Wealth & Money Quote by Morihei Ueshiba

Leave it to a martial artist-philosopher to treat the economy less like a spreadsheet and more like a dojo. Ueshiba starts with a blunt, almost Marx-adjacent premise: material conditions set the stage for everything else. But he immediately swerves away from purely materialist logic. Stability, for him, isn’t just GDP behaving nicely; it’s the social calm that lets people train, raise families, build institutions, and refine character. In postwar Japan, that idea lands with extra force: a country rebuilding itself, discovering that “development” without a moral center can feel like hollow victory.

The sleight of hand is in his phrase “the ideal economy combines the spiritual and the material.” Ueshiba isn’t rejecting commerce; he’s trying to domesticate it. He frames markets as exchanges of energy and intention, not merely goods. That’s why his most provocative claim isn’t about money at all: “the best commodities to trade in are sincerity and love.” It’s a deliberate provocation aimed at a world that treats empathy as soft and profit as real. He flips that hierarchy, insisting that trust is infrastructure. Without sincerity, contracts become combat; without love, competition becomes cruelty dressed as efficiency.

As an athlete and founder of Aikido, Ueshiba’s subtext is practical: the strongest system isn’t the one that wins fights, but the one that prevents them. He’s arguing for an economy that produces social harmony the way good training produces balance: disciplined, relational, and hard to fake.