Submitted by Terence Blackett
Khalil Gibran’s famous quote – “Money is like love; it kills slowly and painfully the one who withholds it, and enlivens the other who turns it on his fellow man” – pretty much sums up the two paradigms of man’s loci in regards to the proper or base use of what is a “medium of exchange”, an inanimate, non-sentient papyrus object whose sole purpose is a medium of exchange.
The question of what money is arises only when money ceases to function properly. In economic terms (properly understood), the answer to the question – what is money? – consists of four words: “Direct and Indirect Exchange.
The other question which arises is – can money be evil? This is where we enter the vale of profound morality and the praxis we place on how money affects those who have as against those who have not.
This issue is a complex paradigm to navigate as the swirling schools of opinion on the issue is as deep as they are wide. The epistemological arguments hinge on the age-old divisions of labor and the moral-philosophical theory of Biblical teachings coupled with the advancing forms of secular, political, ideologies which advocated a morality of rational egoism, free market liberalism and a new stratospheric level of greed, ambition and avarice in a world inebriated by “the love of money”.
To give some ontological meaning to this issue, one must look at how we got here in the first place and the real question is – what is the way forward?
Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:
1. It is the visible divinity – the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.
2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.
Karl Marx said it best – “By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as an omnipotent being. Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.”
In the book, “Theology of Money author Philip Goodchild posits a philosophical inquiry into the nature and role of money in the contemporary world.
Philip reveals the significance of money as a dynamic social force by arguing that under its influence, moral evaluation is subordinated to economic valuation, which is essentially abstract and anarchic.
His rigorous inquiry opens into a complex analysis of political economy, encompassing markets and capital, banks and the state, class divisions, accounting practices, and the ecological crisis awaiting capitalism (the subject of another thread at a future point).
Engaging with Christian theology and the thoughts of Carl Schmitt, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and many others, Philip has developed a ‘theology of money’ based on four contentions, which he elaborates in depth.
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Money has no intrinsic value; it is a promise of value, a crystallization of future hopes.
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Money is the supreme value in contemporary society.
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The value of assets measured by money is always future-oriented, dependent on expectations about how much might be obtained for those assets at a later date.
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Money is created as debt, which involves a social obligation to work or make profits to repay the loan.
Since these values, when realized, will again depend on future expectations, the future is forever deferred.
Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credit.
As a system of debts, money imposes an immense and irresistible system of social control on individuals, corporations, and governments, each of whom are threatened by economic failure if they refuse their obligations to the monetary system.
This system of debt has progressively tightened its hold on all sectors and regions of global society.
If we have learnt nothing within the last year is that the most ominous weapon outside of nuclear armament are those who are the custodians of our money (i.e. banks). For they have at their behest the power to withhold loans and dry up credit, thus driving economies into the ground in a hurry where people suffer in all walks of life.
Personal and corporate bankruptcies, lost jobs, disintegrating social programs and other unpleasant consequences are a direct result of these policy initiatives. There is no government that can afford to offend its Central Bank given that the Bank of International Settlements will put any amount of pressure on anyone to influence them in their way.
In a 1924 Bankers Association meeting – this ominous treatise was put forward (not intended for the public ear):
“Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through the process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. By dividing the voter through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance. It is thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.”
So again, as Marx put it, the proletariat would always be subservient to the bourgeoisie, no matter what, because they are the ones who control the means of production – hence capital flows according to their dictates and is constrained according to their fancy.
This evil lust for the control of money has permeated from the head to all the dysfunctional organs within society where greed and wanton excess are the tools of modern 21st century society.
Under this absurd, flaxy, fragile, Keynesian economic system, the real wealth of the world is being confiscated from the true wealth creators, (you and I) and transferred to the bankers who then in turn pay themselves exorbitantly huge salaries and bonuses – free from any censure, regardless of who says what.
So for hundreds of years, since the days Rothschild was trading on the waters-edge of Vienna, bankers have accumulated untold wealth while gaining power and control over every person, business and government on the planet.
Today, it is no longer about the money; it is their lust for control of the masses which drives them on. They have used this great wealth and power to buy and control the global oil companies, the media, transportation, the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry and they will even buy off our elected politicians through the financial control exerted my the wealthy elite over the federal and provincial political parties in individual countries.
Many are asking the question – what is the way forward?
Sadly, under our current debt monetary system, all countries and their peoples have suffered through recessions, depressions, wars, record personal and corporate bankruptcies, family breakups, unemployment, growing environmental concerns, increasing taxation, less and less government programs and services, and increasing personal, corporate and public debt.
Food banks are a growth industry in America (where most churches have them), homelessness is virulent and more prevalent and our children are ill-prepared (intentionally) by our educational system to survive in an increasingly uncertain world.
Most young adults cannot even reconcile a bank account. All of these happenings are a direct result of the debt money system we are under and the few people who control it.
So, where does it all end?
The destruction of evil in our world will happen sooner or later. That is a pre-given! What we do in the meantime is crucial in regards to accountability and this is incumbent on every man, woman, boy and girl in their individual societies.
Let me close by citing a few choice passages from Francisco d’Anconia’s money speak from “Atlas Shrugged” – some argue that his philosophy seem to run counter to Christian teachings about money, but I believe they can be reconciled. He argues:
“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 it 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.”
“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.”
“That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by someone’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.”
“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.”
So there you have it folks!!!
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