I’ve been wondering about money lately.
It’s been said to be the root of all evil, but that’s been so often repeated
that even if it’s true, it doesn’t help much. Yet, money does seem to have a
perverse effect on people and societies unless its influence is actively kept
in check. For some time, my question has been, what’s the mechanism? Why is this so?
The answer, or at least part of it,
turned out to be surprisingly simple. It came to me the night I was dismissed
from jury duty a few months back. The case I would have heard, had I been
seated on that jury, involved money.
I pondered why so much organizational
energy would be expended on such a thing when there are potatoes to dig and
clothing to sew. Money is, after all, a secondary value. It has no intrinsic
worth. So what is really at issue in a crime involving money?
My conclusion is that the criminality
of theft consists in that the thief values my money or possessions over our
relationship, and our relationship in that moment is the local node of a more
universal human connection. Break the bond of trust and the whole fabric is
compromised.
The thief, the embezzler, and the
perpetrator of fraud present an inversion of values. This inversion is the
metaphysical underpinning of the crime. It is also an important determiner of
whether or not a crime has been committed. In the case of stealing money,
it is not a crime because money is so valuable, as is commonly believed within
a culture that has made an idol of it. The criminality of the theft is that the
thief breaks something of primary value in our relationship, trust, in order to
elevate something that is inherently of secondary value: mere money. Ultimately
even property and things of real value are also secondary to relationships. Where
this is not the case, relationships break down.
This distinction – crime as violation
of relationship versus crime as violation of property – is of immense
significance, for those who would promote the idolization of money and property
would have us believe that precisely the opposite is the case: that we have
made a crime of theft because money and property are of primary value. Once
this misunderstanding takes root, those whose power flows from money can constantly
enlarge the domain of legalized criminal behavior – behavior that elevates
money, a thing of secondary value, over relationships of intrinsic worth.
Corporations creating and introducing chemicals and organisms with demonstrably
hazardous effects on life, for-profit prisons that successfully lobby for laws
that ensure a steady stream of prisoners, banks selling worthless securities to
credulous pensions and would-be retirees … there are relationships being
compromised by all of these activities, but the activities are profitable, so
they go on.
People think it’s all about the money,
and these kinds of activities seem to support that idea. But it never really
is. It can’t be. Money is nothing. Its meaning is entirely dependent on the
contiguity and integrity of the social fabric. This is the reason that money
crimes, from embezzlement to fraud to robbery, are real crimes: they are
attacks on the social fabric upon whose integrity the value of money ultimately
depends. However, for this same reason, money and property are secondary to the
primary injury of a “property crime.” This cannot be emphasized enough: the
thief becomes a criminal not so much by taking things of value, but by breaking
something of infinitely more value in people’s trust. This is why “The People
of the State” have a vested interest in maintaining the trust that underlies
social functioning. Distrust can reach a level that society cannot bear, as it
exacts a toll on every interaction. Transparency, truth, trust, honesty, labor,
and freedom: these are the things that generate wealth in the grand sense of
the term.
But the interesting thing is, once
enough people think money and property are the primary focus, the relationships
involved and things of intrinsic worth fall into a secondary position, and then
become obscured. The next link in the chain that follows from this error is
that as primary and secondary values are inverted, they dissociate. Navigating
by the headlights of monetary gain alone, soon enough, medicine will make people
sick and dependent, chemicals will be introduced into foods for the convenience
of their manufacturers as opposed to the well being of those who eat it, and
livestock will live in perpetual misery and stress because more money can be
made when their misery is discounted. Criminality can expand virtually
unnoticed in such a society and subordinate the law to its own ends. Lacking
the discipline of real relationships and intrinsic worth, false relationships
rule, and it isn’t long before the mass of society is living in the throes of
an amnesic, dissociative fugue.
On the other side of my tax dollars I
find torture, predator drones, war crimes and crimes against humanity. On the
other side of the dollars I spend on gasoline is an industry that leverages tax
subsidies with political donations, despoils the environment, and hires
scientists willing to lie about climate change. There’s a banana peel beside my
computer – and on the other side of that purchase, often enough, are agricultural
practices that abuse land and labor, as well as gross social inequality. And
finally, this miraculous device on which I type these words is made by what
might as well be called slave labor, except that slaves, being owned, are
treated as assets, while manufacturing workers in many overseas markets are
treated as expendable.
Contemplating these realities, I can
try to extricate myself from the web of moral failure connected with nearly
everything I do with my money, or I can join the amnesia, allowing money to
dissociate my experience from the realities on the other side of my monetary
transactions.
Assuming I choose to regain
consciousness, it is essential to wake up from the mass hallucination of money
as a primary value. I can think of no better illustration of the nexus of this
confusion of primary and secondary values than the television game shows I
watched as a child. Many of these had a quiz format where the participants'
production of scripted, called-for information or other performance is
instantly rewarded with specific sums of money, the tally of which appears
somewhere on the screen. So what is important here? Where is the value? Is it
in the information, the task, the performance, the skill, the intelligence? No,
it’s pretty clear that there’s no meaning to the maze but the cheese, and the
cheese is the money. Drill that into people – it isn’t hard in a social
construct where hunger follows from pennilessness – and soon money becomes a
value unto itself rather than a marker of value. It becomes primary. Once these
values have been inverted, it’s almost automatic that money will further
dissociate them, altering our perceptions. We don’t see the hungry person, we
see the poor person—and the response is very different. Again: first primary
and secondary values are inverted, and then they split. This is highly
consequential.
Because, regardless of how stuck a
culture is on it, money is not primary. This is simply an error, albeit one
that can remain undetected among many for longish periods of time under the
right cultural conditions. Of course, the effects of the dissociative
psychology of money are everywhere to be seen, for its deep genealogy of
dissociation is revealed in the social fragmentation, broken people, and broken
world it invariably engenders unless it is held in check.
If money holds its inverted place as a
primary value long enough, eventually we reach a position where, for example,
supposedly sane, reasonable people in the nation’s highest court can assert
that money is speech and that corporations are people. Yes, and I can say that
donkeys are daffodils, but that doesn’t make it so; I guess that's because I’m
not sitting in a special chair in a black robe. It’s as though they would do
anything rather than admit the original error of putting money in the place of
primary value. So much was built upon it subsequently, and the constituencies
of this error became so large and powerful, that any verbal devices that are
needed to prop up the false front can and will be used, regardless of how
internally twisted, weak, and just plain false they may be.
However, a child could spot the
absurdity of such propositions, even if a presidential candidate cannot. Not
only does the emperor have no clothes, it is abundantly clear, if we are
reduced to talking in this way, that neither has the empire a fitting social
fabric. The pernicious influence of inverted and dissociated values
ultimately shows up as socially sanctified madness, and in the blindness of
that insanity, criminality insinuates itself into everything from the highest
institutions of governance down to everyday acts like fueling a vehicle or
buying a piece of fruit.
Am I saying that we should do away with
money altogether? No. However, I am suggesting that we do away with the
thinking that puts money in a place of primary value, which inevitably leads us
to a place where we confuse profit making with value creation and monetary
wealth with personal worthiness. Granted, those who have used money to cudgel
their fellow citizens down will not willingly concede that privilege. But the
reality is, both individuals and nations who use money in this way are relying
on the dissociative power of money and the hallucinated world it creates to
hide their actions from view. The deeper truth here is that we are all
collaborators to one degree or another in these crimes, but this doesn’t mean
the bosses of the rackets shouldn’t go to jail.
