The Moral Value of Money
Why money matters even when we wish it didn’t — and what we can do about it.
Some housekeeping. Thank you for your patience. This essay was one of those that demanded I write it. And partly because I want the capacity to succumb to such demands as they arise, I’m going to postpone the £10KBURN until next year. I’m probably keener on the idea than ever but I’ve realized I don’t have the space or time to do it justice at the moment. I’ll talk more next week. £10KBURN was due for a public launch in solstice week. I think the earlier I make the decision the better so I wanted to let you know asap. I hope this essay lands well with you.
Prologue
Standing at the front desk in the Transport Office last week I found myself in the middle of a conversation.
“How the fuck did my life end up like this?” asked Phil. “How did I manage to mess things up so much I ended up here?”
“Tell me about it!” Alan agreed. “Worst thing is, I had options. I could’ve gone to uni!”
“Yeah mate”, I thought. “Now imagine how you’d feel if you’d gone to the London School of Economics — and still ended up working here.”
But I kept my counsel and, smiling in sympathy, I left the office.
Submit and Be Redeemed
Doing things we don’t want to do for money is a universal experience.
I spent much of my forties as Tour Manager in the Music Industry. I worked with artists blessed with talent and good fortune. Ostensibly they got to live their dream life. But regardless of their level of success, as a matter of course, they all had to do things they didn’t really want to do. And invariably those things were related to making money.
As a rule what artists want to do is create and/or perform. And most view creating and performing as ends in themselves.
To the industry though, creating and performing are merely the means. They are what must be done to build an audience which can then be mined for money. Money is the endgame for industry. Money is the endgame for capital. And if I’m honest, as a Tour Manager, it was - for the most part - the endgame for me, too.
Perhaps you think I’m being too cynical?
In a sense you’re right. The majority of crew - and many other folks who work in the music industry - regard their job as a vocation. Touring can feel like being on an amazing adventure with your friends. At the best of times, that is the somatic reality of it.
But you don’t have to hang around backstage too long to witness the return of what’s been repressed in order to bond the tour-family together.
“Not my job, mate” and “I don’t work for free” are the surface ripples of a deeper disturbance. My favourite rupture was always the mumbled “I need more cunt money to deal with this” - cunt money being the premium demanded for working with especially difficult artists. My final client - the one who caused me to give up and become a van driver - very much fell into that category.
However, even if I lost myself once in a while, for me, my role never moved too far beyond being ‘just a job’. I found it grounding to raise an invoice at the end of a tour. There was something ritualistic and purifying about it.
It's worth noting that the words we use to describe that process haven’t lost their theological resonance. We submit an invoice for redemption.
Double your Impact!
A XR mailshot landed last week - celebrating raising £35k from the public in just six days. The £35k was then doubled to £70k through ‘match funding’. You’ll likely be familiar with the practice. Wealthy individuals, through a charity - in this case The Big Give - promise to match the donations raised from very-much-less-wealthy individuals.
It’s a strong pitch. Perfect for ensnaring the big-hearted believer. And it’s always accompanied by the pressure point - Match Funding only available for a limited time! Hence it works both to secure and maximise donations. What’s not to love?
If twenty-year old me was part of the XR Fundraising team he’d be using every trick in the book to raise as much money as possible. Pulling on people’s heartstrings until they went ping. And squeezing them until their wallets popped open. Anything for the cause.
But (nearly) sixty-year old me feels a little uneasy about it. I find myself wondering why the wealthy folks don’t just donate like a normal person? Why do they have to maximise, incentivise and leverage every angle? What’s happened to the ideal of giving anonymously? Why does it all have to be so sharply marketed and transactional?
I wonder what effect all this has on the spiritual aspect of giving?
Double Edged Sword
The Comms team at XR Fundraising seemed a tad uneasy, too. After thanking match funders and donors, they said:
Money can be a double edged sword. On the one hand it's one of the very things we're rebelling against as people weaponise it and prioritise it over life and Earth. But on the other hand, money can be a force for good, like funding climate activism.
Well, yes. Money is ambivalent. It is a double edged sword. So far, so good.
