A double-dip recession. Continuing Eurocrisis. A media scandal, already huge, that keeps on growing. Sometimes it's hard to shake the feeling that the dystopian future that all those sci-fi writers imagined is beckoning. Yet it's the intimate cruelties, inflicted on ordinary people, by ordinary people, that retain the power truly to shock.

This week, not for the first time, Panorama broadcast undercover footage from a care home, gathered by a concerned private citizen, Jane Worroll, who was worried by recurring bruises on the arms of her 78-year-old mother, Maria, who has Alzheimer's. A nurse was filmed repeatedly hitting this frail, disoriented lady.

He was convicted of assault, and sent to prison for 18 months. Fair enough. But two other care workers, filmed manhandling their patient like she was a sack of coal, without even a "hello" or a "goodnight", were initially given four days' training and put back on the job. It was not until five months later that they were sacked. On film, they also talked to each other, in Filipino, of dreadful pay and inadequate staffing as they performed that grisly parody of their work. Maybe their ability to speak in a language incomprehensible to their hapless victim helped them to maintain the distance they needed to be so casually abusive. But that's just a symptomatic detail of the trouble our society has with caring for its most vulnerable members, certainly not its cause.

Workers from abroad are recruited to care for the elderly, because our wealthy democracy "works" under the assumption that patience, care and kindness are not economically valuable activities. It is not only that this work is poorly paid. It is also that taking time out from one's own work to care for a child, or a sick relative, can result in a lifetime of economic punishment, too.

Yet, people – usually women – still do it, and there, essentially, is the root of the triple-whammy called the gender pay gap. First, careers are hurt even by short periods of leave, let alone a few years "out". Second, the more limited work opportunities that this affords channel people who aren't "committed to their careers" into less lucrative work in caring. Third, care paid for to allow someone to work tends to put downward pressure on the salaries of the other working people doing the caring.

In truth, what looks like a gender pay gap is really the gap between two currencies – the currency of money and the currency of care. The former is always prioritised, always at the expense of the latter. That, really, is where feminism came in.

But it's not even about sexism – not really, not quite. Time and again, I've observed couples looking after their kids in reversed gender roles. Often, the same strains of the what-have-you-been-doing-all-day-while-I've-been-slaving-my-guts-out kind occur. The real trouble is that everything has been monetised and any other currency is systematically belittled. If labour is not specifically valuable in a financial marketplace – ie profitable – then it is labour without "real" value.

How did we get here? How did we get to the point where the most precious thing in life, our ability to look after each other, nurture our families, protect our vulnerable, came to be governed by a system that affords it so little worth, that treats it, actually, with contempt? One sees the ghastly consequences of this inversion of human value everywhere. Take education, where "cleverness" is valued, and academic success, with the career opportunities it brings, is the only real goal.

Ghastly. But what if you were to suggest schools should be on the look-out for kids whose gifts lie in being empathetic and kind, then nurture those wonderful qualities and reward them with respected qualifications that promised well-paid, secure careers? You'd be scorned by the left for besmirching the egalitarian principles of comprehensive education, and by the right for filling people's heads with nonsense about the financial viability of rewarding people for such plainly unprofitable skills as decency. In this important respect, the so-called "right" and the "so-called" left sustain each other.

Of course, it's significant that the Panorama care workers were recruited from abroad. Why dig coal in Britain when you can import it more cheaply? Why value care in Britain when you can import it cheaper? The basis of globalised capitalism is finding people at a financial disadvantage and exploiting them. The welfare state provides a sticking plaster over exploitation in this country. But it, too, helps to maintain a status quo. "How can people complain that they can't get jobs, when every cleaner is from Ghana, every waitress from eastern Europe?" asks the right. "Why are so many care workers from overseas?" Obvious answer? Because such work doesn't provide a living wage for people brought up among the social aspirations promoted in this country.

Why be poorly paid and poorly respected for caring, when you can be poorly paid and poorly respected for not caring? The former is the problem, not the latter.

Yet carers are "wealth creators", bringing up the next generation, or providing the present one with time to work. And "wealth creators", we are always told, are entirely admirable. Traditional wives were "wealth creators", bringing up the kids, looking after elderly family members and facilitating the smooth running of the out-of-office lives of their husbands.

Such wealth-creating roles were, nevertheless, scorned and derided by men for centuries – and mostly still are – as the domain of the "weaker sex", who didn't even need their own bank accounts. It was normal for men of all classes to insist on the primacy of their own all-important "bread-winning" role, while wondering – not too deeply – what the hell the "housekeeping" was being squandered on. Many women now despise themselves if they accept such a role. If they don't, then other women can generally be found to do it for them.

Humans have allowed money and its acquisition to over-run and conquer them. The rule of money is itself a dependency culture. Like all dependency cultures, it's an ever-tightening trap, and a con. All you need to do with money is give it velocity – keep it circulating though as many hands as possible, as quickly as possible, going round and round. All people really need to know is that there's more where it came from. Which there always will be, as long as no one breaks the circle by sitting on their profit instead of spending it.

Money is just a cargo cult, one that has been wrongly and wilfully elevated to the status of a pseudo-science. "Confidence" is what economists call willingness to spend, even as they destroy the confidence of so many people by leaving the market to inform them that they are not worth much, and never will be. That's why "globalisation" is stupid, and why off-shoring, hoarding and hiding your wealth is immoral. It's why high-interest lending steals from everyone. It's why high-risk investment is what it sounds like – reckless. It's why valuing only work that generates profit misses humanity's point. It's why we're all in this miserable, needless mess. It's why we are not getting out of it, and won't for some time, if ever.