Stepping-stones and roadblocks
As Bertalanffy (1969) argued, contemporary affluent society may be suffering from rising mental dysfunction, increasingly losing individual and collective capacity to cope with reality. Meanwhile, contemporary stress dogma exacerbates problems by getting people stressed about stress may learn something from systems theory.
Systems theory shows how the dynamically interacting factors that contribute to rising affluence tend to decrease human capacity to cope as individuals and society move further from the values and practices that fueled developing affluence. This does not mean that affluence is a bad thing. What people do with affluence makes it good or bad. In other words, it is not money that is the root of evil; it is the love of money over all other things that is evil.
Humans are not pawns who simply react to environmental factors; they are dynamic organisms and purposeful beings with the potential to transcend the self and to benefit self and others by using affluence as a stepping-stone and not a roadblock. Removing the purpose and values upon which humans attain affluence, and building the expectation that reality should be something that it is not can contribute to growing anxiety and mental dysfunction in individuals and society.
