The Physics of Value: Why We Must Stop Counting Money and Start Counting Rust

It is a habit of the modern mind to view the economy as a game of addition. We are taught that wealth is the accumulation of things—that the man with the fullest warehouse or the largest portfolio is the winner. We view a house, a car, or a factory as an “asset,” a static store of value that sits passively on a balance sheet, enriching its owner simply by existing.

This is a barbarian error. It is a delusion born of a financial system that has forgotten the physical laws of the universe.

To understand Onerism, you do not need a degree in finance. You only need to look at an old iron gate left unpainted, or a garden left untended. What happens? The iron rusts. The weeds take over. The order collapses into chaos.

This is not an accident; it is a law. It is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or Entropy. The universe relentlessly seeks to dissolve order into disorder. It wants your house to be dust; it wants your engine to be scrap metal.

The Axiom of Burden

This physical reality brings us to the foundational truth of Onerism: Possession is not an asset; it is a liability.

When you acquire a “thing”—be it a toaster or a skyscraper—you are not acquiring wealth. You are entering into a binding contract with the universe. You are assuming a debt. To keep that object functioning, you must pay a continuous tax of energy, time, and attention. If you stop paying, the object dies.

In the old “pecuniary” (money-based) culture, we ignored this debt. We built things designed to break (Planned Obsolescence) so we could sell new ones. We pretended that we could grow forever on a finite planet. But now, in an age where machines can produce goods faster than we can consume them, the “scarcity” that gave money its value has evaporated.

The Shift from Making to Maintaining

What is left when production becomes trivial? Maintenance.

We must shift our entire civilization from an architecture of growth to an architecture of stasis. The hero of the modern age is not the “maker” who churns out disposable junk. The hero is the Steward—the custodian who ensures that the grid does not fail, that the bridge does not crack, and that the water remains clean.

In Onerism, we redefine wealth. Richness is no longer about having things. Richness is the demonstrated capacity to prevent complex systems from collapsing. The wealthy man is not the one with the yacht he never uses; he is the one who has the energy, skill, and discipline to keep a fusion reactor running for a century without a single error.

The Dyne: A Currency of Fact

How do we measure this new wealth? Not with the dollar, which is merely a promise to pay later. We measure it with the Dyne.

The Dyne is a unit of currency backed by the laws of physics. It is a receipt for entropy retarded. When you fix a broken engine, you have pushed back the chaos of the universe. You have created a physical fact of order. The Dyne records that fact. It cannot be printed by a central bank; it can only be earned by the sweat of the Steward and the skill of the mechanic.

The Necessity of the Modern Age

Why must we embrace this harsh reality? Because the party of accumulation is over. We have built a technological world of terrifying complexity—a world of global grids and AI systems. If we treat these systems with the negligence of the consumer, they will destroy us.

The machine can build the world, but it does not care if the world endures. Only the human can care. We must stop acting like consumers devouring the earth, and start acting like the immune system of the technosphere.

We must stop asking “What can I buy?” and start asking “What can I save?”. That is the only question that matters when the rust never sleeps.