural diversity will shape how value evolves. But one thing seems clear: the tension between sacramental and secular values will remain at the heart of how we define meaning in the modern world.
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