The Root of All Evil

What is your relationship with money? Is it something you can never get enough of? Is it a glorious gift from the gods? Is it the root of all evil?

What’s money, anyways?

Money was created to facilitate barter. Barter works well in self-sufficient communities that have few needs outside of their borders. If I raise cattle, and I need a set of silverware, I may go to the tinsmith, and after coming to an agreement, we exchange two wheels of cheese for a set of silverware.

This doesn’t work as well when we want something from far away, or when they don’t need what I have. It is harder to, say, exchange a bottle of milk for something made on the other side of the continent. Or to offer cattle to a vegan.

Money was created to make this easier. I can generate money by doing something useful for one person, carry it as far as it needs to go without worrying about it spoiling or getting damaged, and give it to someone else for something useful to me, without the people on either end needing to want each other’s goods.

Money is energy

At its most basic level, money is a measure of energy. When money is exchanged for goods, the seller is considering how much time and energy (and other money) it took to create the goods. At the same time, the buyer is considering how much time and energy it took to earn the money they would exchange for the goods. If those numbers match up, the energy is exchanged, money for goods.

Each of us spend a certain amount of time and energy to receive money. In some cases, such as with investments, we earn money based upon our ability to support others’ ability to create goods and services. As an employee at a company, we are paid for applying our energy to the company’s problems, working to solve them.

Money as a measure of appreciation

When someone gives us money for what we create or do, they are saying, “You are worth giving some of my energy to you.” If they didn’t appreciate what you did, they wouldn’t spend their money – the time and energy they’ve spent – on you.

Why is money bad?

Frequently, money is considered something distasteful, especially in the spiritual community. We see how greed destroys the world around us, and feel that money can’t be good if it causes people to ruin others’ lives. We may also feel that we are beholden to others because of the money we feel we must give in exchange for what feel like basic living requirements.

The love of money

People say that money is the root of all evil, but it isn’t. The original saying is “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Instead of recognizing money as a tool, it becomes something to be amassed. It becomes a love object, a measure of self-worth.

Stock market crashes, for example, don’t occur because investors shift from supporting one company’s goods and services to another’s. Nor do they happen because a particular technology changes or goes obsolete. They occur because when companies increase in profitability, investors become outnumbered by speculators.

Investors invest in companies. Speculators invest in stocks. Rather than supporting a company, speculators support a price. They see investors make money from a thriving company’s dividends and climb in after them, pushing stock prices up to levels that have nothing to do with the value of the company. And when they feel like they can’t make money off of shifting money, they run to get as much money as they can, crashing the stock.

Money as an obligation and the poverty mentality

Sometimes we find ourselves giving money when we really don’t want to. We feel obligated to pay off bills that do not seem reasonable, or for things that don’t feel like they apply to us. Rent that feels exorbitant, taxes, utility bills, credit card bills, all can feel like someone else is draining our energy without our permission.

When we feel like we are not in control of our money, it can feel disempowering. This is commonly known as a poverty mentality.

The key characteristic of a poverty mentality is the underlying belief that, no matter what we do, we can never do enough to sustain ourselves.

(The fact that I call it a “mentality” is not intended to belittle the feelings of despair and desperation that can come with it. It is intended to highlight that this is how we feel, the mental state we go to when we feel that our resources are not enough.)

Poverty mentality doesn’t require being poor, as evinced by Leona Helmsley, for example. At the same time, a person can be poor or have many obligations, yet feel that their world is abundant. Debt can easily trigger a poverty mentality, but it does not have to.

The vicious cycle

The challenge with a poverty mentality is that it is self-fulfilling. If we believe that we cannot find enough money ourselves, and we become focussed on trying to find money, we lose focus on why we don’t have enough money.

We may not notice how we distract ourselves from our situation. The $4 lattes we cannot live without, the video games that help us not look at what we are doing, the next season’s fashions that will make us feel prettier, all sap our resources that we could otherwise use to fulfill and release the other obligations in our lives.

Even if we are foregoing the distractions, the desperation that permeates a poverty mentality can make it more challenging to find ways to get out from under the obligations. The feeling of disempowerment trickles into our behavior. Prospective employers see our despair and wonder if we are interested in being employed, versus having given up. Prospective clients are put off by our desperation. And our opportunities match our perspective.

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater

When we feel like money is used to trap us, that people do horrible things with money because they love it more than they love people, the planet, what-have-you, it’s easy to feel like money is the root of all evil.

At some point, we may decide that we want to live in a world without money. We choose alternatives, such as living in a barter society, living off the grid, or living through the kindness of strangers. All of these are certainly viable alternatives, with differing consequences on our ability to act within society.

But we can still work with money without being beholden to others’ agendas.

Money is just a tool

As a young adult, my dad impressed on me that money was a tool to give us more options, but it didn’t bring happiness. We can be happy with any amount of money. We can be just as miserable in a barter society as we are in a monetary society. The challenge I see is to be able to be happy living in whatever society we choose – barter, money-based, etc. – and still have the option of interfacing with the monetary world.

The key to shifting from money-as-evil to money-as-tool is to shift how we relate to our obligations and our ability to create money. When we find ourselves in a poverty mentality, we become slaves to the belief that we need more money, and that we are beholden to others in order to get it.

When we find ourselves in an abundance mentality, we find ourselves viewing money as something that we create and give away, because we make more. Obligations are met as they arise without tension, because the obligations are taking something that we can always replace.

Money is called currency, not stagnancy. Money flows through and around us. It does no good being locked up except for specific targets (saving for a large purchase, keeping a rainy-day cushion, etc.). We see it running like water, and we can channel it as it flows by. We use it to run monetary water wheels and mills and what-not (to stretch the metaphor).

Money moves from being a master to a servant.

Next week I’ll discuss how to shift from a poverty mentality to a sense of abundance.