ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the wealth fallacy affects every day psychology, as well as corporate and popular culture, providing another powerful set of reasons why growthism is leading to the mismanagement of our world. One of the reasons for the wealth fallacy is that people with high materialistic values seem to experience lower levels of wellbeing and psychological health than those who hold non-materialistic values. If there’s one arena where the addiction to wealth and the entire panoply of CIMENT values flourish most freely, it’s the multinational corporation. Another key CIMENT value is technologism, which increasingly dominates corporate culture, as all businesses turn themselves into high-tech companies, forced to constantly reinvent themselves through technological innovation. The wealth drug also plays a huge part in executive culture. Elitism plays a central role, as corporate climbers become familiar with a hierarchy that can contain a dozen or more managerial levels and grades of remuneration that can run into the hundreds.
