Knowledge

The next big craze in greed is going to be knowledge. The more of it you have, the less of it you believe and the more of it you want.

Money will eventually be so scarce that it will become more or less obsolete. A few small groups will have it. All of it.

Everyone else will just work to stay alive. They'll never have more money than they need and they'll need all that they have so they'll end up not putting much value on it.

Knowledge, on the other hand, will be highly respected and prized. And for a long time it will be easily acquired and traded freely.

People will begin hoarding it. They'll all want more than anybody else. And they'll covet what knowledge anyone else gotten to first. Whoever controls the knowledge will control the population. So they'll attempt to devalue some bits of it in order to increase the value of others. They'll collect what's valuable and discard what isn't, decreasing its value even further. Next thing you know there will be small pockets of knowledge hoarders each proclaiming their own collection as the definitive "best" and "most valuable." Population control is important so certain groups will want to kill the others in order to monopolize the knowledge and ultimately assert more control.

Somewhere along the line it will be necessary to try and stop the free flow of knowledge. Each group will need to convince their share of the population that they have all the knowledge they need and there is no need to acquire anymore. They will have to stop accepting new knowledge to avoid any internal conflict. Troublemakers will be made examples of and then publicly executed.

I have a feeling things like this are cyclical and a few hundred or thousand years later we'll be back to chasing money again. But as for right now, people are probably more easily manipulated by controlling their knowledge rather than their money. More and more people are starting to hate money. But more and more of them are starting to love knowledge. It's all about the times.