Wealth Addiction - The cost of being rich

No one ever thinks having lots of money will harm them.

We may think it will have undesirable side effects, like making us a target for thieves and scammers, or causing relationship troubles with friends and relatives.

But no one ever thinks having lots of money will diminish them as a person.

The price of homogenising value

The greatest utility of money is that it reduces everything to a common standard of value. It lets us move beyond bartering goods by creating an intermediary store of value. We can use money to exchange the things we produce, for other things we want or need.

But the utility of money comes at a cost. Because money is so useful as a method for exchanging value, we start to see the money itself as valuable. We forget that money is only the medium to acquire things of actual value.

Money is a means, not an end. We don’t want the money itself, we want the things money can buy. But because money is the intermediary, it’s always standing between us and our goals. Which makes it easy to lose sight of our actual goals and focus on accumulating money.

When we become accustomed to seeing money as the thing we want, we lose sight of the actual goal. We can’t see past the money. When we see money as the thing of value, we lose sight of our actual values.

And our values define our character. Both individually and as a society.

Money veils our value judgements

Because money is a veil between us and our values, it’s easy to hide our selfishness behind the money. Money can sanitise our value judgements, giving them a veneer of respectability.

Instead of our choices being value judgments, they become economic management.

When we say, I can’t afford it, we’re not making an economic statement, we’re making a value judgment. We’re saying that particular thing isn’t as important as some other thing. This isn’t always a problem, we have to make those kinds of choices every day.

But because the money removes the overt judgement, we can use a euphemism and say, I can’t afford that. We can talk about the money, not the value judgement.

Which makes it easier to be selfish. Because we don’t have to tell ourselves, I would rather live in a luxury mansion and own a private yacht than donate to the homeless shelter. When those priorities are clearly stated, the value judgment is clear. That choice isn’t one that will make us feel good about ourselves.

If we talk about the money, we hide the value judgment.

When I say I can’t afford it, I’ve placed a shield between my choices and my conscience. What it really means is that I give that thing less priority than other things. When we make a budget, we’re making a moral document, we’re making value judgments.

Money becomes a shield that lets us avoid confronting our value judgments, how we choose to live, and what we do with the energy at our disposal.

A budget is a moral statement

This mentality permeates our entire society, it happens on the individual level, and also in the government. A popular political euphemism is to say something isn’t “economically feasible.”

We talk about economic development and economic progress, as if the dollar value of an economy is the end goal. There is no corresponding qualitative measure of our economy, what we’ve done to create those dollars, or the social costs of producing that money.

We justify certain industries because they create jobs, but creating jobs isn’t the goal of our activities. We don’t want to create any kind of job, we don’t want people to expend energy doing harmful things.

People want occupations that are fulfilling. No one wants to exist as a mindless and repetitive cog in someone else’s money generating machine.

But we only measure the dollars, profit is the measure of success.

Our collective energy should be used to achieve the goals we have as a society. But we focus on economic development, and forget that we want a strong economy so we can achieve social development. A government budget is a moral document. It prioritizes some expenditures over less important things.

And once we talk this way for long enough, we start to lose sight of our needs. Because we see money as what we need, instead of what we need the money to achieve.

We come to believe that money is the key to satisfaction. This distracts us from our real needs, the ones money can’t buy, Instead we focus only on what money can buy. We find ourselves lonely and unfulfilled in a job we hate, surrounded by sparkly golden trinkets.

Money as a motivator

When money is used as a motivator, it redefines our reason to do something in terms of what will induce people to part with their money. We don’t grow and distribute food to provide the optimum nourishment to the greatest number of people, but to achieve maximum sales at maximum profit. The money becomes the goal, the nourishment is secondary.

What defines us as a person? It’s not how much we can produce, our efficiency, but rather what we choose to produce, our priorities as value judgements.

What do I use my limited energy to achieve? What are my goals in life? If money has become the goal, then that’s all we need to do, make money. By making money we’ve achieved the goal, our lives are successful. We can spend the money on anything, regardless of how trivial and selfish that thing is.

Wealth as success

For most other things we desire, we recognize the danger of excessive indulgence and how that can affect us as a well-functioning person. Too much food makes us overweight and unhealthy and can develop into an eating disorder, a recognized mental disease. Excessive drugs lead to addiction, compromising our free will.

We understand those kind of excessive behaviours diminish us personally. The person becomes less than they could be, their integrity is compromised.

But with money, we don’t see the ultra-wealthy as disordered individuals or lesser human beings. Most people aspire to be like them.

We see having money as having freedom and power. We forget that power corrupts. There are a number of scientific studies showing that higher social class predicts increased unethical behaviour.

Enabling the addiction

The fact that we associate success with money enables the behaviour of the obscenely wealthy. Because everyone aspires for wealth, it enables the mega-rich to be seen as role models, not addicts needing help.

We don’t recognize excess wealth as a disordered state. We don’t see someone who is hoarding money far in excess of what they need as a person whose value system is disordered.

We see them as the most successful among us. This is because we judge success in dollar value. This only makes sense if money is the goal, not the means to achieve the goal. Money distorts our value system, it changes our character.

The value of our character and our ideals and principles aren’t something that can be measured in dollars. We should be careful not to trade them for something inherently worthless.