Does Money Makes The World Go Round? Or Is It Freedom?
Saturday, September 15th, 2007My American friend alternately tells me that everything in the US is about politics and that everything is about money. My response is that everything is about freedom. What do you think?
Being fascinated by all things cultural, from fine arts to psychology to free speech, I continually view political and economic landscapes from multiple viewpoints. The United States of America is truly the most dynamic and multifaceted nation on our planet for this kind of observation. It also offers, by virtue of the freedom its citizens enjoy, as wide a range of belief systems as any one society has ever simultaneously produced and allowed to flourish.
Every ideology has some positive values at its core. We can trivialize them, we can view them with cynicism, especially when they are misinterpreted or perverted or taken out of context, yet no matter how much we do this we can’t make them go away. We can’t dismiss a core value out of existence by sneering at it, and if we try to invalidate it by ignoring it our whole becomes unbalanced, or, to put it another way, the code won’t validate and the program will keep slowing and stalling. Unfortunately, our natural tendency is to concentrate on the values and processes we personally like, and when we get stuck we try to blame it on the things we don’t like.
What does all this have to do with money?
Monetary valuation is a lot like a piece of the underlying structure of a computer program. It performs functions based on values. It is also a universal method we have developed for understanding and allocating meaning to much of our day to day existence, to our actions and interactions with one another.
How we live our lives, what we do and how we behave in relation to others is what really makes the ‘world go round’. Our most natural functions, though, in conscious learning and living, involve valuation and judgment. Money is, at its essence, symbolic. Removing money as a symbol does not change what is being symbolized.
Communal ideologies, in practice, tend to crash on the basis of valuation, and this is because people are all unique and different. we have different abilities and needs, even when we have a common purpose. Altruism, charity, the concept of mitzvah, social responsibility, etc. are not things that can truly exist without personal belief and motivation. Individual achievements and actions that benefit several or many can be entirely satisfying without formal valuation, but an idealistic state where every one of us devotes all our efforts only to benefiting others is contrary to our basic nature. Each of us has many primary levels of need, beginning with those associated with physical survival, and increasing in complexity through levels of self realization, emotional balance, etc. Disassociating these personal needs from the money symbol is a good thing, but denying them as unique and personal isn’t. Trying to do so not only denies our identities it also threatens our very existence by devaluing them.
Money is an integral component of the methods we’ve developed for valuation of our actions and accomplishments, and it is only that. Primitive societies used other things symbolically for the same purpose. The issues related to ‘love and peace’ vs ‘aggression and war’ are important to most of us, but valuing then on an economic or monetary basis makes no sense. Both peaceful and warlike societies have died out, passively or violently. Power has been acquired and used by benevolent leaders and by tyrants alike, but neither benevolence nor tyranny are based on wealth. Money is one of our important things. It isn’t us.
Our personal motivations and actions can be moral or immoral, but blaming immorality on money is pure misdirection. Even more dangerous is associating immorality with the accumulation of money. Money doesn’t breed immorality …immorality breeds immorality. The more we hang on to this dangerous fallacy the more it ‘proves’ itself for us. In interpersonal transactions, whether we trade our work product peer to peer, create products or services for many, or are forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, we choose constantly either to focus on creating and offering value or on trying to get away with something and this is the root of morality. This is the level at which we define, or misdefine it, and making this a conscious action is one of the best definitions of freedom I know.
Democracy is, perhaps, the best ideal we’ve created so far, and the statement that ‘all men are created equal’ one of the best expressions of it. This is, in my opinion, perverted by viewpoints which effectively deny our unique individual makeup, abilities, and autonomy, and thereby our freedom. The very concept of freedom is one of the most highly personal things there is, not a political system. It is also, and for the same reason, at the heart of every great human achievement. None of these have been motivated by money per se, yet, if money is viewed as a measure of prosperity and an instrument of freedom in society, then most of them were.
We in North America live in what was once called the New World, a place where opportunity to create a good life for ourselves, our families, and our communities was boundless. It was also a rough and dangerous place, involving risks and responsibilities that are hard for most of us to imagine today. Both peace loving settlers and daring adventurers survived and prospered, in part, by being prepared to kill or die at any time. Is modern society here safer?
An essential part of the romantic allure that permeates the history of this continent rests in the dream of almost limitless personal freedom. The history proved some very profound truths. More recent history illustrates the same truths, but they are becoming obscured by our increasing lack of understanding of personal freedom in the context of societal interaction and interdependence.
Every one of us has, deliberately or accidentally, said something politically incorrect. Recently, I pointed out to an aggressive bill collector following old records that he was looking for someone male with an Arabic name and that I was female with a Slavic name. His response was instant anger and his retort, (approximately) that “we’re all trying to become alike!”, struck me as sublime. This particular mantra isn’t about any real ideal of equality. We are, every one of us, completely unique in a myriad of truly wonderful ways, yet share an equally remarkable spectrum of needs, desires, and goals in common. Where individualism and equality meet, where they recognize and respect one another, is where freedom resides.
