Money: A New Beginning
An irremediable structural flaw lies at the base of our civilization. I call it Separation, and it has generated all the converging crises — economic, health, ecological, and political — of our day. It manifests as separation from each other in the dissolution of community, separation from nature in the destruction of the environment, separation within our selves in the deterioration of health. Science is its deep ideology, technology is its accomplice, and money is its agent.
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Money as we know it today is intimately related to our identity as discrete and separate selves, as well as to the destruction that our separation has wrought. A saying goes, “Money is the root of all evil.” But why should it be? After all, the purpose of money is, at its most basic, simply to facilitate exchange; in other words, to connect human gifts with human needs. What power, what monstrous perversion, has turned money into the opposite: an agent of scarcity?
For indeed, we live in a world of fundamental abundance, a world where vast quantities of food, energy, and materials go to waste. Half the world starves while the other half wastes enough to feed the first half. In the Third World and our own ghettos, people lack food, shelter, and other basic necessities, but cannot afford to buy them. Other people would love to supply these necessities and do other meaningful work, but cannot because there is no money in it.
Money utterly fails to connect gifts and needs. We pour vast resources into wars, plastic junk, and innumerable other products that do not serve human needs or human happiness. Why? It is not difficult to trace it back to greed, to the love of money. Ultimately though, greed is a red herring, itself a symptom and not a cause of a deeper problem. To blame greed and to fight it by intensifying the program of self-control is to intensify the war against the self, which is just another expression of the war against nature and the war against the other that lies at the base of our civilization.
Amidst superabundance, even we in rich countries live in an omnipresent anxiety, craving “financial security” as we try to keep scarcity at bay. We make choices (even those having nothing to do with money) according to what we can “afford,” and we commonly associate freedom with wealth. But when we pursue it, we find that the paradise of financial freedom is a mirage, receding as we approach it, and that the chase itself enslaves. The anxiety is always there, the scarcity always just one disaster away. Greed is simply a response to the perception of scarcity. Money, which has turned abundance into scarcity, precedes greed. But not money per se, only the kind of money we use today, the kind of money that is evaporating as we speak, money with a very special characteristic that ensures its eventual demise.
Human beings are fallen creatures. There is a constant "war" for men's 'souls'. We don't really know if this is the result of the intentions of a "creator" or a biological determination we haven't yet fully figured out and , I guess, evolved beyond, but the war exists.
Some call it the "school of life".
If human beings didn't fight over money they would fight over something else, even inventing reasons to fight.
I think that may change one day in the distant unknown future.
I agree John that humans would indeed continue to struggle with one another regardless, as the author says ...
All of today’s crises originate in the conversion of natural, social, cultural, and spiritual capital into money. Yet even usury is not the deepest root. It is not an accidental feature of our system that, if only someone had made a wiser choice, could be different. It is implicit in our Newtonian-Cartesian cosmology in which, by definition, more for me is less for you.
As well, the fallen state which you refer to, is the separation mentioned.
As well, the fallen state which you refer to, is the separation mentioned.
I agree.
I have never been driven by the need some people seem to have to acquire a lot of money. There have been times when I have been broke and times when I have been "flush" as they say. Sure it's nice to drive around in a Benz or a 'vette. But really it's most important to me that there is just enough money to pay the bills, live in a decent home, drive a good solid car and not starve. Maybe take a vacation (a cruise) once or twice a year. My wife and I have worked hard all of our lives and are now retired. Perhaps something will come along to change things and we'll lose what we have, but we enjoy them while we have them and if they go away, they go away. Then again it doesn't hurt to toss a $5 in the lotto machine at the grocery store once in a while either.
Then again it doesn't hurt to toss a $5 in the lotto machine at the grocery store once in a while either.
Cheers and good fortune to that Randy!
Thanks. I doubt I'll ever win, but I'm sure the people who did win didn't think they would either. Besides I'll just end up giving most of it away to charity anyway.
To add a bit of levity, and according to Dire Straits, the way to go.