This key insight to money’s nature was central to George Simmel’s classic text The Philosophy of Money - written around the same time Freud was making the case for ambivalence as the precondition of the human psyche.
Just to be clear — ambivalence is often misused. It doesn’t mean that you don’t care one way or the other. Ambivalence means the presence of contradictory emotions, feelings or thoughts. So you do care, you’re just not sure which way.
It’s what comes after the double edged sword bit that bothers me. The rest of XR’s statement makes money docile. It says the power of money is ours to control. Money’s ability to bend our minds and bodies to its logic is denied.
Economics as a discipline is pathological in its attempts to tame money. Theories about the veil of money, the neutrality of money and even the superneutrality of money all serve to foreground money’s lack of agency.
There are times we all wish money didn’t matter. But it does. It drills every oil and gas borehole, dumps every load of toxic waste, releases every slick of sewage. It motivates wars and violent crime. It turns trees into timber, pigs into pork—and poetry into content.
But wishing away money hasn’t worked.
It hasn’t worked for Economists who participate in a woeful, inadequate and dismal discipline. David Graeber’s assessment was “that we just rip up the discipline of economics as it exists and start over”.
And more importantly, wishing money away hasn’t worked for us. We must learn that money - and our feelings toward it - are not distinct from one another. They are wholly entwined in a mess of pulsing, libidinal and bifurcating energy. The problem of money is a problem of consciousness. Our revulsion and desire for it are two sides of the same coin.
Dog-Shaped Hole
Sometime after his faithful hound passed, a poet-musician friend told me he had a ‘dog-shaped hole’ in his life. I knew exactly what he meant. I had it too after the death of TeeDee - my wonderful wolfhound/deerhound cross. Having a ‘dog-shaped hole’ doesn’t deny the uniqueness of your late dog. It just recognises the space they occupied as archetypal.
We find it more difficult to think of human beings like this. Take for example that old client of mine. I don’t think of him as fitting himself into the role of ‘rock star’ - I just think of him as a dickhead.
Gods and Devils
The email from XR utilises our tendency to attach our feelings to people rather than positions. They say - people weaponise [money] and prioritise it over life and Earth - and so conjure up images of greedy oil executives and their lobbyists, dictators and arms dealers, corrupt politicians and Lear-jetting executives. You’re probably picturing them now as you’re reading this.
Scapegoating is of course the drug pushed by populists - an intoxicating mix of opioid and stimulant. But when we measure good and bad like this our thumb is always on the scale. We are pushing others down to find the comfort and exhilaration we seek for ourselves.
We must always make our judgements with humility and forgiveness. Doing so helps to avoid the us and them dead end. And more, it helps avoid the wrath of the Gods. Because by identifying Devils we declare ourselves Gods. And this is hubris - the gravest of offences.
Billionaire-Shaped Hole
When we think specifically about the morality of money though, nothing is more potent than the archetype of ‘billionaire’. Potent in the sense that it contains the greatest capacity for ambivalence. Those images you conjured up - of the greedy oil executives etc - are all bad guys with no redeeming features.
But ‘billionaire’ contains the possibility of redemption. The top five billionaires could end world hunger between them ($330 billion) and still have nearly a $trillion in change.
Now what I’m about to say may taste sour, at first. If so, we’re on the same side. Please bear with me.
I talked earlier about our overwhelming desire to see money as neutral. I think because of this we cannot conceive of money delivering both freedom and constraint to those who possess it in abundance.
I’m not talking about how a billionaire’s wealth is often locked in assets, and how selling them off would tank their value. That may be true — but it’s not the real constraint.
I’m talking about something much deeper; an ideology that exists across the political spectrum, that is reinforced by the weight of a symbolic power so immense it might as well be infinite, and that is so deeply embedded in our heads that to transgress it - by say, burning money - feels morally offensive.
By far the greatest proportion of all the money that currently exists - estimated at around $130 trillion - is dedicated to a singular end. The debt and stock markets - valued at $388 trillion - are also dedicated to this same end. Most money is primarily employed to make more money. The fecundity of money has become the first principle of our material life.
