I just watched Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Holiday. I have no words to express the passionate way I love that movie, but I have the words to tell you why--it's because I feel just like Johnny Case in regards to society and wealth. Unlike Johnny, I have no reckless dreams of running away to find myself, but I do have a loathing hatred for money. I have spent the last five months living on my own, working only when necessary, earning as little money as possible, keeping jobs only long enough to pay rent and buy food--sometime not even that long. I have missed meals and gone in debt, but I have never worried about finances. Every dollar I get fills me with an awful mixture hatred and fear. I don't want money; I detest the fact that I am required to have it. I don't mind working--I love to serve the people around--but I hate that I can't just live and work but that I must instead spend my time to earn money to enable me to get an education. I love to learn, but I hate that I'm going to school so I can get a job to make enough money to raise a family--WHAT THE HELL DOES MONEY HAVE TO DO WITH FAMILY!
I HATE the way our society runs....
I am going to school so I can become a teacher. My discipline will be English, but I intend to teach Life--I wanna work in high schools, catch the kids just before they go off to be inculcated with nonsense about money making the world go round and teach them to think and feel, to be human, to live; I want to somehow convey to them what really matters in life--love and beauty, action and honor, friendship and compassion.
Tell me, my friends, am I crazy? Sometimes I feel all alone in this world of greed and lust because I despise money and I don't long for beautiful women. I just want some simple girl with a beautiful mind and a deep soul, who doesn't mind living a simple life free of fluff and luxury--just a simple, easy life free from all the bondage that is Society. All I want is a house with some land where I can see the stars at night and a woman who will gaze up and appreciate the endlessness of the heavens, the majesty of nature, the goodness of God, and the power of love. Oh, if this is madness, let me be mad; lock me up someplace where society can't get to me to inflict me with its wretched poison, and let me die a man.
Sounds good but let me pose a caveat. Say you instead chose to earn money and use that money to better society. The earning of money is not necessarily inherently evil, but the hoarding of it is. So instead of looking on distain at the accumulation of money that you do why not see that accumulation as a means to better not only yourself, but also the accumulated society around you.
ReplyDeleteOften our perspective on things hides what we a really thinking. Your argument is beautiful and good, but only when based on the emotion of hating money. A better approach would be to reveal your real concern... the rest of the iceberg. Ask and answer the question "Why do I hate money?" Then rather than arranging your life to address the emotion of hating money, arrange it to address the real villain.
ReplyDelete----End of main thought... example follows... those who wish to pursue the above exercise without knowing part of what I have discovered in my own soul searching in regards to the topic ought to quit reading and go ponder. ----
For example, my view of money is that it is a representation of the trade value of my honest labors, or the trade value of the labors of others who have made a gift of that labor to me. As such I appreciate having it because it shows that I have been productive and have earned, or been gifted, the right to the necessities and pleasures of life - in so far as others are able labor to provide them; or the ability to gift others with those same things. The thing that I hate about money, isn't so much money itself, but the avarice in the hearts of those who would seek as much gain possible with as little labor possible, with no respect as to who is helped or hurt. The other thing I hate about money is that it is a requirement. In deeper realms I really hate the thought that I MUST do anything, including labor for a token of what OTHERS feel is the value of my labor. I really hate that it is essential to sustaining my own life.
However, without this particular annoyance, I would personally never really improve my labors. The necessity of money has become a way for growth for me. The strict structure of living, like the strict structure of formal poetry, provides a way for me to discover and improve the best parts of myself and throw out the rest by virtue of them not fitting... not to say that laboring for money is the only parameter of that structure, but that it exists as a small piece of it, along with larger pieces like social interaction and religion. I feel that removing this particular aspect of society would remove part of our ability to add certain virtues of character to ourselves or to eliminate certain evils within ourselves. Greed can't be overcome without an object of greed. Besides that, if we got rid of money we'd all experience the same feelings about material possessions, and if we got rid of material possessions, we'd loose the ability to labor for excellence.
etc, etc, etc,
Your lambasting money reminded me of an argument made for an entirely different perspective....
ReplyDelete"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'
"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.
"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.
"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.
"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.
"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."
Why anonymity from one so wise? I mean, I understand you're only quoting, but you do it very well.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure why I hate money the way I do. Frank's comment says that he suspects that my hatred for money is merely a manifestation of a much greater personal issue, but I'm not sure it is. Since post this particular post, I've pondered a lot on my feelings, but I've come to no solid conclusions.
My favorite part of your quote was, "Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed."
As I've pondered lately on my feelings regarding money, I keep coming back to the idea that it isn't fairly distributed--pompous businessmen making fortunes while hardworking farmers scrape along breaking even--I just don't like that. But in my mind, there's no way to MAKE money fair; I mean, who can fairly judge and quantify the amount of work a person does in his or her occupation? Surely the bartering system wasn't any fairer--maybe even LESS fair, who knows?
But if money IS a barometer, then I think it's saying a storm is coming--is anybody else NOT surprised? Look at where our money goes and what it does--"money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors."
But anyway....
I guess the real fact of the matter is that I have never understood money; it just doesn't make sense to me. I've never been able to grasp why these little pieces of paper or metal are worth anything to anyone. "Well, they're backed by gold," people say. Be that as it may, I understand even LESS why people would work so hard for gold. I've often wondered to myself how gold has become the universal currency because IT IS A USELESS METAL! Seriously, go to Wikipedia and look up gold; they have a long list of bullet points under the Applications heading, but none of them are very impressive. Basically, gold is a soft and heavy metal the sparkles nicely and conducts electricity--and that's it. Tell me, friends, how useful is a soft and heavy, sparkly and conductive metal? Why do we use this ridiculous ore as the stick that measures how high we jump? Is this really what we want?
Fransisco had quite the brain for poetic argument didn't he. That was a spectacular and moving representation of what money is and isn't. I agreed with much of it. I was thinking about what he said about the love of money. I suppose that the definition of love of money can change quite a bit. I like this excerpt:
ReplyDelete"To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men."
I have to wonder about the following phrase of the New Testament:
1 Tim. 6: 10
"For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows."
Perhaps Paul is teaching us not to covet the money of others -- to not be looters and moochers... but maybe he IS talking about the same kind of love. Perhaps if we love to greatly the fruits of our own labors, that is to say, if we covet the gains of our own abilities, perhaps we forget to be dependent upon the Lord. Perhaps we are forgetting that we are all beggars in God's household. Perhaps "the creation of the best power within you" ought to be something more than material, and centered not solely upon ones own self.
Frank the Crank might be wrong about the hate of money being based a hidden issue such as hate of avarice... maybe hate of money is based on a completely different emotion: the love of the immaterial.
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ReplyDeleteI love all these little false dichotomies we set up for ourselves.
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ReplyDeleteUm....and aren't you and Frank the same guy, Schlange?
Shh!
ReplyDelete