This first principle is carved into the walls of every billionaire-shaped hole. Squeezing oneself into this hole is impossible unless you’re wholly aligned to the fecundity of money.
The ‘unnatural sin’ of money begetting money was something theologians struggled with for over a thousand years. But now it is a principle installed at the heart of modern life which can be easily rationalised by billionaires, millionaires, the rich and anyone with pretensions to be so.
If money can provide food, shelter, warmth, healthcare etc, then more money can provide more food, more shelter etc etc. This is the machine code of match funding. What’s not to love?
Well, what’s not to love is that under such logic the ends are eternally sacrificed to the means. The sacred is made profane. And so we find ourselves spiritually adrift.
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The Reality of Abstraction
In his recent essay Ocean of Elephants
considers how “being human means living between embodiment and abstraction.” And he declares that “the problem with abstractions is that no matter how real they might seem, they will always be subsumed by physical reality”.Alex wasn’t writing specifically about money but he might as well have been. Because money is the most abstract and the most real of all things - it is the pendulum of money that swings most widely between those two extremes.
Money carves out form. Now more than ever, money sculpts the archetypal spaces into which we must fit. Not only our job, profession and status. But also our most intimate archetypes. Money chisels away at lovers, mothers and dreamers, embellishing those ancient caves of our collective consciousness with new meaning.
Money bounds our physical world. It is a constant, nagging presence infusing the most granular aspects of our material reality. We cannot sustain our bodies, our homes or our health without it. Money resides in thought, number, language, and deed. Living with the human family for 100 generations, it has achieved near total assimilation to our being.
Famously Keynes said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” So I’m not certain Alex’s point that ‘the abstract will always be subsumed by the real’ is too helpful for us. Sure, there’ll be no money on a dead planet. But what we really need to know now - when some are saying two degrees of warming may be locked in by 2035 - is what money looks like in a future where we actually survive.
As you can very easily find out - for me that future involves widening even further the swing of money’s pendulum. It involves directing, through the body of money, a rebalancing of exchange and gain against sacrifice and loss. It involves extending our relationship to money so that the transgression of the principle of fecundity is regarded as a sacred act. Which it is.
Money must not only be confronted at the level of an icon - a symbol which directs and informs our collective thoughts and deeds - but also we must face money as it exists in our most intimate being. We must face it not as an enemy but as a slave who has become a thing to us. We must set it free because it exists as a direct reflection of our own estrangement from our most intimate being. Because by giving money the limit of a thing, by denying its agency, by disavowing its mystery — we give ourselves the limit of a thing, too.
Epilogue
This essay insisted on itself the moment Phil and Alan had their conversation in the Transport Office. We’re all ground down by the system. Dreams, ambitions and passions are squeezed out of us as we’re made into numbers on a corporate spreadsheet. The company we work for is owned by the biggest investment firms in the world. Between them they manage about 6.5% of all the money in the world - about $20 trillion of the $130 trillion that ‘exists’ today. The job we do matters. Our collective refusal to work would cause multiple deaths within days, if not hours. But still, we’re paid like shit and treated like shit.
I’ve always regarded my day jobs as a incumbrance. I’ve friends who - usually because their families are well off - can avoid having to sell their labour. Or at least having to do so full-time. And I’m jealous of them. But at the same time I think there is something about being in the trenches. Privilege gives you time and space. But the struggle of maintaining a day job while creating - the struggle of doing both labour and work (to use Hannah Arendt’s distinction) - gives you a valuable perspective.
If it doesn’t destroy you (which it nearly has me at times) that mix of commonly-shared (labour) and unique (work) experiences lends an extra magic to your lifepath. If I’d have taken my tutor’s advice and stayed in academia I think I’d be missing something.
Having said that, I feel like I’ve got a good handle on commonly-shared stuff now! I’m very ready to stop driving the van and tend to my Priestly duties full-time. If you want to make that happen please consider taking out a paid subscription.
Burn. Shine. Love!
Jon Xx
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Excellent piece of writing.